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WELCOME TO THE CANCER FACTORY  
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Jim Morris
February 7, 2024
The Progressive
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_ The United States says it cares about blue-collar workers, but the
worker protections in place tell a different story. _

, Alliance for American Manufacturing

 

The United States doesn’t think much of its blue-collar workers.
Sure, politicians praise them and solicit their votes. But the true
measure of the nation’s commitment to the people who staff our
factories, mines, and warehouses—the legal protections we offer
against illness, injury and death—shows that we really don’t care.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently announced
[[link removed]] that 5,486 workers
died on the job in 2022, a nearly 6 percent increase from 2021.
Employers reported [[link removed]] 2.8
million non-fatal workplace injuries and illnesses in 2022, the BLS
said, up by 7.5 percent from the previous year. This is almost
certainly an undercount, given that many work-related health
conditions go unreported
[[link removed].].

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been
starved of resources—while being, paradoxically, vilified as a
business-killer—since its creation in 1970. In fiscal year 2022, the
agency spent $3.99 per worker, according to
[[link removed]] the AFL-CIO.
That’s less than a venti Caffè Latte at Starbucks. 

What’s more, the nation had only 1,871 federal and state inspectors
to police its 10.8 million workplaces, translating to one inspector
for every 77,334 workers, or enough to visit each workplace once every
190 years. This does not represent a serious commitment to
employees’ well-being.

I note these statistics as a journalist who has written about
occupational health and safety for decades and just published a book,
_The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and
the Hidden Deaths of American Workers_
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that memorializes one of the most egregious instances of worker
neglect since World War II. In this little-known episode, a chemical
manufacturing plant in Niagara Falls, New York, owned by the Goodyear
Tire and Rubber Company, began using a pungent, yellowish liquid
called ortho-toluidine to make an antioxidant for tires in 1957.
Goodyear bought the chemical from DuPont and other suppliers.

DuPont knew by the mid-1950s that ortho-toluidine caused bladder
cancer in laboratory animals and assiduously protected its own
manufacturing workers from exposure. DuPont didn’t get around to
telling Goodyear about this potential human carcinogen until the late
1970s, however, and Goodyear was slow to safeguard its own employees,
even after receiving DuPont’s belated warning. 

The predictable result: an epidemic of bladder cancer, a relentless
and devious disease that can seem to disappear, only to resurface
years later. At last count, there were seventy-eight cases from the
plant, four times what would be expected in the general population.
Other cases have probably gone unrecorded.

The Goodyear plant also produced an excess of liver cancer due to its
use of vinyl chloride, a known carcinogen
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to make polyvinyl chloride resin, a precursor to PVC plastic, from
1946 to 1996. It was, truly, a cancer factory.

OSHA is hopelessly behind in its control of chemicals. Many of its
exposure limits are decades old and don’t reflect current science;
most of the tens of thousands
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of chemicals in global commerce have been assigned no OSHA limits
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and haven’t been analyzed for toxicity.

The Environmental Protection Agency is evaluating and pondering
additional regulation of some chemicals
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including vinyl chloride, that are found in Americans’ homes,
ambient air and workplaces. But the process of restricting or banning
a chemical is excruciatingly slow and subject to the caprices of
politics
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No rational person would say that things are as bleak in U.S.
workplaces today as they were in the late 1960s, before Congress,
prodded by Richard Nixon, passed the Occupational Safety and Health
Act [[link removed]]. In
researching for my book, I thumbed through countless documents from
that not-so-distant era and came away astonished at just how barbaric
conditions were.

Some 14,500 workers were dying on the job each year, and millions more
were being maimed and sickened. On February 1, 1968, two days after
the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, Lyndon Johnson’s secretary
of labor, Willard Wirtz, opened a series of congressional hearings by
comparing America’s workplace carnage with the bloodbath in
Southeast Asia. Just as “this morning’s paper reports a casualty
list from Vietnam,” Wirtz testified, there was a “casualty list
repeated every single workday throughout the year in this country.”
And yet, he said, it was “almost impossible to realize the
under-emphasis which has been placed on this matter over the
years.” 

With a few narrow exceptions, the states were responsible for
regulating health and safety on the job. Most barely tried. Heavily
industrialized Ohio had 109 wildlife inspectors and 79 workplace
inspectors. Mississippi had no labor department and two safety
inspectors.

When Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act into law on
December 29, 1970, he called it “probably one of the most important
pieces of legislation, from the standpoint of 55 million people who
will be covered by it, ever passed by the Congress of the United
States.” The agency created that day, OSHA, did make a difference in
workers’ lives, especially during the Carter Administration, when it
cracked down on toxic substances, including benzene, lead and cotton
dust, under the leadership of Eula Bingham.
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But OSHA was gutted under Ronald Reagan and never fully recovered.
Union membership, meanwhile, has fallen precipitously. In 1983,
according to the BLS
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the membership rate in America was 20.1%; in 2022 it was 10.1%. The
scrappy Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union, which
represented Goodyear employees in Niagara Falls and pressed for a
government investigation into the bladder-cancer outbreak there, is no
more. OCAW leader and firebrand Tony Mazzocchi, an eloquent advocate
for members’ health and safety, died in 2002.

We’re left today with a worker-protection regime that is very much
hit-or-miss. While some companies — probably most — take seriously
their legal responsibility to provide a safe place of employment,
others simply don’t care. Immigrant workers often get the worst of
it. 

In reporting for my book and the nonprofit news organization I run,
Public Health Watch [[link removed]], I’ve
encountered two clusters of the ancient lung disease silicosis
[[link removed]]among
workers who cut and grind artificial-stone countertops. They have
little or no respiratory protection and inhale ultrafine silica
particles that will eventually suffocate them if they’re not removed
from exposure. The first cluster was identified in Northern California
in 2019, the second in Southern California in 2022. 

In each case, the victims were relatively young Latino men happy to
have a steady job that paid $14 an hour. As of December
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the number of confirmed silicosis cases in California stood at 100 and
will likely go higher.

California, to its credit, has stepped up inspections of
artificial-stone fabrication shops and passed an emergency rule
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that will require shop owners to suppress silica dust with water and
take other protective measures. But it has its own workplace
regulatory agency, known as Cal/OSHA. About half the states don’t
and must rely on federal OSHA, which has begun a silica enforcement
initiative but is stretched so thin that it’s hard to imagine it
will make a serious dent in the problem.

And so, more countertop workers will perish. When I interviewed
[[link removed]]a
gravely ill Juan Gonzalez in the San Fernando Valley in October 2022,
six months before his death at age 37, I asked him what message he had
for consumers. “Many of us continue working in this field out of
necessity, and many continue because of ignorance, not knowing what
causes the damage: the stone,” he said in Spanish. “Behind the
kitchen, basically, there’s sweat and blood and, at the worst, even
death.”

We are in the third decade of the twenty-first century. The disease
that consumed Gonzalez was killing miners and stone-cutters in Greece
and Rome two millennia ago. We can do better.

Jim Morris is founder and executive director of Public Health Watch
and the author of “The Cancer Factory,” an investigative book on
chemical exposures in the workplace. He has been a journalist since
1978, covering public health and the environment.

A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good! Since
1909, _The Progressive _magazine_ _has aimed to amplify voices of
dissent and voices under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal
of championing grassroots progressive politics.

* Health and Safety
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* Labor
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* OSHA
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