BROWN-LUNG COTTON-MILL BLUES

...From the early 19th century on, there is a steady stream of reports from England, which imported American cotton, on the dangers of cotton dust...

...Between 1971, the year that brown lung was clearly made a compensable occupational disease in North Carolina, and 1975, the year CBLA was formed, only 33 people had ever filed for brown-lung compensation...

...If he cannot (and, in the past, companies like Stevens have made job-change requests difficult or a cause for firing), it is only a matter of time until Monday-morning problems became a daily occurrence and every work day turns into an ordeal...

...Whereas in Britain brown lung was made a compensable disease in 1941 and was systematically researched as early as 1936, in America barrier after barrier was set up to make sure as little information as possible got out about brown lung...

...Like the child who goes through school and never gets chicken pox even though the rest of his class does, there are textile workers who can spend a lifetime in the mills and never show signs of brown lung...

...Nor was Ramazzini alone in these observations...

...That there should be so many brown-lung victims and so little precise information about them is perhaps the saddest irony of all...

...Equally important, the potential quality of the settlements has also changed...

...At this point the brown lung victim's only hope is to leave the mills or get transferred to a less dusty job...

...For brown lung is not a new occupational disease...

...will be proposed...

...It was not until CBLA began organizing and holding free screening clinics that significant numbers of workers began coming their way, and at the start, even the clinics were a touch-and-go matter...

...The same dangers also apply to the question of what cotton-dust standard will finally be instituted...

...Through "massive violations of its employees' rights" (the words are those of the National Labor Relations Board) and "surface bargaining' in mills where its workers have voted for a union (in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, 3,500 Stevens workers are still without a contract after three years of negotiations), the company has managed to beat back all efforts at unionization...

...As the textile companies have shown an increasing reluctance to accept decisions made by the North Carolina Industrial Commission and slowed their hearings at every stage, the Commission has moved to streamline its own practices...

...IN THE U.S., the textile industry has been enormously successful in using its money and influence to inhibit knowledge of brown lung...

...Since its formation in April 1975, the six-chapter, 500-member CBLA has made the eradication of brown lung a crusade, and in so doing has forced both the textile industry and the federal government to take notice of health hazards they had preferred to ignore...

...Whereas under the old North Carolina workman's compensation law there was a $20,000 or 400-week limit on claims, under current North Carolina law no such bounds exist...

...from the Brown Lung Cotton Mill Blues album, June Appal Records...

...8 In 1976 the Textile Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union merged in order to begin an all-out assault on Stevens's Southern plants, and since then there has been an escalation of ACTWU activity, A national boycott—similar to one the Amalgamated conducted against Farah pants—is now under way, and in addition ACTWU has taken a leading role in the drive for passage of H. R. 8410, a bill designed to strengthen union organizing rights under the National Labor Relations Act...

...In this regard perhaps nothing is more revealing than the proposal by South Carolina's Senator Ernest Hollings of a Brown Lung Bill, patterned after the Black Lung Bill, that would provide a nationwide compensation system for brown lung victims and make the textile mills rather than the federal government do the paying in the long run...

...It also criticized OSHA's planned changes, which would drop the cotton-dust standard to 0.2 milligrams (the textile industry wants a standard of 0.5 milligrams) and allow the industry to monitor its plants and take seven years to come into full compliance with the new law...

...The textile industry was among the chief supporters of President Nixon's 1972 campaign, and in Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health George Guenther, a former textile official, they had their own man on the inside...

...In Guenther's eyes, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was the industry's, not the worker's, agency...

...Brown lung—or, as it is technically called, byssinosis—is to textile workers what black lung is to coal miners: an occupational disease that if allowed to go unchecked can and will kill...

...Guenther was true to his word, and in 1975, the year Carolina Brown Lung was formed, very little had changed in how the federal government saw brown lung...

...A worker with lowgrade brown lung will in all likelihood show the same symptoms as anyone with a bad cold: chest tightness, coughing, shortness of breath, and phlegm are standard brown-lung signs...

...Yet today none of the 44,000 workers in Stevens's 85 plants is under union contract...

...Over the last year it is not, however, ACTWU, whose boycott of Stevens has had minimal economic impact, but the shakily financed Carolina Brown Lung Association that has made the most gains in the struggle to bring the Southern textile industry under control...

...A brown-lung victim is now entitled to receive two-thirds of his final year's salary plus all his medical expenses for life...

...This summer the number of filings reached 240— with 49 cases settled out of court, 22 denied, and the rest pending...

...Brown lung is progressive, and in its most advanced stages it takes the form of chronic bronchitis or, when the alveoli of the lungs rather than the airways are impaired, emphysema...

...In 1705 Bernardino Ramazzini, an Italian physican living in London, noted the problems of making cloth with remarkable precision, observing in his Treatise on the Disease of Tradesman that those who hackle in the flax and hemp to prepare it for being spun and wove afford frequent instances of the unwholesomeness of their trade: for there flies out of this matter a foul mischievous powder that entering the lungs by the mouth and throat causes continual coughs and gradually makes way for asthma...

...A new application form now allows a worker who thinks he has brown lung to file a direct appeal to the Commission rather than get an examination from a private doctor first...

...CBLA's accomplishments at the local level have also made it possible for the Association to make its case in Washington from a position of strength rather than weakness...

...No one in CBLA doubts that a company like J. P. Stevens, which as a result of its illegal labor practices has paid out more than $1.3 million in fines and back pay since the Textile Workers began their organizing drive, will do what it can to avoid future compensation claims...

...In a state like North Carolina, where it has been so difficult to receive compensation for brown lung, getting workers with breathing problems to file for awards has not been easy...

...It was necessary to get doctors whose primary political loyalties were not to the textile industry (a difficult problem in small company towns), and then it was necessary to find lawyers who would handle the brown-lung cases that were ready for appeal (and in the process would risk delayed or no payment...

...Minor discomfort ceases being minor, and Monday morning chest tightness and coughing (caused by reexposure to cotton dust after a weekend of rest) become more pronounced...

...But there is a limit to the stalling Stevens can do in the courts, and as the compensation load grows (the seven CBLA members who have won brown-lung cases received a total of $73,000), mill owners like Stevens will be under pressure not only from the government but from the insurance companies handling their compensation payments...

...At this juncture, it is not just the brown-lung sufferer's ability to make a living for his family that is in jeopardy...

...To make them effective, ordinary volunteers were not enough...

...As the industry's Textile Reporter observed in a 1969 issue, brown lung is a "thing thought up by venal doctors who attended last years ILO [International Labor Organization] meetings in Africa where inferior races are bound to be afflicted by new diseases more superior people defeated years ago...

...The result is that a procedure that in the past dragged on for years has been reduced to a matter of months...

...The only mill he could gain admittance to insisted that he keep his findings secret, and when he went ahead and published his results (which showed a 12 to 29 percent brown-lung rate among the workers studied), he was dismissed from his job with the North Carolina Board of Heath...

...As raw cotton is processed, it gives off a fine dust, which workers inhale and then, depending on length and degree of exposure, react to...

...Setting on my front porch swing I'm like a man forgotten Head all filled up with angry thoughts And lungs filled up with cotton* Fourteen years ago, the Textile Workers Union began their campaign to organize J. P. Stevens, the country's second largest textile manufacturer...

...The best estimate is that in the United States today there are 35,000 active and retired workers with disabling brown lung and as many as 10,000 workers with some form of brown lung...

...It was the "great potential of OSHA as a sales point for fund-raising and general support by employers" the Guenther discussed when he visited the White House in 1972, and when he returned to the Department of Labor, the OSHA he presided over was one in which he could guarantee "no highly controversial standards (i.e., cotton dust, etc...

...Industry opposition kept him out of private mills...

...Bouhuys was not alone in being subjected to such pressure...

...The serious trouble begins when low-grade brown lung moves on to a more advanced stage...

...Public Health Service gave Dr...

...While OSHA, which was formed in 1970, could during the Nixon-Ford years go about its business with only industry pressure to worry about, CBLA has made sure that is no longer the case...

...Gonna Go to Work on Monday One More Time," by Si Kahn...

...IT IS CLEAR, however, that OSHA is not about to return to its old ways...

...then the Commission arranges for the worker to see—at company expense—a state-certified brown-lung expert...

...The current OSHA health standards for cotton dust are now being revised, and at hearings held last April, CBLA was outspoken not only in its criticism of current OSHA standards (which allow one milligram of cotton dust per cubic meter of air and are constantly violated...

...To the industry brown lung was a Communist and black plot—all rolled into one...

...Even the textile industry seems aware that OSHA is no longer the pushover federal agency it once was...

...As is the case with CBLA's state organizing, final results are not in, and much hangs in the balance...

...In places like the carding room, where exposure to the leafy bract of the cotton is especially severe, medical surveys have shown brown-lung rates as high as 41 percent...

...Its new director Eula Bingham made that evident when she told a delegation of brown-lung victims, "The past sins of this agency at least were not committed by me...

...The mills are already in severe violation of cottondust standards (in Stevens's Roanoke Rapids plants, workers were found to be exposed to between 12 and 30 times the legal amount of cotton dust), and to place monitoring responsibility in the industry's hands rather than the union's, opens up the chances for a series of abuses...

...Bureau of Labor Statistics, which observed that "constant confinement in a dusty atmosphere" makes cotton 9 manufacture "a dangerous trade" and despite a similar report in 1940 in Textile World, an industry publication, it was not until 1964 that the U.S...

...Public Health Service officially recognized brown lung as a disease...

...For a Senator from a textile state to make such a proposal is in itself an act of courage, but more than that, it is an indication of the political climate Carolina Brown Lung has been instrumental in creating...

...But unless the industry can hide its past record on brown lung or convince the public that in cotton manufacturing as in Vietnam certain body counts are acceptable, its cost argument is in trouble...

...Even then Dr...

...This is especially true with regard to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration...

...The achievement of CBLA is that in two years it has begun to reverse this attitude...

...Bouhuys was almost unable to complete his project...

...and in 1892 the word "mill fever" is used to describe widespread outbreaks of brown lung...

...IN NORTH CAROLINA, the results of CBLA's work have been highly encouraging...

...In cotton preparation and yarn areas, untreated cotton has been shown to produce a 7 percent brown-lung rate at 0.1 milligrams of cotton dust per cubic centimeter (the figure CBLA wants), a 13 percent rate at 0.2 milligrams, and when the dust goes up to the 0.5 milligrams the industry wants, the overall brown-lung rates will jump to a whopping 25 percent...

...At the heart of CBLA's organizing is a two-fold strategy of first making state-compensation systems work for those who have been disabled by brown lung and then using these gains to pressure such companies as J. P. Stevens to introduce the kind of equipment (now available) that would clean up their plants...

...But for anyone who works in the dusty areas of a cotton mill long enough (and according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration over 247,000 textile workers are exposed to cotton dust), the chances are good that brown lung in same form will be a fact of life...

...CBLA's work in North Carolina has paid off not only in the number of brown-lung filings in the last *120 Congressional Record, S 12582 and S 12581 (July 16, 1974...

...10 two years but also in the procedures now used for filings...

...It will not be possible to say of Hollings's Brown Lung Bill, as it was of California Representative Philip Burton's, that it comes from a legislator with no first-hand knowledge of or vulnerability to the industry he proposes to regulate...

...Despite a 1913 report by the U.S...

...For the textile world of the late '60s, admitting to being a source of brown lung was worse than admitting to being a source of venereal disease...

...Similar opposition surrounded the work of Dr...

...But since that time the numbers have risen eight-fold...

...It is his very survival...

...Whereas in the past the industry sought to dismiss reports of brown lung as exaggerated, its current strategy is to insist that cleaning up the mills is too expensive...

...Peter Schrag when in 1966 he tried to do a medical survey of textile workers in North Carolina...

...The textile industry's unwillingness to admit the existence of—let alone take responsibility for— brown lung did not, however, end with the medical information breakthroughs of the 1960s...

...It was not until 1967, after he got access to a federal penitentiary mill in Atlanta, that he finished his study, and it was not until 1968, when his findings were published in The New England Journal of Medicine, that the U.S...

...Arend Bouhuys, now with the Yale School of Medicine, a grant to discover why brown lung, which had been so heavily reported in England, had not been similarly reported in America...

...I cannot be held accountable for fours years of undone reports...

...In 1818 its effects on Lancashire workers are noted: in 1831 it is described by J. P. Kay as "spinner's disease": in 1860 it is discussed in an official report to Parliament...

...The problem is one that union leaders throughout the country have recognized as severe...