Asbestos Related Legislation

Ancient History

Asbestos and carcinogenic are not only connected medically, but linguistically as well. Both words come to us from Greek; the first one is virtually unchanged from its ancient form, which means “inextinguishable” (1). The second word has changed slightly; its original form was karkinos, meaning “crab.”  For centuries, cancer was known as the “Crab Sickness.”

To the Romans, who marveled at the “magic mineral” that was untouched by fire, yet pliable enough to be woven into cloth, cancer had another name: the “disease of slaves” (2)

Recent History

Corporations have known of the toxicity of asbestos for nearly seventy years. Between 1940 and 1980, well over twenty million tons have been used in the manufacture of buildings and vehicles of all kinds as well as everyday appliances. At its height, asbestos was the center of a multi-billion-dollar industry in which over two hundred thousand workers were employed (3). 

After the Second World War, wealthy corporate financiers whose excesses during the 1920s had led to the Great Depression of the 1930s (and who had expressed support for and even done business with Adolf Hitler) still harbored great bitterness toward the late Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Eventually, they found common ground with anti-Communists such as Ayn Rand and supporters of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.

This group effectively destroyed President Harry S. Truman’s plan for national single-payer health care for Americans (which, had it been available, would have removed at least one of the major causes for later asbestos litigation). Government regulation of any aspect of free enterprise was labeled as a step toward communism (4).

Eventually, this attack on government regulation culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan, who fervently believed that private enterprise, driven by the profit motive, would do everything more efficiently than government, and at a substantially lower cost. The program of privatizing all government functions – including the military – has been followed by every Administration since, and has greatly accelerated since 2001.

The fear of Soviet-style communism may have had some validity, and Reagan’s views on unregulated free market forces may have indeed been based on a sincere belief that such forces would work to the betterment of society. However, the history of the past twenty-five years have shown that such thinking is both misguided and naïve.

Instead, this philosophy has led to a system in which human needs and safety has become completely subordinate to the imperative of profits. In his book Fatal Deception, author Michael Bowker outlines numerous examples of medical reports that began coming out in the late 1940s showing the connection between asbestos and respiratory diseases that were subsequently shown to officers of major corporations as well as the Roosevelt Administration. These reports were subsequently disregarded and suppressed (5). One victim of asbestosis, a former shipyard worker for the U.S. Navy, summed it up this way:

            “…you are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars
            to protect all the people that work in shipyards. It was a lot
            cheaper to let them work unprotected. The companies
            figured, ‘Sure, some of the workers will die, and fewer will
            sue us – it is still much cheaper than buying the protective
            gear.’” (6)

What’s Being Done?

Today, the United States is the last industrialized nation in which asbestos is still legal. Even today, asbestos is found in thousands of consumer products, ranging from toasters to ceiling tiles. An attempt was made in 1989 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to ban the use of asbestos. The asbestos industry sued in federal court, citing that jobs would be lost and communities would face economic ruin. (Ironically, many of these same corporations later closed U.S. factories and moved operations to China and Mexico.) In 1991, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ban (7).

That year, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) finally introduced a bill that would ban the use of asbestos in the U.S. (8). Senator Murray’s bill, the “Asbestos-Containing Products Risk Reduction Act of 2002” (S. 2641) would have restored many elements of the EPA ban overturned nine years earlier (9).  The bill was read twice and referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. For five years, no other action was taken on the bill (10). However, Senator Murray recently reintroduced the bill as the “Ban Asbestos in America Act of 2007” (S. 742). The bill passed out of committee on a bipartisan vote of 19-0 (11); it will not only outlaw all uses of asbestos in the U.S., it will provide funding for the study of asbestos-related diseases (12).

In 2005, the EPA published a document entitled “Asbestos Project Plan,” the purpose of which was to provide “a framework for a coordinated Agency-wide approach to identify, evaluate and reduce the risk to human health from asbestos exposure”(13).One thinks of John Cleese, frantically uttering in the face of a catastrophe the immortal words, “Right! This calls for immediate discussion!” (14).

Nonetheless, despite the overturning of EPA regulations and previous failures by Congress in taking meaningful action, products containing asbestos are being phased out under the Clean Air and Toxic Substances Acts, and Senator Murray’s bill in Congress is expected to pass when it comes to the Senate floor in the fall (15). These include spray-applied surfacing ACM and other materials with more than 1% asbestos content, asbestos insulation, corrugated paper, rollboard, specialty papers containing asbestos and any new uses of the substance (16).

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