I have no idea what kind of corporate citizen Alcoa is, or how it ranks compared to its competitors in employee safety or protection of public health. But my guess is, aluminum smelting is a pretty messy business that is also pretty strictly regulated (at least over the past 40 years, when we started paying a lot more attention to those matters).
Meantime, North Carolina remains home to a lot of other environmentally suspect and safety-challenged industrial practices, including hog and chicken farming, pork and poultry processing, and (to a lesser degree as time goes by) textile manufacturing.
I’m not defending the corporate practices of any of these industries, either.
It just seems to me, after witnessing a year’s worth of complaints about Alcoa’s safety practices — as many of the same characters gripe about the company’s decision to close its smelting operations in Stanly County ? that if, by some bizarre set of circumstances, Alcoa were to announce that it planned to reopen its smelter in Badin and restore the 900 to 1,000 jobs that were lost about a decade ago, that a lot of the folks who are most incensed about Alcoa’s corporate citizenship would tell the Yadkin Riverkeeper and the other environmentalists who are want to run Alcoa out of town on a rail to pound sand.
Just sayin’.
