Striking Antioch Georgia-Pacific Plant Workers Describe 'Unsafe' Conditions

Jacob San Miguel said he had frequent nosebleeds from working 12-hour shifts in clouds of fiberglass dust.

His coworker, Jimmie Arnold III, went to the emergency room several times after waking up at night struggling to breathe. He said it was because air contaminants on the job activated his asthma.

They are among the roughly 100 workers striking over wages and safety concerns at a drywall manufacturing plant in Antioch owned by Georgia-Pacific, one of the world’s top manufacturers of paper, tissue and building products. Employees interviewed by KQED said the company has failed to fix health hazards at the facility, ignoring worker complaints for years.

Georgia-Pacific is owned by Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the U.S., according to Forbes. Koch Industries has an estimated annual revenue of about $125 billion. The employees at the Antioch plant said they often had difficulty breathing, chronic coughs and severe lightheadedness, including from the smell of known carcinogens and other chemicals hanging thick in the air.

The workers, most of them in their 20s, said insufficient ventilation at the Minaker Road facility causes them to routinely inhale fiberglass dust, formaldehyde and other toxins released from materials used to make drywall, which is also known as gypsum. They worry about long-term exposure to chemicals such as formaldehyde, which has been linked to throat cancers.

“By the end of your shift, you can barely breathe through your nose,” said Fernando Tapia, 21, who works at the start of the drywall line. “Your nose is clogged up. You are constantly coughing.”

He and other workers said ventilation fans at the facility are often broken or nonexistent, while machines constantly kick up dust and worsen the indoor air quality.

“The fan that we have, they barely fixed it like a couple of weeks ago. But realistically, it’s not circulating any fresh air inside,” Tapia said while coworkers stood behind him at the picket line last week.

The company provides surgical masks that don’t filter tiny particles or N95 masks that quickly clog up, they said. Both kinds of masks are also hard to wear while doing strenuous physical labor with goggles on, so some prefer not to wear the masks at all.

California law mandates employers to monitor for fibrous glass, formaldehyde and other airborne contaminants if it’s reasonable to suspect employees are exposed to concentrations higher than permissible levels. If so, businesses must take steps to reduce and prevent workers’ exposure to those chemicals, preferably through local exhaust ventilation, which is considered more efficient than masks.

A spokesperson for Georgia-Pacific, which has more than 30,000 employees at 150 facilities in the U.S., declined to provide information on air monitoring at the Antioch Gypsum plant.

“Georgia-Pacific works to act with proper regard for the rights of others, especially regarding safety and the environment, and we fully comply with all local, state, and federal laws and regulations,” Nicole Linton, external communications manager for the company, said in a statement. “Safety is our company’s top priority. We strive for continuous improvement in our key safety processes.”

Over the last decade, Georgia-Pacific facilities across the U.S. have been cited for dozens of violations, most of which are considered serious, according to Occupational Safety and Health Administration records. At least three employees have died on the job after falling 85 feet, getting sucked into machinery and drowning in a pulper tub. Others suffered amputations, second- and third-degree burns, skull and leg fractures, and other injuries that required hospitalization, according to OSHA.

Workplace safety regulators issued initial penalties of nearly $567,000 against the company between September 2014 and September 2024. Georgia-Pacific agreed to pay $376,000 after reaching settlements.

Garrett Brown, who was a field inspector with Cal/OSHA for 18 years, said the citations indicate the company has a weak safety program.

“I’m sure they would deny it. But if you had a strong safety program, you would not have fatalities, multiple amputations and falls,” Brown said.

At the Antioch facility, some workers said they hadn’t received the required training on how to protect themselves from fiberglass particles and some of the dry chemicals they handle.

“They didn’t give me any mask or anything like that. They didn’t tell me how bad the fiberglass was going to be. And there’s nights I’m waking up, I’m wheezing,” said Arnold, 26, who has worked at the plant for three years. “Not only is it unfair wages, but we have a lot of chemicals at the plant that are unsafe to our bodies.”

Georgia-Pacific has brought dozens of workers from Nevada, Texas and other states to continue operating at a reduced capacity since the strike began on Sept. 16, said Pedro de Sá, a business agent with International Longshore & Warehouse Union Local 6.

The company and the union, which represents 85 production and shipping workers at the facility, have been negotiating a contract since May, including recently with the help of a federal mediator. Before the strike, Georgia-Pacific’s last offer included a wage raise of 12% over four years, which workers rejected as insufficient due, in part, to inflation and job health hazards, de Sá said.

“For us, this is about fairness,” he said. “It’s a sacrifice. These workers made a stand being like, ‘We will make the sacrifice to make sure that we get where we deserve.’”

San Miguel, 27, said he’s ready to hold out for as long as needed because the company had not addressed workers’ safety complaints.

“Over the years that we’ve worked here, we start to feel it on our bodies,” San Miguel, a machine operator, said. “It accumulates in the air. You see the air sparkle and the dust particles getting picked up. It’s just stuff we’ve been talking about over many years, and even the people before us have complained about it.”

De Sá said he facilitated a call with the workers and Cal/OSHA on Sept. 17 to file a complaint about unsafe working conditions. It’s unlikely the agency would inspect the Antioch facility during a labor strike, according to Brown, the retired inspector.