(CNN) — Top executives of the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon oil rig announced Tuesday they will donate their safety bonuses to the families of the 11 workers killed in the April 2010 explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. The announcement follows criticism of a Transocean Ltd. financial filing that claimed 2010 was its “best year” in safety…. “The executive team made this decision because we believe it is the right thing to do,” Chief Executive Officer Steven Newman said in a statement Tuesday. “Nothing is more important to Transocean than our people, and it was never our intent to diminish the effect the Macondo tragedy has had on those who lost loved ones,” he said. “We offer our most sincere apologies and we regret the impact this matter has had on the entire Transocean family.”…. The five executives will donate more than $250,000 to the Deepwater Horizon Memorial Fund, which Transocean established. The fund has distributed more than $1.6 million to the 11 families.
A few days ago, I wrote about Transocean Ltd’s PR coup in deciding to pay its top executives “safety bonuses.” Yes, despite the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 employees and fouled the Gulf of Mexico (perhaps for years to come), someone at Transocean decided that rewarding their top executives for the “best year in safety performance in our company’s history” was a KILLER idea. (Yes, the pun was fully intentional.)
Having (like many other bloggers and journalists), raked Transocean over the coals for their insensitivity and cloddish handling of the matter, I feel compelled to at least acknowledge that things have been set right. Would it have been better if Transocean had not traveled down this road to begin with? Of course. Still, the error was recognized and the ham-handedness acknowledged, and now the bonus money is going to where it should have been going all along- to the families of those who died on the Deepwater Horizon.
Yes, all of us (especially the families of those who died due to Transocean’s cutting corners) would have been better off had Transocean donated the bonuses to the families right off the bat. How someone could have whiffed on the reality that paying “safety bonuses” in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy was nothing if not insensitive is difficult to imagine, but it appears that at least one person at Transocean is suffering from a serious humanity deficit. Thankfully, due to the public process of SEC filings and the attentiveness of a few journalists, what would have been a grave injustice has been corrected. In the end, Transocean did the right thing…and that should be acknowledged. It won’t bring back the 11 who died on the Deepwater Horizon, but it at least represents an admission that Transocean recognizes the tragedy and the impact it continues to have.
Corporate responsibility. Or something like that.
