Industrial Epidemic

...Worse, the public seems to have lost what little interest it may once have had in the entire issue...

...Some of Scott's subjects are more familiar than Brodeur's asbestosis case...

...So blatantly immoral an implication is astounding...

...Reviewed by Bruce C. Vladeck School of Public Health, Center for Community Health Systems, Columbia University When he was Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Elliot Richardson observed that 100,000 Americans die every year from occupationally related diseases, while another 300,000 are seriously disabled...

...One suspects Brodeur stopped when he did only from the urge to show the public what he had already collected...

...Brodeur reports on this system much as he must have investigated it, giving the book an almost Proustian flavor: The crumbling of a single cookie results in ever-expanding associations and interconnections...

...People have to live in this hazardous world, and to keep their equilibrium, most manage to screen out the immediate threats...

...Yet even together, they are not likely to have one-tenth the influence...

...If anything can revive that interest, it is these two excellent books...

...Brodeur's most important asset is his refusal to leave any stones unturned or leads un-followed...

...By unraveling all the skeins in this one case he maps out a powerful and dangerous subculture that holds the life of millions of Americans in its largely indifferent hands...

...since then, several dozen cases of occupational angiosarcoma have been identified...

...And if the victims aren't terribly concerned, it is understandable that the companies won't be, either...

...In addition, it is coming to seem that everything causes cancer or some equally horrible disease these days...

...Irving Selikoff of New York's Mount Sinai hospital, one of the heroes of Brodeur's book...

...One hopes they succeed...

...In connection with this, I should mention a brief squib about Brodeur's book I stumbled across not long ago...

...Moreover, because her scope is wider, she is able to emphasize several fundamental topics...

...Invariably, the first costs to be cut are those for maintenance, and the first postponements of maintenance are safety-, rather than production-, related items...

...Thus there is considerable repetition of elementary facts...

...Another is the total inadequacy of the Workmen's Compensation laws...

...But it expands into a telling indictment of what Paul Brodeur calls the "medical-industrial complex," the interlocking power structure of corporations, bought physicians, university researchers, and government employes...

...The bulk of Expendable Americans originally ran as a series of articles in the New Yorker, and it suffers from some of the awkwardness inherent in the transition to book form...

...But perhaps the most significant reason occupational health receives so little attention is that it affects factory laborers almost exclusively...

...At least the reality is that in picking and choosing from among the competing evidence, government officials tend to take the industry's side...

...Thousands of others are killed or maimed annually in industrial accidents...

...More recently, researchers found that even very slight exposures to asbestos are associated with mesothelioma, an especially virulent cancer...

...It commands the Secretary of Labor to protect the health of workers on the job, authorizes him to levy large fines when necessary, and in cases of imminent peril empowers him to shut down factories and mills...

...Each upholds the finest traditions of investigative journalism...

...Rachel Scott aims at roughly the same targets as Brodeur, but her attack is quite different...

...To safeguard workers from overexposure to asbestos particles or other perils, Brodeur notes, employers are supposed to conform to Federal standards...

...Still, Brodeur has important things to say, and his wealth of hard information allows him to say them effectively...

...The writer was primarily alarmed by the possibility of asbestos poisoning extending beyond the factory to the surrounding community...

...Many of the greatest threats derive from the introduction of new chemicals and materials, rarely tested for toxicity, into industrial processes...

...Certainly the dominance of that ideology helps to explain the comment of John Stender, assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health...

...Broader than Expendable Americans, Muscle and Blood is reminiscent in both form and style of Lincoln Steffens: Like The Shame of the Cities, it devotes a chapter or two to different variations on the single underlying theme...

...The Tyler affair, while hardly atypical, constitutes the kind of scandal hungry police reporters dream about...

...Most basic is the complete subversion of mere common sense or human decency by the strict imperatives of economics...

...And for all the popular rhetoric about "blue collar blues" and worker alienation, the content of industrial employment is essentially hidden from the rest of the population...

...Asbestos particles, it has long been known, produce asbestosis, a crippling lung disease...

...Both were obviously and self-consciously designed to inspire outrage, to spur the reader into action...

...One is the standard managerial practice of forcing injured employes back onto the job as quickly as possible so that their accidents will not be reported in the official statistics...

...Most of the so-called evidence related to occupational dangers, however, is produced by scientists supported, either directly or indirectly, by the interested corporations, and the sheer bulk of their research tends to overwhelm the more rigorous studies of such honest pioneers as Dr...

...the most elementary practices of industrial housekeeping were systematically ignored...

...Eventually, the plant was dismantled by the company, quite literally bolt by bolt, and its structures and machinery were buried in what one cannot resist calling a continuing cover-up...

...Occasionally, too, her treatment of them is superficial, as in her discussion of the explosives industry or the exposure of migrant farm laborers to toxic pesticides...

...Yet it is only a reflection of a widely shared attitude...

...Testifying before a Senate committee in July 1974, he stated that he had to consider the economic "feasibility" of life-saving exposure standards before making a final administrative determination...

...By any standard, the Tyler plant was a disgrace: Asbestos particles filled the air...

...Occupationally produced cancers, for instance, take anywhere from 20 years on up to develop...

...That is, the health of people other than workers in the plant might be endangered...

...Unfortunately, the cadre of Federal inspectors maintained to enforce the act is pitifully small, and corporations have learned to paralyze the government by engaging in wars of attrition through endless litigation...

...the reader often wishes for a cast of characters-or at the minimum an index-to help keep all the doctors and corporate vice presidents straight...

...Another factor, as Scott appears to believe, might be our "free enterprise," profit-maximizing ideology, which, in the eyes of the law, holds property rights equal to the well-being of men and women...

...There is just something about the subject of occupational health that keeps people from getting excited...

...the estimates of deaths from occupational disease, in particular, represent only stabs in the dark...

...But at other times she is right on the mark -for example, in detailing the criminal neglect at the Kawicki Berylco Industries' beryllium plant in Hazel-ton, Pennsylvania, or at Mobil's infamous Paulsboro, New Jersey, refinery...

...As studies of major public issues, both of these books rank at the top with, say, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring or Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed...

...Expendable Americans begins as a case study of one plant, the Pittsburgh Corning asbestos factory in Tyler, Texas...

...Brodeur and Scott, and their publishers, are trying to change this situation, to awaken the public conscience, to goad us into immediate and concentrated action...

...For example, the discovery of a link between polyvinyl chloride, a ubiquitous substance employed primarily in the production of plastic, and angiosarcoma, a rare and lethal cancer of the liver, made the headlines last summer...

...In part, that something might be the intrinsic difficulty of focusing on the problem...

...And all of these figures are merely rough guesses...

...More distressingly, the author's fascination with details, and his evident relish in connecting them, can frequently be overpowering...

...company representatives attempted to prevent officials from looking into the situation, and suppressed information of potential life-and-death importance to the workers and the surrounding community...

...The government, in turn, is expected to set those standards on the basis of the best available findings...

...But thousands of fatalities and tens of thousands of serious illnesses and injuries continue to be produced by well-understood and entirely preventable hazards, such as unsafe mine conditions...

...In an effort to deal with this problem that dates back to the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, Congress in 1970 passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act...

...As has often been pointed out, those upset by water and air pollution remain largely oblivious to the fact that injustice takes place inside as well as outside industrial walls...