The Online Asbestos, Asbestos Cancer, & Mesothelioma Authority
Asbestos, Cancer, & Mesothelioma Legal Concerns & Resources
If you go to any major Internet search engine and enter the word "asbestos," what initially comes up are hundreds of advertisements for law firms that specialize in asbestos litigation.
This is a "sign of the times," and a clear indication of what is perhaps the most prevalent tort issue today.
The word tort refers to personal injury case law, which is the legal classification into which asbestos litigation falls. Primarily, this litigation involves a worker who was exposed to asbestos in the course of his employment bringing suit against one or more companies that are found to be potentially liable for the exposure and consequent illness (considered to be the "injury" in legal terms).
Despite the rush to deregulate every corporate industry by the last four Presidential Administrations, most of the laws pertaining to worker and product safety are still in place. Corporations who violate these regulations--particularly when it results in injury (illness) or death--can still be held liable under civil statutes. In some cases, they can be found criminally liable as well.
It was not always thus. During the time in U.S. history known as the "Gilded Age," corporations ran amuck, ignoring the safety of their workers (to whom they often paid next to nothing) and producing tainted and defective products. Dirty secrets of American history include the documented facts that J.P. Morgan made a fortune through the sale of defective rifles to the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War(1), and that most U.S. casualties during the Spanish-American War resulted not from battle, but from illness and tainted beef processed and sold to the Army by the Armour Meat Company(2).
President Theodore Roosevelt and his Administration were the first to institute some worker protections and limit the power of corporations. Although he himself was from a family of extreme wealth and privilege, President Roosevelt understood that the long-term stability of a democracy was dependent on the well-being of the people who actually did the work of building the nation.
Many legislators and policymakers during Theodore Roosevelt's time were strongly influenced by the work of journalists known as muckrakers--investigative reporters and other writers who became the conscience of the nation. These were the writers who exposed the corporate corruption that was behind the sale of poisoned products and the existence of dangerous working conditions for employees, among numerous other social issues.
"Muckrakers"--named by Roosevelt after the "Man With the Muckrake" in John Bunyan's 1678 spiritual allegory Pilgrim's Progress--are still among us today. Two of them are reporter Andrew Schneider and author Michael Bowker, whose works have brought the issue of asbestos poisoning to the attention of mainstream America.
Had the dangers of asbestos been known during the Progressive Era of the early 1900s, the muckrakers would undoubtedly have been very outspoken against its manufacture and use. Unfortunately, medical science at that time was only just beginning to suspect some link between asbestos and lung disease. It was not until the 1930s that the health hazards of asbestos were fully known.
The first people outside the medical profession to receive evidence of asbestos' toxicity were the corporate officers of the large asbestos producers. They worked very hard to conceal this information from the general public for 40 years. However, it was a secret that would not stay buried, as increasing numbers of asbestos workers began to suffer from cancer and "white lung."
In 1981, Ronald Reagan began dismantling President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and rescinding the rights and protections instituted under his cousin Theodore a generation before. Despite the actions and inactions of a government increasingly beholden to big business interests, however, information about the toxicity of asbestos could no longer be hidden.
Furthermore, there was irrefutable proof that asbestos corporations had engaged in a conspiracy to hide such information from the public. In 1977, an attorney representing a client with asbestosis discovered correspondence at the corporate offices of a major asbestos manufacturer and distributor dating back to the late 1930s, agreeing to withhold such information from the public.
Since then, there has been a reckoning. Hundreds of corporations have gone under because of asbestos liability, and hundreds more have attempted to seek refuge under U.S. bankruptcy laws that favor the interests of corporations over those of citizens. In an ongoing case against one asbestos company, members of the board are facing criminal charges in federal court.
The new "Gilded Age" has been going on in America for over a quarter century. It is only now beginning to spawn a backlash among citizens who work longer and harder than any people in the industrial world yet increasingly receive fewer fruits of their labors--and who are tired of being poisoned because of the greed and avarice of huge corporate interests.
This backlash has brought about two major victories in the fight against asbestos. The first one is the defeat of a bill that would have denied the right of asbestos victims to hold corporations accountable. The other is the unanimous passage of legislation that will outlaw all manufacture, distribution and use of asbestos and asbestos products throughout the United States by 2010.
The fight is far from over, however. The major element of litigation--and the one that is virtually always upheld on appeal--is recovery for medical costs and loss of income.
Because the U.S. is the only major industrialized nation that does not provide health care to all citizens, those who suffer from asbestos-related diseases have the added insult of high medical bills as well as the injury of the disease itself. And for many, who either have no health insurance or whose insurance refuses to cover treatment of a "pre-existing condition", their only recourse is in civil court.
What follows is a compendium of the issues, the legislation and the mechanisms of the legal field known as asbestos litigation.
- Engelbrecht, H.C. and F.C. Hanighen. Merchants of Death. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1934)
- Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. (New York: Perennial, 2003.)