FREON STALKS A FACTORY

...Accudyne was cited and fined in 1989 for failing to provide employees information and training on hazardous chemicals in the workplace...

...But there are ways they can go about challenging them without exposing themselves...

...Concerned workers are pointing to a type of freon as their prime suspect...

...Every time we propose a standard, industry says it's not needed, and labor says it is not stringent enough," he says...

...I'm scared...

...Just because you're working for the Government is no excuse for infringing people's rights and health and safety...

...Delco, which also makes electronic components on contract for the Defense Department, had its own problems with freon, among other chemicals...

...By doing that, they are protecting themselves if they do want to pursue it in court...

...Union leaders can put in written requests to see the records on behalf of employees who wish to remain anonymous...

...But UAW industrial hygienist Peter Dooley takes a dimmer view of freon's potential hazards as it is used in industry...

...They are freely used in air conditioners and refrigerators...

...One employee charges that conditions have gotten so bad that doctors are being pressured to recant their original diagnoses...

...Still, workers are not so sure...

...At least something is in place...

...Accudyne President Donald Gerred dismisses workers' reports of health hazards as containing "absolutely no truth...

...Local Union President Mike O'Brien is as wedded to secrecy as is management about what is going on at the plant...

...They have to report it in order to come up with evidence that it is work-related...

...For a company with four plants and some 500 workers, Accudyne has received only an "average" number of OSHA citations, according to OSHA industrial hygiene supervisor Lionel Olson, whose Madison office has inspected the factories...

...They do a little bit," says one former employee of the union's efforts, "but once every blue moon...

...It is considered safe," he says, "but ten years from now, we may find out something different...

...The chemicals grouped under the name freon—which include many of the infamous ozone-depleting chlorofluorocar-bons—are generally considered among the safest in occupational settings...

...UAW Health and Safety Director Frank Mirer points out that because the freon applications and versions at Delco and Ac-cudyne may not be the same, it may be incorrect to assume that Accudyne employees are also at risk for brain cancer...

...with advocacy of safe working conditions...

...Workers questioned for this article feared that any specifics about their medical or working conditions would reveal their identities to company officials and might cost them their jobs...

...There are a lot of cases where people have very little recourse except to act collectively and demand that the local union be more receptive to their needs," he says...

...The best thing they can be doing is reporting and reporting and reporting to the medical department there," he says...

...If you wait until cancer does occur," Koch warns, "you can't reverse it...

...Different kinds of freon are pretty much all the same in effects," he says...

...The union is a United Auto Workers local, and the UAW is often associated April Rockstead was an editorial intern at The Progressive during the summer of1990...

...But Koch argues that the desire to preserve secrecy should never be carried to the point of suppressing workers' cries for safe working conditions...

...They should be requesting their health and safety records, their exposure records...

...They should call OSHA to examine the solvents, and call in labor professionals to review the results of the studies," he says...

...They are afraid of speaking out for fear of undermining their own legal rights, should their health problems become irreversible...

...The only way to respond effectively to management indifference and intimidation is to speak out, says Rick Koch, the UAW health and safety officer at Delco Electronics in Milwaukee, a division of General Motors...

...And Dooley shares Koch's view that speaking up is the best protection for workers...

...And, lacking concrete proof that specific chemicals have caused them to feel ill, they believe it is easier to ride out a few difficult years with health insurance and an eventual pension than to reenter the job market at fifty...

...This is Government stuff," says one Accudyne employee, explaining why she doesn't feel free to talk...

...About thirty people on a soldering line at Accudyne have resorted to CAT scans, ultrasound examinations, biopsies, bone-marrow samplings, and liver tests to verify what the company won't: They may face severe, possibly long-term health risks from the chemicals they work with...

...But Koch says the freon itself is not the only danger...

...For those who had worked there twenty years or longer, the risk was ten times that of the general population...

...They are even checking up on the doctors," she says of the company...

...We work with military contracts...

...They are skeptical that requesting Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspections would do any good or preserve their jobs...

...At Accudyne, workers say the union—UAW Local 95—has largely ignored their problems...

...According to Olson, many portions of Accudyne's OSHA files are off-limits because of "sensitive" military work...

...Freon was targeted as a suspected trigger of a variety of cancer-related and neurological health problems because freon was so widely used throughout the plant...

...It was worker solidarity that forced management to make improvements in ventilation systems and accept a health-and-safety representative elected from the shop rather than merely one appointed by the company, he says...

...Employers are required by OSHA's Hazard Communication Standard to provide employees access to data on the hazardous chemicals used in their work areas and to carry out formal training programs for employees "at the time of initial assignment and whenever a new hazard is introduced into their work area...

...Many employees on the soldering line are women who are close to retirement and have special reasons for not making waves...

...They have the right to know what they're working with," says Koch of Accudyne workers...

...It's this response—which ranges from denial to intimidation—that may be the most terrifying for Accudyne employees in the long term, since the company's intransigence is blocking potential life-saving improvements in working conditions...

...Accudyne is contesting several current OSHA citations—one for failing to prevent lead accumulation "at both entry and exit to the automatic solder, wash lines and in traffic aisles," one for allowing a faulty exhaust ventilation system to recirculate lead-contamimated air back into the workspaces near the automatic solder, and two for failing to require or arrange protective equipment for employees in a loading room "to protect from flying particles due to potential primer detonations...

...One woman, explaining why she couldn't comment on her work situation, asked, "If the union can't do anything, what makes you think you people can help us...

...But the threat that management holds over them is that they're going to close down the plant...

...But Accudyne employees know that something is making them ill, and doctors have reportedly cited overexposure to freon as a possible cause...

...Workers report a density so strong that they can taste the chemical and are sometimes forced to purchase their own face masks to make the work bearable...

...FAILING HEALTH Freon Stalks a Factory BY APRIL ROCKSTEAD Less than a half mile along the Rock River from Mercy Hospital in Janesville, Wisconsin, is Accudyne's North Franklin Street plant, which manufactures land mines and other ordnance...

...Basically, they cause people to have heart attacks...

...Asserts one employee, "They will get rid of us if we start talking about this...

...An active union and workers' demands prompted a study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, that showed a fourfold increase in brain cancer among Delco employees compared to the general population...

...This is not the idle talk of one far removed from the problem...

...The chemicals' "sweetish, ethereal" odor is "normally detectable well below levels considered harmful...

...And he questions the toxicity studies done so far on freon, many of which have been conducted by the Defense Department...

...Whatever problems they would have at the Accudyne plant would be taken care of at our union, within our structure, not out in the public," he says...

...Essentially, it's job blackmail...

...That's bullshit as an excuse," he says...

...Short-term acute occupational exposure to a common variant, freon 113, is considered "low in toxicity," according to the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, whose data are used as a guideline by Wisconsin's Department of Health and Social Services...

...These methods include examining OSHA 200 logs, accounts employers are required to keep of every suspected work-related injury...

...Employees were not being trained in the company's written hazard-communication program nor trained in the specifics of the job," reads the citation, which followed a 1987 write-up for the same problem...

...OSHA cannot afford to be that cautious, according to Olson...

...Doctors' names are mentioned specifically at meetings...

...The Madison OSHA office generally doesn't consider freon a problem in industrial settings, Olson says, unless its use is confined to a small area or tank where asphyxiation could occur...

...Freon, he says, has the potential to carry particles of other metals and chemicals into the air when it evaporates, thus exposing workers to a variety of unsuspected hazards...

...We could all lose our jobs...

...Like many other wage earners across the country, they are compelled to weigh the unknown risks of day-to-day workplace hazards against the more tangible hazards of losing their jobs, benefits, and references...

...The study was initiated by rank-and-file workers who noted their co-workers were dying of brain cancer," Koch says...

...Even more troubling than the silence imposed on workers is the fact that their own unions are sometimes unwilling to demand safe working conditions...

...The proximity to the hospital may have saved some worried Accudyne employees a few minutes on their way to the emergency room and doctors' offices over the past few months...

...The doctors have told girls what this freon is doing to us, and now they're denying it...

...I can thoroughly understand the fear at some of the local unions, their fears about what management will do to them," says Koch...

...Though the Centre notes that "high concentrations may affect the nervous system and cause reduced ability to concentrate, dizziness, headache, etc.," and that "massive exposures could cause unconsciousness and death," the report states that freons are "unlikely to accumulate," and are "readily excreted via lungs...