“Health and Safety weren’t interested,” said McDonald, who is a shop steward at a Glasgow distribution depot. “Management are responsible for health and safety, but no company bosses get charged with manslaughter.”

The four-storey factory in Glasgow’s Maryhill district collapsed “like a house of cards” in the massive blast, reported the Herald May 12. Eyewitness Jacqueline Collins told the Militant, “The floors and windows shook. We thought it was a bomb.” The factory “was a danger to them [the workers] and those around about,” she said.

Several workers were buried for hours. The last body was taken from the unstable structure after three days of searching by fire and rescue workers.

“These old factories are death traps,” said Thomas McCann, a retired engineering worker and shop steward. “I’m angry,” he said. “Why was this not investigated earlier?”

There was no trade union at the factory, which had a high staff turnover, according to media reports. The plastics manufacturer occupied a factory building from the Victorian era, located next to shops and surrounded by densely packed housing. About 60 people were believed to be working inside at the time of the explosion.

Most of those killed were working in the offices above the manufacturing area, where metal was coated in plastic using highly volatile materials and electric and gas-fired industrial ovens. The dead included the managing director and finance director.

Survivors said the blast came from the ovens. Fire safety experts said that the company should have installed vents that would have allowed the force of a blast to escape the building instead of knocking down the walls.

A feature article in the May 16 Sunday Herald stated that a “catalogue of health and safety hazards lay at the heart of the working practices” of the company. Among other hazards, the factory air “was filled with dust from chemical powders” and “troughs of chemicals were kept next to ovens.” Some gaps in oven doors were “big enough for a hand to fit through,” reported the paper.

Jim Fletcher, a plastic coater for eight years in the factory, told the Scotsman newspaper that he had resigned in 1998 over concerns at the unsafe working conditions. Workers felt “trapped” in the confined factory space, he said. “A total of eight were on one floor. That is one of the reasons I left,” Fletcher said. ICL Tech/Stockline Plastics was investigated by the government Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in both 2000 and 2003 over conditions at the Maryhill plant.

Two other workers complained to the HSE and wrote to their Members of Parliament about unsafe handling of chemicals. The HSE deemed at the time conditions were safe. It has emerged that the government outfit warned the company in advance of its visits, and that the identity of a worker who complained was revealed.

An HSE spokesman told the BBC that the most recent complaint “bore no relation at all to what happened this week.”

Saying it was “not appropriate” to comment on the cause of the disaster, First Minister in the Scottish Parliament Jack McConnell promised a “thorough” investigation into the blast, led by the Procurator Fiscal Service—a government-appointed lawyer who investigates sudden or suspicious deaths—and involving the police and HSE.

A worker who had been in the basement of the factory when it collapsed, still suffering from the after effects four days later, told the Militant that the police had told him he shouldn’t talk publicly about the disaster.

Peter Clifford contributed to this article.  
 
 
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