Letting Workers Know About Hazards : Legislation Splits Business, Earns Union Backing

Frank Carsner’s conversation is disjointed and rambling, the result of brain damage that drove his IQ from a gifted 130 down to a below-average 96. His vision is clouded by cataracts. Asthma strangles his breathing. He has had tumors on his legs and eyes and difficulty moving his limbs.

Carsner’s doctors say the 46-year-old man’s disabilities are the result of his work as a master painter at a Portland, Ore., truck plant.

From 1973 to 1981, his workday was spent awash in toxic solvents known to pose a risk to the human nervous system. For much of the period, he worked daily with paints containing isocyanates--chemicals that harden enamel coatings, but that also have long been linked by medical studies to respiratory damage in humans.

At the time, though, the hazards were unknown to Carsner and his co-workers. As with many industrial employees, it was not until a colleague died--and lawsuits and investigations ensued--that the painters began to recognize the causal relationship between a day’s work and disease.

“We knew nothing about isocyanates or neurotoxins,” Carsner recalled. “This was all Greek to us then.”

The toll that ignorance took on his life and health has made Carsner an intense supporter of legislation pending in Congress that would require the federal government to notify hundreds of thousands of workers of life-threatening hazards they face in the workplace.

“I wouldn’t be terminal and a lot of other people wouldn’t be terminal if it were implemented,” said Carsner, founder and president of Portland’s Toxic Victims Assn.

Over the objections of some business groups--but with the support of lobbyists for businesses that make heavy use of potentially hazardous materials, including the petroleum and chemical industries--the House narrowly approved worker notification legislation in mid-October.

The bill would set up a board, under the auspices of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, to review medical studies and identify chemical and physical exposures that pose proven health risks to workers.

NIOSH would notify employees exposed to those risks in current or former jobs, and their employers would be required to pay for screening, counseling and medical treatment.

Proponents of the measure estimate that more than 300,000 workers are disabled annually by exposure to health hazards on the job--a figure they predict would drop as notification campaigns put pressure on employers to improve workplace safety.

Even if the legislation is approved by the Senate later this year, as is expected, the White House has threatened to veto the new program.

Republican legislators and business critics say the notification plan would impose needless, costly regulation on industry and unleash a slew of lawsuits, despite prohibitions in the bill against using the notices as the basis of litigation.

‘No Information’

“We see it as just duplication,” said Terry Hill, spokesman for the National Federation of Independent Business, which estimates that it will cost firms $632 per employee to provide medical testing mandated by the legislation and up to $32,000 for each worker who leaves a job because of toxic risks.

“We call it OSHA II,” he said--a reference to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, whose inspection and regulatory programs, the bill’s foes say, adequately guard workers against exposure to health hazards.

Medical experts, however, say warning workers of occupational hazards is a proven means of preventing illness, or at least speeding its detection.

Proponents argue that a notification program could help physicians with little training in occupational disease to recognize symptoms that they might otherwise ignore.

And while workers, under “right-to-know” laws, now can demand health information about chemicals they use at work, advocates say a notification program will overcome employees’ demonstrated reluctance to ask questions or confront their supervisors.

“Right now what’s happening is that these people have absolutely no information, they’re developing diseases and they don’t know where to go to get medical help,” said Margaret Seminario, the AFL-CIO’s associate director for occupational health and safety.

Only a handful of notification and screening campaigns have been conducted in the United States. The most extensive is a 6-year-old program in Port Allegany, Pa., for former employees of a Pittsburgh Corning Corp. plant that manufactured asbestos products in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Initial studies financed by the American Flint Glass Workers Union found widespread evidence among the plant’s work force of asbestosis, a scarring condition in the lungs that can be a precursor to cancer.

When the 25-year-old son of a factory worker--exposed to asbestos fibers apparently carried home in his father’s clothing--died of a cancer triggered almost exclusively by asbestos, Pittsburgh Corning agreed to underwrite a long-term screening and medical surveillance program for former plant workers and their families, explained Dr. Edwin Holstein, medical director of the Port Allegany Asbestos Health Program.

Would Change Little

About 60% of the 1,000 people eligible are taking advantage of the program to receive lung-cancer screenings by local physicians as often as three times per year, said Mary Lou Dann, the program’s coordinator.

The results have been encouraging.

“What really kills with asbestos is the tumors,” Holstein said. “We’re catching some of them early, making a difference with some of them.”

Many of the biggest industrial firms already have ongoing medical surveillance programs--a factor that helps explain support for the notification bill by industry groups, from the Chemical Manufacturers Assn. to the American Electronics Assn., that expect they would have to change little in their operations if the proposed legislation is enacted.

In the absence of government-mandated notification, however, most workers are on their own as far as discovering and defending themselves against workplace health hazards.

OSHA has developed exposure standards for only a handful of the hundreds of potentially risky materials workers may come in contact with on the job. And because occupational health research has been limited and the harms resulting from exposures can remain latent for years, workers often have a hard time convincing employers--or courts--that a particular exposure is the cause of their ailments.

‘We’re Canaries’

Jeanne Patterson, 29, worked through her first pregnancy in the “clean room” of a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Santa Clara, despite some worry about being required to get a note of approval from her doctor.

But when she was pregnant again last year, her physician refused to sign off. Studies with laboratory animals had shown that glycol ethers--chemicals produced in the fabrication of wafers for semiconductors--might pose hazards to women’s reproductive health.

Rather than quit her job, as she says her employer suggested, or keep working while she carried her second child, Patterson fought for, and won, disability benefits. In January, a few months after her daughter Tiffany was born, the first published study of female workers at a semiconductor plant found an unusually high rate of miscarriages among women working in clean rooms.

“It’s just like the coal miners back East when they first started explaining to them about black lung. We’re the canaries out here,” said Patterson, whose experience turned her into an activist for notification and other worker safety issues. “Right now, you have to become an expert on your own case because there’s nobody else out there who is.”

In spite of the increasing attention paid in recent years to occupational health hazards--particularly the harms caused by asbestos--employees like Patterson who seek out information about workplace dangers remain the exception. Relatively few workers or worker groups have aggressively pursued data about the risks associated with their industries.

“The nature of a lot of workers is that they want to do their jobs, not make waves,” said Bernardo Garcia, vice chairman of the steering committee of the Los Angeles Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a union-supported advocacy group.

Lawsuits and collective bargaining have, though, been used on a few occasions to press on a small scale for notification and medical screening programs like the one contemplated by the federal legislation.

Some former employees of a closed Firestone tire plant in Salinas, Calif., for instance, are asking in a class-action suit that the company be ordered to inform all its former workers that they may have been exposed to benzene and other toxic substances linked in scientific studies to leukemia, cancer, birth defects and other medical problems.

The workers want Firestone to pay for long-term monitoring of their health, according to Los Angeles attorney Gordon Stemple, who represents the former employees.

In Santa Fe Springs, the 17 workers at Neville Chemical Co.’s paraffin plant went on strike in May, demanding that the firm provide medical tests to screen for illnesses linked to exposure to dioxins and furans--groups of cancer-causing chemicals that were byproducts of the plant’s manufacturing processes.

The employees, members of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, sought the testing because of the cancer death of one worker and serious illnesses contracted by several others, according to Brent Hardwick, chairman of the plant bargaining unit.

A year earlier, Hardwick and another union leader had testified against Neville in a federal criminal case that resulted in the firm’s conviction on charges of illegally burying toxic wastes at the plant site.

According to company officials, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health concluded that the incidence of cancer among the plant’s employees was not higher than normal.

Jack Ferguson, the plant’s manager, insisted that yearly physicals conducted since 1978 provided adequate screening for potential work-related diseases.

But Hardwick says the physicals are insufficient to reveal dioxin or furan contamination. “I’d like to know if that material’s in my body and how much of it is there,” he said.

In any event, the plant--which had been shut down since the strike began--was permanently closed Tuesday, when Neville announced that it had sold its paraffin operations.

Still, Hardwick contends that warnings about health hazards and medical screenings for occupational disease should be part of the social contract between workers and employers.

“We’re looking here at the mirror image of the kinds of testing programs corporations and companies all across the country are demanding in terms of alcohol and drug abuse,” he argued.

“What companies are saying is, ‘We demand to know what kinds of chemicals you put in your body,’ ” Hardwick said. “We say, ‘Can we find out how much dioxin, how much furan? Why won’t you bargain on that level?’ ”

Time Bombs

On a nationwide scale, opponents of the proposed notification program warn that it will create a logistical nightmare. And occupational health experts acknowledge that locating a plant’s former employees can be complicated.

“There are going to be some practical problems with identifying and finding people who are retired or have moved on from company to company or who are in trades where access to them is not very easy, like in the building and construction trades,” said Brian Christopher, director of the Alice Hamilton Occupational Health Center in Washington.

Finding appropriate ways to inform people that their bodies may be time bombs, ticking away with latent contaminants that could cause deadly disease at any time, is no simple task either, the experts note.

“We quickly came to realize that you don’t just send out a letter to a worker and say, ‘By the way, I finally remembered to tell you that you’re at increased risk of cancer,’ ” said Dr. Linda Rudolph, chief of the occupational health surveillance and evaluation program of the California Department of Health Services, which is considering a notification program for workers tested in state research studies.

“You’re talking about setting up a situation where people and their families are likely to feel anger, because it’s nothing they can do something about, and they’re going to feel scared,” Rudolph explained.

“You’re just opening up a whole wealth of issues that are very emotional and very complex.”

Successful notification programs also have had to confront widespread ignorance in the medical community about the occupational causes of disease.

“If you look at the training of physicians in this country, the amount of hours given over to the occupational disease component of medical education is from non-existent to minuscule,” said Paul Schulte, chief of screening and notification for NIOSH.

“Consequently, physicians are not alert to the role of environmental influences, such as exposure to chemicals, in the development of disease.”

Giant Step

Yet it is a new national attentiveness on the part of both laymen and doctors to the environmental causes of many catastrophic diseases that could be one of the most dramatic payoffs of a nationwide notification program for workers in high-risk industries, according to Dr. John Froines, a toxicologist at the UCLA School of Public Health who was deputy director of NIOSH during the Carter Administration.

“When you start to have people who recognize there’s a possibility that disease has environmental connections to it,” Froines said, “you really have gone and made a giant step in terms of identifying populations at risk and developing intervention strategies to deal with it.”

Ernesto Vega, coordinator of the Los Angeles Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, speaks of the notification issue in simpler, human terms.

“Think of the workers that had been involved in the installation, use and manufacture of asbestos,” Vega said. “If those workers had been notified of the hazards, we wouldn’t have the problems we have today, of people just walking around waiting to die.”