Lethal Dust

...For the previous two-and-a-half years, Martinez had worked for Manville, the nation's largest manufacturer of insulation products, as a janitor, bag loader, and ore crusher...

...Although the corporation was in excellent financial condition, it argued that it faced economic ruin if the cases were allowed to run their normal course...

...Several politicians, including Senator Gary Hart, Colorado Democrat, also played an unsavory role...

...About the only players to emerge from the asbestos litigation with their moral integrity intact are the trial attorneys who came to the defense of asbestos victims...

...In all likelihood, the fund will be inadequate to compensate the number of claims, which could easily exceed 50,000 over the next twenty years...

...Bill Blum (Bill Blum is an attorney in Los Angeles and a free-lance writer...

...Under the terms of a bankruptcy reorganization plan scheduled to go into effect on December 31, 1986, Manville's business operations will be protected by an injunction issued by the court while a settlement trust fund, financed by the company's insurers, will be set up to assume liabilities for present and future losses...

...In court, they found themselves working on a contingency basis against some of the largest, most high-powered insurance defense firms in the country, which were pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars in hourly fees...

...He was talking loudly in Spanish, repeating the word morir ("to die...

...Outrageous Misconduct is based on a series of articles that first appeared in The New Yorker, and earned Brodeur the 1985 Association of Trial Lawyers of America Special Literary Public Service Award...

...From that group, 8,000 to 10,000 people will die of asbestos disease each year until the turn of the century...

...Hart's proposed legislation floundered, but Manville eventually got its way by declaring bankruptcy in 1982, an act that effectively halted litigation against it in more than 10,000 legal cases...

...his skin was clammy with cold perspiration and his heartbeat indistinct...

...The company's insurance carriers—Traveler's, Home, Lloyds', and others—were equally guilty of coverup...

...Silicosis and asbestosis, another lethal pulmonary dust illness, have ravaged the health of millions of American workers and consumers...

...Hart's bills, the first of which was submitted in 1980, would have forced claimants out of the court system and into an administrative process run by the Federal Government, which would have severely limited the potential size of compensation awards...

...Despite Brodeur's tedious and overly detailed style, the book stands as a powerful reminder that greed and avarice often lie at the heart of what conservatives uncritically celebrate as the entrepreneurial spirit...

...Unfortunately, Manville's bankruptcy ploy is only the cutting edge of corporate retribution for the courtroom successes of plaintiffs in the product-liability field...

...Other companies, such as A.H...

...Manville's bankruptcy petition was their punishment...

...Duncan found Martinez sitting on a bed gasping for breath, "blood-flecked foam" coming from his mouth and nose...

...Seconds later, he gasped again and, with a rush of fluid from his nose and mouth, died...

...Manville resolved those cases only on the condition that the workers' attorneys would never sue the company again...

...In the process, he had been exposed to high levels of mineral dust and had contracted the chronic lung disease, silicosis...

...Brodeur reports that Manville knew of the dangers of asbestos since at least 1933, when the company settled lawsuits with eleven workers stricken by asbestosis for less than $3,000 each...

...Milton Duncan of Lompoc, California, was called to the home of Macedonia Martinez, a thirty-three-year-old Mexican-American employed at the local Johns Manville factory...

...Thereafter, it became standard practice at Manville to withhold suspicious x-rays from lung-damaged employees...

...Congress is considering legislation, the Uniform Product Liability Act, which would drastically curtail damage awards against manufacturers...

...According to Paul Brodeur, author of Outrageous Misconduct, the fate that befell Martinez was hardly unique...

...These legal crusaders generally came from small law firms, often based in the same rural communities where their clients lived and worked...

...What makes this grim statistic outrageous, in Brodeur's view, is that for the past fifty years, Manville and other asbestos manufacturers knew of the pernicious nature of their wares but failed to inform their employees or the general public...

...But after a slow start in the 1960s, the plaintiffs' attorneys began to score a steady string of lucrative victories...

...Robins, maker of the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device, are following Manville down the duplicitous path to Chapter 11...

...Fifteen years later, Manville learned even more directly of the hazards of asbestos when its own medical director reported an unusually high rate of asbestosis among the firm's work force and recommended that afflicted employees not be told of their true physical condition...

...Hart, in whose state Manville's corporate headquarters is based, twice introduced bills to bail out the asbestos industry...

...Brodeur estimates that from 1940 to 1980, some twenty-one million Americans were exposed to microscopic fibers of asbestos from insulation and other building materials...

...But Manville is not the only villain in this disgraceful saga...

...As the director assessed the situation, the recommendation was justified to enable the workers to "live and work in peace" and the company to "have the benefit of many years of experience...

...The young man had an expression of extreme terror...

...A Federal judge was persuaded...