IRMINGHAM, Ala. — In their hometown, the McWanes are known for quiet generosity. The family pledged $10 million to the science museum, the McWane Center. They have given millions more to Alabama's major cultural institutions, including the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. College students compete for McWane scholarships.

The family's latest philanthropic project is this city's icon, a 56-foot statue of Vulcan, the god of fire and forge. Thanks to a $2 million leadership grant from the McWanes, the statue will soon be restored and returned to its pedestal atop Red Mountain, overlooking downtown as a symbol of the city's working men and women.

Yet if the good works are appreciated by Birmingham's civic leaders, the business empire that supports this philanthropy is barely known. The family is so private that not a single sign advertises the McWane corporate headquarters. In a 1997 profile of James Ransom McWane, then chairman of McWane Inc., The Birmingham News wrote that "even well-connected" business leaders had never met the man it described as "a riddle in his hometown."

"Son," said N. Lee Cooper, past president of the American Bar Association and founding partner of the Birmingham law firm that has long represented the family's corporate interests, "the McWanes haven't talked in a hundred years, and they aren't about to start now."

The untold story of how a reclusive family ascended into the ranks of the nation's wealthiest industrial dynasties is an often-painful one, written in the blood and tears of the very blue-collar workers celebrated by the Vulcan statue.

As reported yesterday in The New York Times, McWane Inc., one of the world's largest makers of cast-iron water and sewer pipes, is also one of the most dangerous businesses in America. The company has by far the worst safety record in an industry that, for three of the last four years, has had the highest injury rate in the nation. McWane has been cited for more than 400 safety violations since 1995, four times more than its six major competitors combined.

A nine-month examination by The Times, the PBS program "Frontline" and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program "The Fifth Estate" also found that McWane has an extensive record of environmental violations. McWane plants have been found in violation of pollution rules and emission limits at least 450 times since 1995, records show. Environmental regulators have said McWane plants are among the worst polluters in New Jersey, Alabama and Texas.

The examination is based on thousands of company and government records and hundreds of interviews with current and former McWane employees, including plant managers, safety directors and environmental engineers. These employees — some speaking on the record, others on condition of anonymity — opened a window into a closely held and expanding corporation that dominates an unglamorous yet essential industry.

At McWane plants, they said, workers who protest dangerous work conditions are often "bull's-eyed" — marked for termination. Supervisors routinely run roughshod over safety and environmental laws that interfere with production in the slightest. They dump polluted water under cover of night. They bully injured workers. They intimidate union leaders.

And everyone, they said, operates under a system of financial and disciplinary incentives that results in lives being put at risk every day.

"The people, they're nothing," said Robert S. Rester, a former McWane plant manager who spoke at length about his 24 years with the company. "They're just numbers. You move them in and out. I mean, if they don't do the job, you fire them. If they get hurt, complain about safety, you put a bull's-eye on them."

C. Phillip McWane, the current chairman and chief executive, declined repeated requests for interviews over the last five months. But the company president, G. Ruffner Page, said in written exchanges that McWane was committed to protecting the environment and the welfare of its workers. While acknowledging that "our standards have not always been met," he emphasized that the company has taken action to improve its record.

Many McWane employees said there had indeed been improvements, particularly in recent months as the company came under new federal scrutiny. Some plants, they added, are better than others. But they strongly disagree that the changes show a fundamental turnabout by a chagrined corporation. To many of them, McWane remains frozen in a long-ago time, a time when industrial barons made great fortunes off molten iron but left behind broken lives and a damaged environment.

The Deep Roots of Iron

Birmingham was built around its foundries, and for all its racial and social upheavals, for all its ambitious embrace of the new economy, this is still a place with an abiding attachment to iron and steel.

Three major pipe foundries, including McWane, are still based in the city. On the edge of town, the rusting remains of the old Sloss Furnaces have been converted into a national landmark and museum. For more than 80 years, the McWanes have been woven into this legacy. The original family patriarch, J. R. McWane, helped finance and direct the casting of the Vulcan statue.

"McWane was an old-fashioned Andrew Carnegie-like figure," said Henry McKiven, a historian at the University of Southern Alabama, referring to another reclusive Scotsman who combined generous philanthropy with ruthless foundry management.

Like Carnegie, J. R. McWane believed in strict conformance with a rigid manufacturing process. If that process called for 80 pipes an hour, he expected 80 pipes an hour, and not one pipe less.

Through four generations, that demand has been the guiding principle of the family business. And it has proven enormously profitable, fueling the company's growth beyond its original foundry, the McWane Cast Iron Pipe Company, just northeast of downtown Birmingham. Today, it has plants in 10 states and Canada.

As it expanded, McWane typically sought distressed foundries, often in fading manufacturing towns, then imposed cost cuts, layoffs and what Mr. Page referred to as "disciplined management practices." Not one of those new plants was given the McWane name, a tradition that has helped keep the family and its business practices out of the public eye.

Yet McWane products are threaded deep into the infrastructure of American life. McWane pipes can be found in Las Vegas casinos, Indiana hospitals and at Ford Field, the new stadium of the Detroit Lions.

The company's growth has been guided by some of the most prominent figures in Alabama's business establishment.

John J. McMahon Jr., now chairman of the executive committee and company president from 1980 to 1998, is president pro tempore of the trustees of the University of Alabama. Another member of the McWane board, Fournier Gale III, was special counsel to Alabama's former governor, Donald Siegelman, and general counsel to the Business Council of Alabama, the state's most powerful business lobby.

Today, McWane Inc. regularly makes Fortune magazine's list of the 500 largest private companies. According to one knowledgeable person, the company's annual revenues approach $2 billion, an estimate that does not include the family's banking and real estate interests.

In defending McWane, Mr. Page said the company had worked to preserve manufacturing jobs in an industry threatened by what he characterized as unfair competition. Foreign manufacturers in China and Latin America, he said, "have little or no regard for the safety of their workers or concern about polluting the environment."

McWane itself, however, has been the subject of repeated investigations into bid rigging and other forms of anticompetitive behavior, government records show. In 1995 a McWane subsidiary pleaded guilty to conspiring to corner a major part of the Canadian pipe market and paid a then-record fine of $2.5 million (Canadian).

Canadian court documents, recently unsealed at the request of the The Times and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, allege that Mr. McMahon, then president of McWane, orchestrated the conspiracy in a series of clandestine meetings in Birmingham. In the meetings, held at a barbecue joint and in a supermarket parking lot, Mr. McMahon pressed executives from another Birmingham foundry, U.S. Pipe, to pull out of the Canadian market or face a price war, documents show.

Mr. McMahon declined to discuss the case, but said the court records "only tell one side of the story."

The company has pleaded guilty to two other crimes, a state environmental felony in 1997 in New York and a federal misdemeanor in 2002 for violating safety laws in Texas.

But in Birmingham, few people know of this record. If the McWanes are known at all, it is chiefly for their philanthropy and their intense privacy. "They don't like the limelight, and they don't particularly want credit for what they've done," Tony Zodrow, president and chief executive of the McWane Center, said.

Not long ago, Birmingham's civic elite turned out for a reception celebrating the restoration of the Vulcan statue. Some guests could not identify a photograph of C. Phillip McWane, but that did not dampen their praise of the McWanes.

"They have done wonderful things for the city," one guest, Mrs. C. H. H. Emory, said. "They are a family which has returned a thousand fold everything they've ever gained."

The Discipline of Production

Everything about Robert Rester — his neck, his chest, his forearms — is linebacker thick. He is 6 foot 1 and 246 pounds. His face is red and beefy, with a goatee the color of rust. His eyes are blue and direct. On his left shoulder is a tattoo of a bald eagle against an American flag and the words, "Don't [expletive] with this."

Mr. Rester was part of the small fraternity of hard-nosed men who run McWane foundries. He was plant manager at two of them, most recently the flagship foundry in Birmingham.

Mr. Rester, who is 44, grew up expecting life to be one long slog, and he took quiet satisfaction from being able to do a hard job in a hard place. `'I was raised in McWane pipe shops," he said. When his first mentor died in an explosion, he didn't flinch. Over 24 years, he kept climbing through the ranks, McWane style, starting as a welder, working 16-hour days, skipping vacations, shrugging off injury and illness, making up to $125,000 a year by being the toughest, meanest McWane manager he could be.

Gradually, he said, he became numb to the constant body count — crushed hands and feet, disfiguring lacerations, burns from molten iron, amputations. His sole focus, he said, was finding a fresh body to keep production rolling. Who got hurt? Why did the injury happen? Could it have been prevented? Those questions hardly crossed his mind. "I was like a robot," he said. What mattered — all that mattered — was getting the machines moving again, he said.

Mr. Rester and other managers linked this mindset to an updated version of the patriarch's dictum: time equals pipe, and pipe equals money.

For a McWane manager, they said, taking time for a safety or environmental problem holds few attractions. It means slowing production to fix equipment. It means more safety training, less time to make pipe. Indeed, police records show that at one McWane plant in Alabama, supervisors refused to wait a few hours for federal safety inspectors to arrive before restarting a conveyor belt that had crushed a man to death.

The formula is reinforced at every level of production. Line workers who fail to make daily quotas get "D.A.'s" — disciplinary actions. Those with several D.A.'s are said to be on "death row." For plant managers like Mr. Rester — essentially the chief operating officer — annual bonuses depend on how their production compares with production at other McWane plants. And for general managers, the pursuit of more tons per hour can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit sharing.

Mr. Rester was one of dozens of McWane supervisors who described a system of unstinting discipline used not just to squeeze out productivity gains, but to suppress union unrest and discourage injury claims.

Supervisors were urged to discipline injured workers, company documents and interviews show. The company says the purpose is to teach safety. But Mr. Rester said the true intent was to punish workers for reporting injuries while shifting blame from the company.

"If he steps in a hole, you know, it's because he wasn't watching where he was going, not because there was a hole there that should've had a cover on it," Mr. Rester said.

Internal McWane records show that top executives tracked the number of injured workers who received disciplinary actions at each plant. Workers who resisted, who cited government regulations or sought independent medical advice, became targets for termination, Mr. Rester said. "We'd say or do whatever we had to," he said. This included putting up safety signs after the fact to make it appear as if the worker had ignored posted policies, he said. It included altering safety records and doctoring machinery to cover up a hazard.

"After a while," he said, "you realize what you have to do to save your job." It became automatic, he said, like a reflex.

The Custodians of Safety

Union Foundry, one of two McWane plants in Anniston, Ala., was a dangerous place to work. In 1995, it had about 350 employees and recorded more than 250 injuries, internal company records show.

That year, McWane sent in a new safety director, Clyde E. Dorn. He was hardly an ideal candidate for the job. He had never worked in a foundry, let alone as a safety director. He had just obtained a bachelor of science degree in occupational safety and health. By his own admission, he was a 44-year-old alcoholic with an arrest record and substantial debts from unpaid child support. He held the job until 2001, when he was fired after being caught trying to buy Oxycontin in a police sting operation; he recently began a prison sentence.

Even apart from his lack of experience, Mr. Dorn said, it was virtually impossible to be effective. He had no budget, no assistants and little authority. He lacked even the authority to shut down a production line if he spotted a safety hazard, he said.

There was one exception, he said: "If someone was caught in the machine."

Mr. Dorn said he managed to make simple and inexpensive safety fixes, as long as they did not affect production. But requests for more safety equipment and an assistant were ignored, he said. Larger safety issues — like too few workers working too many hours — were off limits, he said.

Federal safety rules, for example, limit the weight workers may lift. At Union Foundry, workers were routinely ordered to lift fittings that exceeded these limits, Mr. Dorn said, and many suffered strains and back injuries as a result.

"There was nothing that I could do. I mean management knew about it. You'd go to them and you'd talk to them and they would say, `We'll look at it.' " Asked why he didn't demand action, he replied, "They made it perfectly clear that I wasn't guaranteed a job if I ticked them off."

Indeed, when the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigated a worker's death at Union Foundry in 2000, inspectors were told that company policy "was not to correct anything until OSHA found it," agency records state.

In interviews, other current and former safety directors complained of having little authority or help. And internal company documents show that McWane executives recognized that safety directors were overburdened. But in recent months, some safety directors said executives had given them more influence.

Mr. Dorn was one of 38 full-time "safety and environmental professionals" whom McWane says it employs in its plants. Some of them came with significant credentials. But several, like Mr. Dorn, possessed few qualifications and seemed to have only a vague understanding of their duties.

At the plant in Elmira, N.Y., an accountant whose job was being cut was made safety director. The McWane plant in Birmingham hired a safety director from a temporary employment service that specialized in environmental testing. A few years before, he had been placed on probation for drunken driving. Asked in a sworn deposition to describe his duties, he replied, "There is nothing written as to what my duties are."

In another deposition, a safety manager at the Tyler plant was asked: "So, you're the safety director, but you don't know if the superintendents are supposed to report safety violations to you. Is that correct?"

"Yes," he replied.

Most McWane safety directors spend only part of their time dealing with safety. The rest is devoted to activities designed to reduce workers compensation costs. Managers have told OSHA investigators that McWane expects them "to do whatever it takes to bring and keep these costs down."

This included conducting time-consuming investigations to catch fraudulent injury claims — which is what Mr. Dorn asserts he was doing when he was arrested for trying to buy Oxycontin from an employee out on workers compensation. It also included placing injured workers under surveillance and challenging doctors on expensive treatment plans. Mr. Dorn, a man with no medical background, said he was under constant pressure to manipulate treatment decisions.

Although McWane's internal safety rankings gave Union Foundry high marks under Mr. Dorn, two Union Foundry workers were killed and hundreds were injured during his tenure, and OSHA repeatedly found perilously unsafe working conditions.

A year after he was hired, for example, OSHA inspectors spent six days at the plant and chronicled a list of serious safety violations: exposed wiring, leaking gas lines, inadequate respirators, nonexistent safety training, missing records, explosion hazards, burn hazards, unguarded conveyor belts, and employees exposed to lead, cadmium, arsenic and beryllium without any protective equipment.

During the inspection, records show, Mr. Dorn was asked if employees ever worked underneath or near a certain industrial elevator. He assured the inspector that no one did, OSHA records state. Seven months later, a worker, Johnny Flint Brewster, Jr. was crushed to death under the same elevator. He had been cleaning sand from the shaft and did not see it descend. OSHA inspectors said the shaft was inadequately guarded, records show.

In his written response, Mr. Page did not address Mr. Dorn's work at Union Foundry. But he noted that Mr. Dorn has been replaced by a man with foundry experience and a master's degree in health and safety who oversees a staff of three.

The Environmental Issues

At many McWane plants, government records and interviews with employees describe persistent defiance of laws protecting workers and surrounding communities from toxic pollution. In a corporate culture where production is paramount, McWane plants have been sanctioned repeatedly for failing to stop production to repair broken or ineffective pollution controls. Several environmental managers described production equipment being tampered with so it wouldn't shut down automatically when pollution controls failed. They told of senior company executives ordering them to ignore requirements for pollution permits.

"I was asked to do things I didn't want to do," said one manager responsible for environmental safeguards at a plant in Canada. Some former managers said they quit because they feared they were being forced to break the law. "It wasn't a normal work environment," one said.

McWane has 10 major United States foundries. A few have relatively minor records of environmental problems, officials said. The Ohio plant, for example, has earned praise from state regulators.

But five plants — in Alabama, Utah, Texas and New Jersey — have been designated "high priority" violators by the Environmental Protection Agency. A sixth, in New York, has been convicted of a felony, illegal possessing hazardous waste.

Mr. Page said that McWane plants "have overwhelmingly abided" by pollution laws. He also cited some $31 million in recent pollution control projects as evidence of the company's commitment to a clean environment. "On occasion, all companies of any size receive citations," he wrote.

Union Foundry, which has received some of the highest environmental fines ever levied by Alabama, has been cited for more than 50 violations, records show.

"They have discharged air pollution — lead and arsenic and copper and thallium off into the air," said Byron Bart Slawson, a lawyer for the Alabama Environmental Council, who filed suit against the plant. "They've been spreading it across this community for years."

At Union Foundry, OSHA testers found that at least seven workers had been exposed to exceptionally high levels of silica in 1996. Exposure to silica can cause silicosis, a lung disease that can lead to a slow death. OSHA inspectors said plant managers, including Mr. Dorn, failed to ensure that respirators were used, even though conditions "were obviously bad."

Inside McWane plants, workers have repeatedly complained of blurred vision, severe headaches, respiratory problems and other ailments after being exposed, often without training or protection, to chemicals and agents used to make pipes, government records and other documents show.

In 1998, Shane Shaw, a 19-year-old employee at a McWane plant in Provo, Utah, was admitted to an emergency room. His urine was black as coffee. His kidneys were failing. Other organs were beginning to shut down. He was close to death, medical records show.

In time, his doctors diagnosed severe arsenic poisoning — the result, they concluded, of chipping arsenic-laced residue from casting machinery without a respirator. In an interview, Mr. Shaw said that he was not required to wear a respirator, nor was he warned of the dangers of arsenic. He has recovered and left McWane, but his doctors say he faces an increased risk of cancer.

Six months before Mr. Shaw became ill, a state OSHA inspector had visited the plant. "The respirator program was totally ineffective," the official wrote.

At Atlantic States Cast Iron Pipe, the McWane plant in Phillipsburg, N.J., residents have complained about pollution for decades. Local newspapers reported that crossing guards near the plant once had to wear gas masks. Since 1995, the plant has been found in violation of state and local environmental rules and emission limits more than 150 times. It has paid or faces more than $3 million in fines. Even so, regulators still consider it one of the state's worst polluters.

"One looks in vain for any evidence of corporate stewardship with respect to environmental issues," Bradley M. Campbell, the state's environmental commissioner, said. McWane's conduct, he said, amounts to a pattern of "resistance, recalcitrance and denial, if not outright lawlessness."

On a Sunday morning in December 1999, Brian and Kathy Fleming awoke in their home on the banks of the Delaware River and noticed oil on the water. Authorities traced the 8.5-mile-long slick to a storm water pipe near Atlantic States. At the plant a sump pump was draining a pit filled with the same kind of oily substance into storm drains.

State and federal investigators raided the plant but learned little about who had authorized the pumping. The case was dropped after McWane contributed $50,000 to an environmental group. But two former plant employees say the investigators failed to detect a string of illegal discharges that dwarfed the December spill.

The men, Robert Bobinis, a maintenance supervisor, and Brad Schultz, a member of his crew, said in separate interviews that each week, during the midnight shift, they were ordered to pump thousands of gallons of water fouled with industrial contaminants into drains feeding the Delaware.

The water filled huge basement vaults that had to be pumped dry so production could continue, both men said. "They didn't want to shut down," said Mr. Bobinis, who filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Atlantic States; it was settled, he said, for a sum he declined to disclose.

Mr. Page called the men's accusations unsubstantiated.

The same thing, however, happened at McWane Cast Iron Pipe in Birmingham, according to several employees and state environmental records. Workers waited for night or heavy rainstorms before flushing thousands of gallons of polluted water through storm drains and into local rivers and creeks. Mr. Rester, the former plant manager, said the illegal dumping was "standard procedure," done with the full knowledge of senior McWane executives, including an executive vice president.

"All he would ever say is, `Whatever we had to do to run 'em we had to do it,' " Mr. Rester recalled. "You know, `Get rid of the water. We got to run.' "

The Safety Statistics

At Union Foundry, there is a new sign at the front gate: "Safety Starts With Attitude." In the last year, McWane has embarked on a high-profile safety campaign.

In his written responses, Mr. Page, the company president, said spending on safety-related capital projects had "increased significantly over the past five years."

The commitment, he said, has paid off. Injury rates at McWane's United States plants, he said, have steadily declined since 1995 and compare favorably with the rest of the cast-iron foundry industry.

"It would be foolish not to protect our most valuable and essential assets — our people," Mr. Page wrote.

There is no independent way to confirm the company's assertions about injury rates; OSHA refused to release its own calculations, saying they are not public.

But internal McWane documents obtained by The Times — reports from plants to corporate headquarters — show that while some foundries have reported declines in injuries, others have reported sharp increases.

At one major McWane subsidiary, Ransom Industries, which includes eight foundries in the United States and Canada, injuries have surged by virtually every internal McWane measure.

From 1999 to 2001, for example, the number of lost workdays caused by injuries more than tripled. Indeed, in 2000, the last year for which direct comparisons are available, Ransom's rate of injuries that resulted in lost workdays was nearly triple the industry average.

McWane's fatality rate since 1995 — though lower than for industries like timber and fishing — is about six times the rate for primary metal manufacturers, the category that includes cast-iron foundries.

At the same time, OSHA records show that at several McWane plants, inspectors have found the company's injury reports to be suspect.

For example, at the plant in New York in 1997, many workers told inspectors about injuries not listed in the plant's reports to OSHA. The inspectors determined that the omissions were deliberate; in 108 instances, they said, the plant had failed to report an injury or underreported the number of workdays an employee missed.

When OSHA factored in the missing injuries, the rate of serious injuries more than doubled, placing the plant well above the industry average.

Mr. Page blamed the problem on "a simple breakdown in communication."

Several current and former managers at other plants, though, said they had techniques to manipulate injury totals.

"Once you have numbers, you have fines, you have attention and you have inspections," a former senior safety manager said.

He described a simple way of disguising the severity of injuries from OSHA: "I'd go to the hospital and get guys out of bed or a wheelchair to avoid a lost-time incident." Even if the worker sat in an office all day, he explained, McWane could still claim that his injury had not required him to miss work.

The Times asked J. Paul Leigh, a health economics expert at the University of California at Davis and an author of "Costs of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses," to examine the internal injury reports as well as Mr. Page's analysis of injury rates.

Professor Leigh said he was "suspicious" that some plants reported so few minor injuries — a possible indication, he said, that employees are reluctant to report less severe injuries for fear of disciplinary action.

Indeed, in interviews at several plants, workers said that fear of punishment, and sometimes firing, had taught them to keep injuries — even deeply painful ones — secret whenever they could.

Mr. Page said that "accident incident rates are not the best way to measure the safety environment in a company."

He also disputed the significance of McWane's 404 OSHA violations since 1995. McWane paid fines to settle many of those citations, but without acknowledging any fault.

"The vast bulk of what you present constitutes claims and assertions that have never been upheld or proven to be true," he wrote.

The Cast of Another Die

"I just knew for a long time that sooner or later, somebody's going to have to stop it, somebody's going to have to say something, and I was always hoping it would be somebody besides me."

Finally, though, Robert Rester decided that he needed to speak out about McWane.

Part of it was bitterness. When first contacted in June, he had just taken sick leave for a heart problem. At first reluctant to speak, he said he had begun to suspect that "what I've watched them do for 25 years to other people" was being done to him. In September, while still on leave, the company fired him, saying he had failed to get treatment for "alcohol abuse." He denies any alcohol problem; since then, records show, McWane tried to hire him back.

But Mr. Rester says he is also motivated by guilt, by a sense that he gave himself to the wrong cause. "I've done so much that's not right for that company," he said.

The misgivings began, he said, when he was sent to manage a new plant in Hamilton, Ontario. "We were going to go up there and show them how to make pipe" McWane-style, he recalled. But the Canadians bluntly told him they would shut the place down if he treated them the way McWane treated its workers in the United States.

"I had to find a way to get people to work without being, well, a big white bwana," Mr. Rester said. He learned that he could get more from his workers if they "don't mind coming through the gate."

Years later, back in Birmingham as plant manager at McWane Cast Iron Pipe, he said he tried to import some Canadian lessons. He set about spending money to clean the plant up and change the tone. The makeover died with the arrival of a new general manager, he said. Mr. Rester protested and was demoted, shipped off to Union Foundry as a maintenance supervisor.

Telling his story recently, Mr. Rester began musing about another foundry in Birmingham. It is the American Cast Iron Pipe Company, known as Acipco, and he knows it is not in his future. "The only time you can get a job at Acipco," he said, "is if somebody retires or dies."

Acipco, as workers and managers there describe it, is a place where safety and a clean environment are not captive to the demands of production. Workers take yoga classes in a modern health club with the latest in weight-training equipment and a spring-loaded floor for aerobics. They get cash bonuses if they keep their cholesterol down. The company has even spent millions of dollars to install special air-conditioned booths in the hottest parts of the plant.

`"We had people say, `You're crazy, that won't work. Why are you doing that?'" the company's president and chief executive, Van L. Richey, said. But they did it, he said, and productivity increased.

Just this week, Acipco was ranked sixth in Fortune magazine's list of the 100 best employers in America. Acipco, in short, sounds almost like a caricature of blue-collar paradise. But it also strongly suggests that the McWane way is not the only way to survive, and succeed, in the dangerous and increasingly competitive business of making cast-iron pipe.

Mr. Richey takes pains to point out that the company is not a utopia. Acipco has paid millions of dollars to settle racial discrimination complaints and, with the rest of the industry oligopoly, has faced periodic bid-rigging investigations, although it has never been charged with any crime.

Still, several statistical measures show how different Acipco is from McWane.

At some McWane plants, turnover rates approach 100 percent a year. Acipco — with a work force of about 3,000, three-fifths the size of McWane — has annual turnover of less than half a percent; 10,000 people recently applied for 100 openings. McWane has also been cited for 40 times more federal safety violations since 1995, OSHA records show.

Acipco was founded in 1905 by John J. Eagan, a devoutly Christian industrialist from Atlanta who had resolved to demonstrate that a factory could be run on the basis of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Mr. Eagan believed that if workers felt they had a genuine stake they would work harder and smarter and produce more. To carry out his plan, he decided to institute profit sharing for all employees. Upon his death, he declared, Acipco's workers would inherit the company.

Many of his fellow industrialists ridiculed the plans as do-gooder nonsense, doomed to failure. Historians say the doubters included Acipco's own president, J.R. McWane.

Mr. McWane had spent much of his early career at Acipco. But days before the profit-sharing plan was made public, he severed all financial ties with Acipco and set up his own pipe shop across town, the McWane Cast Iron Pipe Company. The two companies — and their dueling visions of capitalism — have been in competition ever since.

Tomorrow: Failures of regulation.