New Report Documents Racist Rot at the Core of the Petrochemical Industry

A recent study published by Ecological Economics reveals that the petrochemical industry, well known for creating pollution and health risks to predominantly poor and Black communities near its plants, also perpetuates stark racial disparities across its workforce, reflecting what can only be described as institutional racism.

In the exclusive interview for Truthout, one of the co-authors of the study, University of Massachusetts Amherst economist Michael Ash talks about what goes on in the employment practices of the petrochemical industry. The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

C.J. Polychroniou: The petrochemical industry creates huge amounts of pollution and is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Many petrochemical plants are also located on former slave plantation lands, such as those along the Mississippi River. These petrochemical plants affect predominantly Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities as they are exposed to high risks of cancer and respiratory ailments from the pollutants emitted by these facilities. However, a growing body of literature also reveals sharp racial disparities in the petrochemical workforce. A recent study you co-authored supports such findings. Can you talk about these racial disparities in the petrochemical workforce? How pervasive are they, and are they confined to certain geographical locations, or is it a widespread phenomenon across the United States?

Michael Ash: First, I really can’t discuss this study without reference to the struggle for academic freedom that our study has engendered for the lead author, Kimberly Terrell. Until June 11, Terrell was a research scientist and director of community engagement at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic at Tulane University. Our study discusses disparities in employment and access to high-quality jobs in the petrochemical industry in Louisiana and elsewhere; and the governor of Louisiana made it clear to the administration of Tulane University that this type of research, no matter how objective and scientific, would not be tolerated. The Tulane administration, to its grave discredit, bent to this pressure and attempted to gag Terrell’s communication with the public and with the media and to impede her scientific research on economic and environmental disparities. With the survival of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic at stake, Terrell chose to resign and will carry on her research under other auspices.

The makeup of the petrochemical workforce is tightly bound with the political influence and pollution effluents of the petrochemical industry. Petrochemical employment is concentrated in the U.S., a product of both geographic and technological imperatives and industrial planning. Petrochemical jobs have historically been good jobs in the sense of offering a pay premium above similar work in other industries — made possible by capital-intensive production, monopoly profits, and an organized workforce.

The employment disparities in petrochemical employment are widespread in the U.S., but they are especially notable in Louisiana because the African American share of the workforce is so high; the environmental risks and harms disproportionately imposed on African Americans are so great; and the representation of African Americans in jobs in the petrochemical industry, especially in good jobs, is so poor.

“None of us work there. It’s all white guys who come in their pickup trucks from Baton Rouge.”

An account from my friend and colleague Jim Boyce illustrates the disconnect between who suffers environmental harms and who benefits from employment. When visiting African American frontline communities in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” along the Mississippi River, Jim asked, “Well, the chemical plants and refineries and paper mills obviously bring pollution, but don’t they also bring at least some good jobs? The reply came: ‘No, none of us work there. It’s all white guys who come in their pickup trucks from Baton Rouge.’”

I should state explicitly that even access to good jobs cannot objectively make up for exposure to environmental harm. Environmental harm and risks and access to decent employment are non-commensurate costs and benefits. Indeed, everyone should and can have the right to both a clean, healthy, and safe environment and to a decent livelihood. But if there are no jobs — environment tradeoffs, even on their own impoverished and dehumanizing terms — then the environmental and economic injustice is especially stark.

That’s what my work with Boyce showed on a national basis in our 2018 paper, and what Terrell, Gianna St. Julien, and I find in more detail in our 2025 study on Louisiana.

What draws petrochemical industries to Louisiana and its so-called “Cancer Alley?”

“Cancer Alley,” the stretch of the Mississippi River beginning near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and running to the Gulf, is home to a planned and cultivated petrochemical industry. Some petrochemical hubs emerge because of proximity to mines or wells, and of course, Louisiana and offshore activity in the Gulf are sources.

The coalescence of newer petroleum interests with the existing racist governance system enabled the development of new structures for the profitable exploitation of communities of color.

But the petrochemical industry along that stretch of the Mississippi began with planning — Standard Oil Company (ancestor of today’s ExxonMobil) initiated its Baton Rouge refining plans around 1910 — and flourished with state initiatives. The location fit into both John D. Rockefeller’s aim for mid-country, river-accessible petroleum processing and the new oil and gas discoveries along the Gulf Coast. Over the course of the 20th century, and especially in the decades after World War II, the petrochemical industry cemented its relationships with public leadership in Louisiana, garnering large public subsidies and tax exemptions.

Many of the area’s petrochemical facilities are literally built on the sites of former plantations. So the coalescence of newer petroleum interests with the existing racist governance system enabled the development of new structures for the profitable exploitation of communities of color.

In addition to exploring the employment gaps, we also document the very large subsidies and tax exemptions for petrochemicals and how these industries contribute little to total employment, and essentially nothing to fair employment in Louisiana.

Some have suggested that the racial disparities encountered in the petrochemical industry can be at least partly attributed to the racial education gap. Is there any validity behind this claim?

There’s an overwhelming urge, encouraged by the media and employers, to make gross inequities seem fair or deserved. Under this logic, racial gaps in employment or in access to good jobs are attributed to racial gaps in education. The truth about racial disparities in employment in the petrochemical industry (and in many other industries) is part of several longstanding employers’ strategies: (1) divide-and-conquer with segmented and segregated work; and (2) blame workers for the bad deal that workers get.

These petrochemical jobs are skilled jobs, and while formal education provides some of the needed skills, skills learned in training programs or on the job are very important. That’s what makes equitable access to the jobs central. Without that, there’s simply a vicious cycle of no skills, no job; and no job, no skills. As a formal matter, we used statistical methods to control for educational differences in the available workforce, and we still find large disparities in employment, especially in the better jobs in the industry. So even on the terms of the industry’s apologists, education does not explain the racial employment gap. Petrochemical job disparities are outsized compared to the racial education gap. But the bigger point is that these exclusions are structural and self-sustaining unless there is a concerted public intervention.

Education is wonderful; it makes workers more productive and opens the way to innovation. But if the institutions for sharing the gains from education aren’t set up correctly, then employers, instead of workers, can pocket the lion’s share of the benefits. So I want to dispel the notion that the racial disparity in employment and access to good jobs is zero-sum (what’s lost by Black workers is gained by white workers). White workers, too, get a worse deal than they would in a racially fair system because the racially unfair system stacks the deck against all workers, white and Black.

If the racial disparities already discussed reflect institutional racism, how does the law address this problem?

The petrochemical industry in Louisiana is regularly given a host of advantages by the public in Louisiana, including outright subsidies and exemptions from taxation, especially the local property tax. These are outright giveaways, with minimal payback in terms of employment and especially little benefit in terms of opportunities for excluded communities.

The job numbers and new plant announcements are from companies’ reports of how they have used the public subsidies. But it’s easy to announce job numbers in the media, and the companies now receive their tax exemptions essentially without any actual demonstration of job creation or retention. The petrochemical industry is increasingly automated; so even these not-very-impressive announced job numbers may not reflect real or long-term opportunities.

At a minimum, Louisiana could strike a better deal for itself in terms of requiring demonstrable benefits in terms of training and access in exchange for this large annual outlay.

What role do the trade unions themselves play in people of color being underrepresented in high-paying jobs in the petrochemical industry? I mean, they must be aware of these racial disparities, so are they also not responsible for allowing this unfair state of affairs to continue?

Trade unions are painfully aware of the divide-and-conquer tactics that employers use. The former Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW) union, which eventually merged into the paper workers union and subsequently into the United Steel Workers, had a decent foothold in the Baton Rouge petrochemical industry. OCAW was the first union to put worker and community health, safety, and protection from pollution at the forefront of labor campaigns. OCAW, especially under the leadership of Tony Mazzocchi, always pushed hard for racial equity because they recognized that the working class was ultimately in it together. Indeed, the term “Cancer Alley” itself originated from a billboard that OCAW put up when cooperating with environmental groups in the 1980s.

Employers, on the other hand, are effective practitioners of divide-and-conquer and also operate with the knowledge that African Americans are, on average, more favorably disposed toward unions.

What are the remedies for institutional racism in the petrochemical industry?

A much closer and more detailed look is possible for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC. We used the best publicly available EEOC data for our study. The EEOC can take a deeper dive and examine exactly which companies are hiring into which occupations.

With mandated environmental reporting, such as the Environmental Protection Agency Toxics Release Inventory, the public has the right to know what chemicals companies are releasing into the environment. With additional modeling, we can learn, for example, that around 80 percent of the potential chronic human health risk from the ExxonMobil facilities in Baton Rouge fall on people of color and nearly 30 percent on poor households — both of these are far out of line with the national and Louisiana shares of the population. But we do not know what ExxonMobil’s allocation of jobs, and especially of good jobs, is from the facilities. When I say, “we do not know,” I mean the general public; the EEOC collects this data from the ExxonMobil facilities.

In the short run, there is nothing stopping companies from releasing their own EEOC reporting on how many and which jobs are represented, and which workers, in terms of sex and race or ethnicity, hold these jobs.

In the longer run, we should have employment and job-quality transparency so that we can assess employment justice for industries as effectively as we can assess environmental justice. The tools for environmental justice assessment were the product of a long, determined campaign for transparency and the right to know. At the very least, we should have that kind of transparency for employment opportunities.