Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Tuesday that state investigators will probe the Mayfield candle factory where eight people died in a catastrophic tornado and workers said they were threatened with termination if they left their shifts early.
In a news conference, Beshear told reporters that the probe “shouldn’t suggest there was any wrongdoing. But what it should give people confidence in is that we’ll get to the bottom of what happened.”
A timeframe for the review by the state Occupational Safety and Health Program wasn’t immediately clear. Beshear said they don’t happen “one day or a couple of days after” an incident.
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“Everyone is expected to live up to certain standards of both the law, of safety and of being decent human beings,” he added. “I hope everybody lived up to those standards.”
In interviews with NBC News, five workers from the Mayfield Consumer Products factory recalled managers telling employees they would likely lose their jobs if they went home.
One employee said that 15 people asked to leave early. In response, said one employee, Elijah Johnson, managers took roll call to determine who had left.
A company spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment Tuesday evening but a day earlier denied that any workers were threatened, calling the allegations “completely untrue.”
“We’ve had a policy in place since Covid began,” said the spokesman, Bob Ferguson. “Employees can leave any time they want to leave and they can come back the next day.”
Ferguson also denied that managers told employees that leaving their shifts meant risking their jobs. Managers and team leaders undergo a series of emergency drills that follow guidelines of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, he said.
Deon J. Hampton contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
