Amid an asbestos industry cover-up of the dangers of the cancer-causing fibers, it took many decades for a ban to happen in this country. That cost more than 130 Bloomington-Normal residents their lives.
Neighbors, family members, and employees of the United Asbestos and Rubber Company on the west side of Bloomington were all affected. Panelists said they fear the past is prologue during a recent discussion of asbestos workplace dangers at the McLean County Museum of History.
Asbestos industry-funded medical studies in the U.S. in the 1930s confirmed the link between asbestos and cancer, but companies hid the information under the guise of proprietary information. The United Asbestos and Rubber Company Plant [UNARCO] opened in Bloomington in 1951 and closed a couple decades later when it moved to southern Illinois. By the early 1970s, asbestos’ health risks became public knowledge, too late for many.
Ericka Wills is a labor activist and professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Wills' grandfather Willard Tipsord died of mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos. Tipsord had worked at the west side plant in Bloomington and often came home with his clothes caked with white fibers that turned into knives in his lungs. Wills said her grandpa died when she was 6 years old, fading from a tall strapping healthy man to an invalid.
"Becoming more frail, more weak, more sick, unable for me to even crawl up on his lap. And him dying and me only knowing it was only because the company had done something bad that made him sick," said Wills.
Willard Tipsord's son — Ericka Wills' uncle — also recently died of a cancer linked to asbestos, though he never worked at the Bloomington plant. Family transfer of asbestos fibers acquired in a workplace has happened in other instances.
Safety procedures were almost nonexistent at the plant for most of its operation in Bloomington. Larry Mertes worked there from 1969 to 1971.
“They might have provided us with little thin paper masks like you would use if, well, they're not even as good as what we had for COVID. They were just a thin little paper mask" said Mertes.
UNARCO kept tabs on worker health and tried to ease people out when they started to show signs of sickness. Jim Walker is a nationally known attorney who sued the company and other asbestos manufacturers on behalf of workers. Walker said UNARCO kept an archive of X-rays of employees as part of that deceptive health program.
"In the X-rays, were the written reports about what each X-ray showed and you could just watch the progression of the disease as the man was X-rayed every year or two years," said Walker.
And for many years, he said, UNARCO even hid the existence of the archive.
"UNARCO had openly and clearly lied-lied-lied about where those X-rays were, when all that time they knew and would call this guy for the X-rays," said Walker.
Litigation and a ban
McLean County in the 1970-1990s was a pretty conservative place. All the judges were Republican. Most jurors too. Walker said despite what you might think would be a tendency to favor the company, it turned out judges and jurors didn't like lying.
"I tried to start my case with the biggest meanest most dislikeable son of a gun that I could put on the stand and get him to tell what I thought would be the most offensive set of lies about 'not knowing it was hazardous.' We had good luck in front of McLean County judges and jurors," said Walker.
He would also try to schedule trials when farmers would not be available, and teachers would be in the jury pool.
Today, the government bans asbestos. Yet, the toxic legacy of the material remains in many public buildings and homes — in tiles, drywall, insulation, and many other common products.
George Martinez is an asbestos mediation instructor for the Laborers International Union Training and Education Fund. He said there's a fair amount of work all these decades later removing asbestos from buildings and taking it to special landfills. Workers must wear respirators and special suits to protect themselves from the fibers that stay in the lungs for life.
"We train workers on how to remove it safely by using mist, water. They call it a surfactant that we put on it. It's sprayed on to reduce any type of airborne fibers," said Martinez.
Those safety precautions were developed over time through research. Eventually, regulation followed. For instance, Jim Walker said a scholar on the east coast did a study on air quality in homes near a former asbestos plant in Patterson, New Jersey.
"He did air sampling in the homes where asbestos workers used to live but didn't anymore and found significant levels of airborne asbestos in those homes 10 and 15 years afterwards," said Walker.
Walker said he wouldn't be surprised if asbestos were still detectable in some of those homes.
Ericka Wills said back in the 1950s the Department of Labor could issue citations but not give fines or penalties that would create change. The regulatory climate didn't change until the 1970s with the Occupational Safety and Health Act which created NIOSH, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which does research and training. It also created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, to develop and enforce safety standards.
Going backwards?
Wills said research, safety, and oversight are all under threat through actions taken in the first 100 days of the Trump administration.
“It's a fact. That's taking us back in time," said Wills.
Wills said the Trump administration has cut 90% of the NIOSH workforce. 900 people lost their jobs. 100 people are left.
She said the government had been beta testing real-time dust detectors for miners through an agency that had its funding cut by President Trump. That's important, she said, because there's more rock dust now than in past generations of mining. Coal seams are narrower and miners have to chew up more rock that contains silica to get to the valuable material. More rock dust creates a different kind of silicosis in miners than black lung disease. Not only will the dust monitors likely not happen, but Wills also said, the Trump administration has chosen not to enforce a new standard for the amount of allowable airborne silica dust in mines.
She said the administration has cut funding at the Department of Health and Human Services for research and education on how to read X-rays on miners who ask for testing to see if they have black lung.
"All of this is a direct attack on workers," said Wills.
Back when asbestos lawsuits were just starting in the 1970s, attorney Jim Walker said it was "an uphill chug." Lawyers for workers got together and learned.
"We shared these documents. We started having our own seminars, the defense lawyers were all having their own seminars throughout this time. We gained in our knowledge of medicine and disease and so forth, and the tide just slowly turned in our favor," said Walker.
It's getting harder for that kind of process to happen.
Ericka Wills said a 2018 Supreme Court ruling decided that filing a class action lawsuit is no longer considered collective action under the National Labor Relations Act. The decision allows businesses to impose mandatory arbitration agreements as a condition of employment. Wills said 60 million workers in the U.S. are now under those agreements. That means they have signed away 6th Amendment rights to sue for workplace exposure. Wills said instead of having a collective body of knowledge established publicly in the courts, cases now happen one by one by one in secret, and worker attorneys like Jim Walker have to go it alone.
"There's no court record. It's not public record what happens in those arbitrations. There's no case law for that either," said Wills.
By abandoning government research and the ability to set new safety standards on workplace exposures, Wills said, there are far fewer checks on the profit motives that can lead companies and business executives to do things like hide the dangers of asbestos to workers
"Which lives are we considering disposable? Just like those little paper masks that were given, that didn't do any good, that you could just throw away, what kind of lives are we willing to throw away and why? Who profits from it?" said Wills.
And she said illness and injury from workplace exposures affect not only the lives of specific workers. The loss of family relationships and family income through worker death and disease lasts generations, as it has in her family.
