LETHAL LORDSTOWN
SLAUGHTER, JANE
Lethal Lordstown Workers fight poison at a GM plant Joseph J. Lukas, forty-five, liver ailment, utility department twenty-two years. Joseph Cappelli, forty-three, heart failure, maintenance...
...Problems also exist in the welding and grinding areas and in final assembly, where car engines are running...
...But after he began vomiting and passing out at work, he began to blame the paint fumes...
...Nothing's happening to us...
...At one meeting, WATCH members heard from Merida Dunbar, who has suffered bronchial problems since an explosion at her small nonunion plant, Sajar Plastics, in 1987...
...We know they have the technological capability for a safer way of painting cars, but they refuse to do it because profit maximization is what they live by...
...Reighard's symptoms began in 1980 when he was transferred to the paint department...
...she asked them...
...Their deaths and those of many other GM workers are being questioned by a grass-roots group called Workers Against Toxic Chemical Hazards (WATCH...
...When I showed him the Memorial he started rattling off names right and left of people who had just died or just been diagnosed with cancer...
...When they finally hit upon the idea of leafleting the Lordstown plant with their telephone numbers, they got an immediate response...
...He does not expect to hold a regular job again because of his sensitivity to so many common substances...
...A WATCH leaflet asked: "Why so many, so young and in such a short period of time...
...The complex employs 11,000 workers...
...WATCH also has insisted that workers should have the right to stop the line and leave the area until a hazardous condition is corrected...
...From then on," says Reighard, "we have just grown and grown and grown...
...Steel plant near Pittsburgh, performed in the late 1960s, was one of the reasons Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act...
...Chuck Reighard, who was employed at Lordstown for fourteen years before leaving on disability in 1985, could testify to that...
...I couldn't believe how many names I knew in that file, and I knew they weren't very old...
...What do you have when the two are combined...
...How many more...
...I know how bad they treat you...
...She kept a journal during part of her sojourn in the booth...
...For three years, the "Chemically Disabled Employees from General Motors," as the four called themselves, ran into stone wall after blind alley...
...WATCH has asked General Motors to conduct a Proportional Mortality Ratio (PMR) study, to compare death rates from cancer, respiratory ailments, and heart disease among GM Lordstown workers with the death rate among the general population...
...WATCH's questions have struck a chord...
...They all said yes...
...in fact, it already has for the paint booths which apply the topcoat...
...There was the same kind of anecdotal evidence about deaths among coke-oven workers that there is now among people at the paint booth at Lordstown," Lynd says...
...I don't know that there is or is not a problem...
...Lukas, Cappelli, and Bolchalk all worked at General Motors' Lordstown, Ohio, car and van assembly complex...
...Staughton Lynd has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board...
...Even if the level of any one chemical is within permissible limits, small doses may cause symptoms while at work, low doses over a period of time may produce lasting effects, and the combined effects of exposure to several chemicals at once may be far worse than exposure to only one chemical at a time...
...My being chemically disabled also has an effect on my wife and son and daughter," Reighard continues...
...On January 11, WATCH members who are current or former Lordstown workers met with a representative of the UAW International...
...It is because they think they get a smoother, more salable finish...
...GM is clearly unhappy about the attention WATCH is getting, however...
...But they haven't done that with the undercoat...
...As a result, two other disabled Lordstown workers, Mike Greb and Pren-tis Taylor, called him up...
...The long-haired marijuana-smoking Vietnam veterans who worked there were not the stable workforce GM had grown used to in other plants...
...It would look like it was six miles long...
...My position is that a lot of people involved in that thing have an ax to grind," says Local 1112 President Bill Bowers...
...The local union to which many of WATCH's members belong, United Auto Workers Local 1112, at first was unresponsive to their requests for action...
...They wrote to GM's medical director, without results...
...Peggy Van Winkle, who is thirty-two years old, says, "I don't want to die in here...
...The reason has nothing to do with health and safety," says Lynd...
...Then why do four out of the six of you all have hearing aids...
...He even won a contest from Four Wheel Drive magazine...
...Now WATCH sweatshirts are popular in the plant, and WATCH meetings are attracting people from other plants in the area, especially GM's Packard Electric plant, which employs thousands of women...
...Like these drivers, the local union remains reluctant to take on the company...
...They died in 1987 and 1988...
...Members of Solidarity USA, a cross-union retirees group, have offered a hall for WATCH gatherings...
...Whenever a GM corporate official came to town, they would go to his hotel to seek him out...
...At work we'd have a long weekend, I would feel real good...
...Now he can't open any glue bottles or anything when I'm around...
...Lordstown's paint-booth workers aren't the only ones who are affected...
...I'd go back to work and within a couple of hours I'd be wiped out...
...Some of them have legitimate complaints, some of them don't...
...My daughter will be thirteen pretty soon, she's into hairspray and perfume...
...They were stopped by plant security guards, as were Carol Goricki and Alberta Faber when they tried to leaflet in nonwork areas inside the plant...
...But we're just as anxious to find out as they are...
...General Motors management maintains that the workers liave nothing to get excited about, although two days after WATCH's press conference the company announced it had joined the union in asking for a PMR study...
...The entry for November 19, 1986, reads: "I feel like I have had every symptom on the paints that it lists in booths, only death...
...At first he attributed his headaches to his father's recent death...
...Carol Goricki, a WATCH member who drives the finished Cavaliers and Pontiac J2000s off the line, tells how she decided to get involved: "I was on a temporary assignment in personnel, doing filing, and the pension files got my attention...
...On October 13, 1988, members held a press conference at which they displayed a hand-lettered four-by-eight-foot plaque, General Motors Lordstown Memorial...
...Paint fumes evacuated from the booth area are sucked back in through the plant's ventilation system, so that people in other areas of the plant also complain of fumes, headaches, sore eyes and throats, nausea, dizziness, and tingling...
...Retire.' They do anything and everything to make you quit...
...My brother's worked in the body shop for nineteen years...
...The Lordstown plant achieved notoriety in the early 1970s for a series of wildcat strikes—worker protests against a highly regimented assembly line that moved at a pace of 100 cars per hour...
...Thirty people were taken out by ambulance, as police guarded the doors from the outside...
...Peggy Van Winkle, WATCH's chairperson and an assembler in the chassis department, reports a similar reaction: "One millwright said that in the last five or six years they'd lost every single millwright that started at GM with them...
...It was the death file...
...WATCH's list is not a scientific survey...
...Twenty-three were less than fifty years old when they died...
...A month later, union leaders said they had written to the UAW International to request a study but had not yet gotten an official okay...
...I started seeing a lot of names I knew, and I got nosy...
...They and a fourth disabled worker, Lessley Harmon, decided to do something...
...The plant public-affairs director, Bob Jones, told one reporter, "We have records that show no individual has been harmed because of any exposure to toxic chemicals, but we decided to go ahead and request the study in order to lay all these groundless fears to rest...
...A guy on maintenance said he knew of sixteen [paint] booth cleaners out with cancer or lead poisoning...
...She has to go into the bathroom, turn on the fan, open the window, and then she can prepare herself, as she says, for her day...
...members culled the names from obituaries in local newspapers...
...WATCH members would not get to help in the study, however...
...GM could employ the new magnetizing process...
...Lordstown was seen as emblematic of how discontent was manifested in the working-class segment of the Vietnam generation...
...Why not...
...When we started passing out the fliers," Goricki recalls, "everyone said, 'I know someone—how come his name's not on the list?' Everyone gave us names...
...WATCH members have received much encouragement from fellow workers—including foremen...
...First they went to Detroit to picket the GM Building...
...But it frightened them and it is frightening other Lordstown workers who for years had suspicions that many of their co-workers were dying prematurely and of unnatural causes...
...Cubbin said he regarded the WATCH group as "outsiders" with no credibility...
...Paula Ann Bolchalk, twenty-nine, cancer, spot welder eight years...
...Because the consumer doesn't see the undercoat, and so they can't make a buck off of doing it...
...What I would like to tell the people," Reighard says, "is that they will treat you the same way that they're treating us, unless you are the owner...
...The insurance company wanted me to take a physical this month...
...We've probably done 700 samplings, either water quality or air quality, inside the booths and around the booths, and we've always achieved the UAW-negotiated standard, which is better than the Federal Government's...
...It went on to list diseases and symptoms experienced by some Lordstown workers: "cancer, heart problems, headaches, pain and burning or numbness and tingling in hands and feet, dizziness, confusion, depression, can't remember what you were going to do, nausea, diarrhea, eye irritation, sore throat, colds, sinus infections, nosebleeds, any excessive bleeding, extreme fatigue, skin rashes or changes, shortness of breath, chest pain or tightness, infertility, miscarriage, birth defects, stillbirths, muscular problems...
...My son's hobby was building model trucks...
...WATCH includes current GM employees, survivors of deceased workers, and disabled workers...
...But he wants us to do things that it's impossible for us to do...
...I just gradually got worse," he recalls...
...They were promised that a PMR study would begin soon, carried out by a university...
...Outsiders," such as the Lynds and survivors of deceased Lords-town workers, were not allowed to attend...
...Medically it's documented that some of them do have hypersensitivity...
...WATCH members then decided to leaflet the plant with a reproduction of their memorial, and to hold a press conference...
...Somehow a reporter from UPI heard about him and wrote an article...
...Their very first question was, 'Did you ever see a psychiatrist?' It's the first thing they say...
...A June meeting between union officials and Ohio State Representative June Lucas, Youngstown State University labor studies professor John Russo, and attorneys Staughton and Alice Lynd, resulted only in a letter which said there were no problems in the paint booths and failed to mention the request for a PMR study...
...The failure of that program is another story, but fifteen years later, Lordstown workers—this time their leaders are women—are still fighting to change the quality of their work life...
...One of the attorneys working with the group, Staughton Lynd, points out that a PMR study of coke-oven workers at a U.S...
...Since his early "retirement," he has been on a one-man crusade to "stop another family from going through what we're going through now...
...Numerous studies documented the "blue-collar blues," and in 1973 General Motors and the UAW agreed to begin a national joint "quality of work life" effort...
...The leaflet listed fifteen new names to be added to the Lordstown Memorial—people who had died in the last four-and-a-half months...
...Little things would hit me all at one time...
...You're going to fool around and cause the plant to shut down," the drivers told her...
...I just found out that a chemical I used to work with causes urinary and bladder cancer...
...Jones said several workers on WATCH's list had died in automobile accidents...
...What do you have...
...As Peggy Van Winkle puts it, "You're working with glue, and what is the guy down the line working with...
...But they have also gotten negative feedback from workers afraid for their jobs...
...That got results...
...How many before...
...There never ever once was a label or a warning, and we used it to wash our hands and get the gunk off our shoes...
...We're doing our part...
...Are you next...
...It's: 'Why don't you take the buyout...
...One fellow twenty-nine years old that works side by side with my brother was just diagnosed with leukemia...
...Jane Slaughter, a staff writer for Labor Notes, is the author, with Mike Parker, of "Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept...
...Get out of here...
...Peggy Van Winkle recounts being confronted by six drivers from the car-haul company which takes the finished cars away from the plant...
...I couldn't even go through our grocery store's detergent aisle...
...Reighard, who is forty-two, receives extended disability benefits through GM's insurance company...
...Patterned after the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., it lists seventy-five former GM Lordstown employees who died between January 1987 and July 1988...
...It's hard to think of where you could work," he explains...
...I've been out of there on disability myself, with an injury, and I don't want to end up going out on sick leave with a disease that I can't prove how I got...
...Charlie [Chuck Reighard] has had some problems, there's no doubt about it...
...In December WATCH members, including disabled workers and current employees, attempted to hand out a leaflet in the plant parking lot...
...Hope that's not next...
...Last August, union officials brought the Lordstown plant manager to a meeting in Peggy Van Winkle's apartment complex...
...Alberta Faber has filed an intentional tort suit against GM, claiming that GM willfully caused damage to her lungs by keeping her in the paint booth after her doctor repeatedly requested that she be moved...
...If we couldn't help ourselves, maybe we could help other people," Reighard says...
...We made a pact to fight General Motors and try to help the other people working in the plant...
...Why do we have to die...
...The plant's only twenty-two years old...
...Besides the PMR study, WATCH has asked GM to improve the plant's ventilation system, rebuild the paint booths to employ a magnetizing process that leaves much less spray in the air, and have the plant's Quality of Work Life groups survey workers for symptoms of chemical exposure...
...You feel fine...
...We have been told that specific chemicals are within Federal, state, and GM/ UAW limits," states WATCH's letter to the plant manager, Michael J. Cubbin...
...What do you want...
...The] finding was that people who worked on top of coke ovens had rates of lung and stomach cancer on the order of five to ten times that of other steelworkers and persons in the general population...
...But we also know what we have personally experienced...
...In a husky voice, Dunbar related a story reminiscent of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911: When a machine at Sajar Plastics exploded, sending toxic gases throughout the plant, management locked the doors so the workers could not leave and talk to the press...
...Joseph Cappelli, forty-three, heart failure, maintenance twenty-two years...
...Before WATCH was formed, Reighard had contacted everyone he could think of who might listen to his story—attorneys, state representatives, GM's board of directors, Ohio's Senator Howard Metzen-baum, H. Ross Perot...
Vol. 53 • March 1989 • No. 3
