US manufacturers suppress the facts about asbestos
The Johns-Manville Company, a major manufacturer of asbestos products, was aware that asbestos fibers posed a significant health hazard, and began to monitor the health of its workforce. In 1933 doctors for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company told Johns-Manville executives that in one of its plants 29 percent of workers had asbestosis. Eleven employees brought lawsuits against the company for its failure to notify them of the risk, and failure to take any preventive or mitigative action. Johns-Manville settled those lawsuits, and wrote into the terms of settlement that the employees' attorney could never again directly or indirectly participate in the bringing of new actions against the company. This requirement indicates that Johns Manville clearly understood its own liability, and its contribution to the illness and death of its employees.
One doctor involved in the Metropolitan Life-Johns-Manville study wrote a scientific paper about the findings and the dangers of asbestos. Managers at Johns-Manville and Raybestos-Manhattan insisted on the right of review before publication, and Metropolitan Life consented. Manville's editing minimized all references to the health hazards of asbestos dust. In 1936 these same corporate officers directed the editor of Asbestos, a trade publication, that they were not to publish any reference to asbestosis.
A consortium of asbestos companies decided to fund research at the Saranac Laboratories, a major researcher in lung disease, on the health hazards of asbestos. Contrary to accepted standards of scientific practice, their support carried the requirement that all research findings would be the property of the companies, who would have the sole power to decide what information could be published. Saranac Laboratories agreed to this condition.
Over the next 30 years researchers at Saranac conducted more than 1300 experimental studies of asbestos, and published a number of papers. Every paper was submitted for review to the asbestos companies before publication, and every mention of asbestos as a cancer-causing agent was deleted. By the 1980's, when plaintiffs were routinely prevailing in asbestos cases, a search of the records at Saranac revealed that all 1300 asbestos studies had either been discarded or had simply disappeared.
Selikoff's groundbreaking study links asbestos and cancer
In 1953, physician and medical researcher Dr Irving Selikoff of New York's Mt Sinai School of Medicine founded a clinic for industrial workers in Paterson, NJ. As he treated these workers, he grew increasingly concerned about the unusual incidence of lung cancers and mesotheliomas among asbestos workers. With the help of the New York and New Jersey locals of the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers, he embarked on a far-reaching study of the health of all 1117 union members.
He found evidence of asbestosis in over half them, and documented a clear dose-response relationship: The longer the exposure to asbestos, the greater likelihood of a worker's developing cancer. He also showed that the death rate among asbestos workers was 25% higher than expected. His groundbreaking study, published in 1964, irrefutably established the dangers of asbestos exposure.
After the publication of Selikoff's study, neither companies nor their hired experts could reasonably continue to claim ignorance of the dangers. The way now lay open for plaintiffs' lawyers to file product liability suits on behalf of terminally ill asbestos workers against the manufacturers of asbestos products.
Federal agencies move to regulate, ban asbestos
The manufacturers continued to stonewall, lying about the facts, and about what they knew. In 1966 an officer of Raybestos-Manhattan stated, "We feel that the recent unfavorable publicity over the use of asbestos fibers in many different kinds of industries has been a gross exaggeration of the problems. There is no data available to either prove or disprove the dangers of working closely with asbestos."
The federal government took notice of Selikoff's study and other evidence, and in 1971, the newly-established Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, published the first workplace exposure standard for asbestos. Two years later the US Environmental Protection Agency, EPA banned spray-on asbestos insulation as an air pollution hazard.
Recognizing the very significant dangers that asbestos presents, the EPA announced its intention in 1979 to work toward a total ban. That rule was promulgated in 1989, and asbestos companies immediately filed suit. Two years later, a federal court revoked the ban.
Plaintiffs' lawyers find proof of asbestos industry's bad faith
In 1977 plaintiffs lawyers representing injured asbestos workers discovered the papers and correspondence of Sumner Simpson, the president of Raybestos-Manhattan during the 1930's and 40's. His letters to his own corporate counsel and to other asbestos companies reveal that industry executives fully understood the dangers of asbestos, and the lethal consequences for their own workers. They document companies' decisions to suppress information and mislead workers about the causes of their illnesses, and a cold-blooded commitment to their own profits over the health of their workers.
Asbestos victims prevail in court
The discovery of the Sumner Simpson papers marked a turning point in litigation for asbestos victims. Exposed by their leaders' own words, the industry's protestations of ignorance were revealed as calculated lies. Ruling for a victim, one state judge wrote that the asbestos industry had made a conscious effort in the 1930s to downplay or arguably suppress, the dissemination of information to employees and the public for fear of the promotion of lawsuits."
Ruling against Owens Corning in 1999, the Florida Supreme Court wrote that the company had willfully withheld information about the danger of working with its asbestos products: "It would be difficult to envision a more egregious set of circumstances . . . . a blatant disregard for human safety involving large numbers of people put at life-threatening risk."
Through the 1970's and 80's, More asbestos victims sought compensation for their illness and suffering, and plaintiffs lawyers around the country drew on the damning evidence of the Simpson papers, and increasing medical understanding of mesothelioma to illustrate the consequences of the industry's stance. Asbestos attorneys were able to achieve substantial compensation for many workers who had served their employers and their country in good faith.
Asbestos companies file for bankruptcy
After losing a series of lawsuits, Johns-Manville declared bankruptcy in 1982, the largest US corporation ever to do so. As the tide of litigation continued to flow against them, other asbestos companies followed the same course. Since then many other US manufacturer of asbestos products has now filed for bankruptcy, and many suppliers have also done so. The resolution of victims' claims increasingly rests with bankruptcy courts.
The task now facing plaintiffs' lawyers, asbestos companies, and the Congress, is to craft a solution that will address the needs of this generation's asbestos victims and their families, as well as those of future victims, whose illnesses have not yet been diagnosed.