Slow-motion tragedy for American workers

Jim Morris
Updated

PORT BYRON, New York — Six weeks before Chris Johnson was born in 1974, the U.S. government issued a warning about a substance that would nearly kill him 30 years later.

The substance was silica, a component of rock and sand that is the scourge of miners, sandblasters and other workers who breathe it in. When pulverized into dust, it can cause silicosis — a scarring of the lungs that leads to slow suffocation — as well as lung cancer.

Related: A drop in the bucket

This was no newly discovered hazard. The ancient Greeks and Romans were mindful of it. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins launched a national campaign against it in the 1930s after the knifelike particles dispatched hundreds of tunnel workers in West Virginia.

The 1974 warning by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health said the workplace exposure limit for silica put people in danger. NIOSH urged the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration to cut the limit in half.

Related: A timeline of delay and disease

OSHA finally did so in 1989, only to see its work undone by a court decision. It didn’t try again until 2011. In the interim, Johnson became a bricklayer and developed acute silicosis after a five-month job that enshrouded him in dust. He’s 40 and, on paper, can expect to survive less than five years.

As Johnson’s experience shows, inaction has consequences. Silica — which OSHA says threatens 2.2 million workers, mostly in construction — is a striking example of the government’s failure to properly regulate toxic substances in American workplaces. The silica rule still isn’t finished. If it is enacted despite industry protests, it will be only the 37th health standard issued by the agency in its 44-year history.

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It’s an ignominious record given the human and economic costs of work-related disease in the United States. According to a widely cited University of California, Davis, study, an estimated 53,000 people died in 2007 from on-the-job exposures — outnumbering those killed in suicides, motor vehicle accidents, falls or homicides. More than 400,000 others got sick. The price tag: an estimated $58 billion. OSHA puts the annual toll at more than 50,000 deaths and 190,000 illnesses.

An 18-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity has found that the epidemic of occupational disease in America isn’t merely the product of neglect or misconduct by employers. It’s the predictable result of a bifurcated system of hazard regulation — one for the general public and another, far weaker, for workers. Risks of cancer and other illnesses considered acceptable at a workplace wouldn’t be tolerated outside of it.

Related: 16 dispiriting facts about worker health

For years, the best OSHA has been able to do is set chemical limits so that no more than one extra cancer case would be expected among every 1,000 workers exposed at the legal maximum over their entire careers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s standards for the public are 10 to 1,000 times more protective. The real gap is often worse, a former OSHA official says.

“I can’t see any justification for treating people that differently,” said Adam M. Finkel, who heads the Penn Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and was director of health standards programs at OSHA from 1995 to 2000.

Related: Key findings from the Center's workplace toxics investigation

Among the Center’s findings:

• Most of OSHA’s 470 chemical exposure limits are, by the agency’s own admission, grossly outdated and don’t protect workers from a variety of ailments. Cancer, for instance: The agency’s own analyses of 16 substances estimate that cancer risks associated with legal exposures to workers over their careers are as high as six in 10. Analyses of an additional 31 exposure limits by the Center and Finkel found cancer risks above 1 in 10 for nearly half of the chemicals.

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• The vast majority of the tens of thousands of chemicals made or used in the U.S., including some very common and toxic substances, have no workplace exposure limits. The lung-ravaging food flavoring diacetyl. The widely used herbicide glyphosate, recently named a probable carcinogen by the World Health Organization. The agents in chemotherapy drugs, hazardous to the health care workers preparing and handling them.

• Even apparent success stories — rare cases in which chemical limits were tightened — can be Pyrrhic victories. OSHA’s own calculations suggest, for example, that the cancer risk for hexavalent chromium, a metal used in specialty paints and coatings, was as high as one in three at the limit in effect from 1971 to 2006. At the current, stricter standard, the risk is still as high as one in 22, OSHA acknowledges.

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• Sampling for chemicals has fallen over the last three decades as workplaces multiplied but OSHA’s staff levels stagnated. Even so, OSHA still finds exposures above legal limits, a Center analysis found. One in six samples containing hexavalent chromium, taken after the 2006 rule change, topped the limit of 5 micrograms per cubic meter of air. Samples containing lead, a brain-damaging metal that can accumulate on a worker’s clothing and hurt the whole family, have exceeded the limit 40 percent of the time since 1984.

• NIOSH last did a nationwide workplace exposure survey more than three decades ago because it has not had the funding to update it. Critical information on both old and emerging chemical hazards across industries is missing, putting regulators and researchers at a disadvantage.

Related: The campaign to weaken worker protections

A profound toll

Job-related illness is a slow-motion tragedy few seem to understand or acknowledge. Its victims usually die one by one, out of public view, though disease clusters emerge on occasion.

Related: Deadly dust: A bricklayer's job nearly kills him

More than 50 cases of bladder cancer, for example, have been tied to a small Goodyear chemical plant in Niagara Falls, New York, far above the expected number in the general population. NIOSH investigators identified the suspect chemical years ago: ortho-toluidine, used to keep tires from cracking. Exposures in the plant weren’t extreme; in fact, they were “well below” the legal limit, the investigators reported.

Goodyear, which made changes to its factory after the problem came to light, said in a statement that all but one of the 54 bladder-cancer cases identified through its own screening program involved workers who came to the plant before 1990.

Related: Legal limits often looser than ACGIH voluntary limits

“While the ortho-toluidine exposure levels in the plant have generally been far below the permissible exposure limits, engineering controls were put in place in the 1980s to further reduce levels in the plant,” the company said.

Steve Wodka, a lawyer in New Jersey who represented about half the Goodyear victims in claims settled out of court, said he knows of 62 bladder cancer cases from the plant. He calls that cluster “probably the best example of the inadequacy of the system.”

Ortho-toluidine is in a family of chemicals — aromatic amines — known since the 1930s to cause bladder cancer, Wodka said. Yet its exposure limit of 5 parts per million, adopted by OSHA in 1971, was fashioned only to protect workers from the chemical’s acute effects, not cancer.

“It remains the law of the land today,” Wodka said.

The blight of disease contracted on the job isn’t confined to factory workers. It consumes hairdressers, grocery store meat-wrappers, scientists and people in a variety of other professions. Many are stricken by middle age.

The panoply of illnesses, from nerve damage to dementia to virulent cancers, takes a profound toll on workers and their families. Careers are lost, finances shredded, marriages tested. In some cases, workers opt for macabre, last-ditch procedures to try to save their lives.

There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.

This story is part of Unequal risk. Workers in America face risks from toxic exposures that would be considered unacceptable outside the job. Click here to read more stories in this blog.

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Copyright 2015 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.