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FILE NAME: Allied Signal Bendix (ASB) DATE: 1980 May 19 DOC#: ASB023 DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION: Article - Maclean's Magazine - Occupational Death < ` ' A .4 ^ ' jP P rom the.front Tommy Dunn" Flooks likrariy other young father. He sits in the easy chair in local Vice-Presi dent Stan Weiko. "After you've worked with some of these guys for 30 years. . . " His voice early April sip tra ils off. T he ping beer, while Bendix workers across the room were particularly his nine-year-old incensed when daughter, Shan they read a provin non, sprawls read cial government ing on the couch. document showing It's only when he the company was turns his head that ordered to clean up you notice his hair its operation as has been falling early as 1966 but out in strips. hadn't done so. This, in many "We cannot ex ways, is the least plain how this hap of his worries, one pened or excuse of the lesser side it," said company effects of the che " spokesman John motherapy treat 2 O'Hare. In the ment he has been o Northern Ontario undergoing since ? community of El- he found out sev Si Hot Lake, workers eral months ago he | threatened to shut has inoperable 5 down the uranium cancer. "Meta g mines to protest static anaplastic Dunn with family outdoors In background; his age makes his case particularly tragic against high radia sarcoma," says the tion levels. Despite 34-year-old welder who until recently played hockey, chopped wood and didn't think much about health. But occurm oHAi staggering dis ease figures among ifie miners--more than 100 reported lung cancers and 500 cases of silico putting up the fam sis--the United ily Christmas tree Steelworkers local last December he felt pains in his chest. has been unable to get the federal A few weeks later his doctor delivered or provincial government to intervene. the devastating news; two cancerous tu The steelworkers ran into similar red mors in his lung. Prognosis: bleak. But tape in Baie Verte, Newfoundland, there was something else the doctor where asbestos fibres literally coated said that sent chills through Dunn's fel By Linda McQuaig the town with a flaky white powder, low workers at the Bendix Automotive plant inWindsor, Ontario. Inside Dunn's lymph nodes pathologists found par ticles of asbestos, the fibrous mineral that has killed thousands of workers in Wages don't mean a thing if you don't live to spend them producing dust levels hundreds of times above the provincial safety guideline. It was only after a bitter 11-week strike in 1978 that the mine, partly owned hy Johns-Manville of Den recent years and is used in the assembly ver, Colorado, agreed to the men's de of brake linings at Bendix. mands. The union now reports a dra Dunn's age makes his case particu industrial health--or industrial death, matic decrease in dust levels. larly tragic, but he is certainly not as some call it--there is a more urgent While work's deadly consequences alone. Despite a flurry of legislation militancy coming from labor. And it is have been acknowledged in most union that has led to improved conditions in being met by an aggressive counter offices, anger over the day-to-day dan many plants, workers exposed to dan attack from industry. ger may be even stronger among the gerous substances on the job are still Armed with a growing body of medi rank and file. In Labrador City, a local developing diseases at an appalling cal evidence linking disease to the work union president confesses he constantly rate. Statistics are hard to come by, but place, labor leaders are pushing the is has trouble keeping workers from Dr. Gordon Atherley, president of the sue hard. In Windsor, the United Auto walking off the job to protest against Canadian Centre for Occupational Workers local at the Bendix plant has excessively high iron-ore dust levels. "It Health and Safety, estimates there are taken its case to the bargaining table, takes a lot of persuasion to keep them some 10,000 workers across the country after it did a tally last year and found from picketing all the time," says Len suffering from job-related cancer, as- that 19 of its members had developed Leyte. Recent x-rays of the miners' bestosis, silicosis and a host of other cancer--and 12 had already died of it. lungs show that about 60 of them al diseases. As the debate intensifies over "We're pretty emotional about this,"savs ready have changed cell patterns, a MACLEANS MAY 19. 1980 4 3 strong indication of early silicosis. After several years of frequent wildcat strikes, the union is now counting on a new government-backed plan to clean up the problem gradually. So far results have indeed been gradual. After more than a year of planning, the town is still covered in dust. "You can tell how many times it's snowed this year," comments Leyte, "because as it melts you can see a layer of dust in between each layer of snow." In Windsor, concern over industrial disease has prompted workers from several different factories to go outside the regular union channels and set up their own pressure group. Calling itself the Windsor Occupational Safety and Health Committee, the group is pulling together scientific data on dangerous chemicals, and its meetings--held at members' homes over soft drinks after work--sound more like a conference of chemists than a gathering of machine operators. One 25-year-old, who works with a chemical tank for cleaning ma chine parts, passes a list of unpro nounceable chemicals across the dining room table and asks a rock-salt miner if he knows anything about them. The miner looks through his voluminous files. Across the table a woman, who works with chemicals at a tool manu facturing plant, talks about the high rate of vomiting, blackouts and dizzi ness among her fellow workers. Some of the most bitter worker-in dustry confrontations take place over compensation claims, with grisly de bates about whether'a dying man's can cer is or is not ihe result of his work. The outcome of these debates can have a significant effecl on corporate balance sheets since it is industry that pays for compensation g r a n t e d by provincial boards. In British Columbia, some em ployers recently have been trying to wriggle out of paying the high costs by suggesting that public funds cover the compensation board's debt, reported to be well over $250 million. In Ontario, industry's premi ums to the board jumped from $263 million in 1974 to $539 million in 1978. James Findlay, ex- A w idow 's crusade for claim No. D 10064293 Up on the 21st floor of a Toronto office lower Odette Dodds faces three stran gers who represent her last chance at fulfill ing a heartbreaking promise. More than 18 months after the death of her husband-- a former employee at the Johns-Manville a s bestos plant in Metropolitan. Toronto-- Dod d s is trying once again to win a pension from the Ontario W orkm en's C om pensa tion Board The board has turned her down in the past and the two-man, one-woman panel of board commissioners she now faces is her last appeal. She must convince them before they make their final decision in June that her husband, John D o d d s-- or claim No D10064293, a s h e 's known to the board-- died as a result of a workrelated disease And like thousands who encounter the bureaucratic maze of provin cial boards each year in pursuit of compen sation-- the only legal recourse open to them-- she has learned the board doesn't hand out money easily. Even though her husband suffered from severe asbestosis, for which he w as receiving the equivalent of full compensation when he died, the board has steadfastly refused to grant D odds a widow's pension. The $ 4 10-monthly pen sion she se eks would certainly bolster the meagre $135 a month from the Canada Pension Plan that she now scrapes by on. But she se es her fight with the board a s more than a battle over money. For her it has become a crusade to prove that it w as her husband's work-- not bad luck-- that killed him. In November, 1974, after 22 years at Johns-Manville, D odds was told by a com pany doctor that he had asb e sto sis-- a paintul, incurable lung disease associated with the inhalation of asbestos fibres D odds took his wife aside that night while she w as making dinner and broke the news. "Jo h n and I looked at one another and cried tor a long time," recalls the 51year-old widow and mother o( two grown children. Within a week Dod d s stopped working. His condition deteriorated rapidly and by December, 1975, his personal phy sician, Dr. Colin Syme, described him as "completely disabled." He w as so short ot breath he could hardly get around; walking up stairs he had to rest. Yet Dod d s was unable to collect any compensation for more than six months atter leaving his |ob. His only income consisted ot small weekly contributions pulled together by union President Charlie Neilson trom the tunds of Ihe Canadian Chemical Workers. In May, 1975, the board allowed D odds a 25-per cent retroactive disability award, and sev eral months later Johns-Manville followed with a $66-a-month pension, but cut off his coverage under the Ontario Health Insur ance Plan. D o d d s's disability award in creased to 40 per cent the next spring and, along with a temporary supplement paid out by the board, he w as eventually re- Dodds at top right In an old photograph with co-workers, half of them now dead; M s widow, Odette (Inset): her last appeal ceiving the equivalent of full disability p ay or 75 per cent of his salary. But asbestosis w asn't D o d d s's only problem. In 1976 he developed thyroid cancer-- a condition that the board doesn't consider to be asbestos-related. Surgery is the most effective means of dealing with the type of thyroid cancer he was diagnosed as having, but internal med icine specialist Dr. Firouz Khamsi decided that D o d d s's severe asbestosis made the necessary operation too risky. After treat ment with thyroid pills failed, he and another specialist opted for the next best method, radiotherapy, which in D o d d s's case had unusually disastrous side effects, damaging his spinal cord and leaving most of his body paralyzed. By June, 1978, Dodds could hardly move his head and his wife had to spend most of her time feeding him, bathing him and pumping his chest. Confined to a special wheelchair /stretcher and barely able to breathe, Dodds .iitive vice-president of the businesssponsored Industrial Accident Preven tion Association of Ontario (IAPA), calls the costs "obscene." In an effort to re duce them, industry recently has been fighting compensation claims even more vigorously than it did in the past. Paul Falkowski, health and safety co ordinator for the United Steelworkers, points out that industry has begun to appeal disability awards even after they've gone through the regular appeal stage. "We never had any of these ap peals before, and now we've had five in the past six months." Industry spokesman Findlay doesn't deny the charge. "Sure, companies have made ap peals," he says. "Companies are getting sharper. That decreases costs." Labor is watching nervously for signs of a further industry counter-offensive died the next month at 58. With her husband dead, the board im mediately cut off the disability award, leav ing Odette D odds with nothing. Ironically, the pension would have been automatic had the board granted full disability sta tus-- which D odds w as entitled to, his doc tors argued-- in his lifetime. Instead, by paying only 40-per-cent disability and m ak ing up the difference with a "tem porary" award, board officials left Odette D odds with no choice but to start alt over again in convincing them that asbestosis killed her husband. An autopsy confirmed that his asbestosis had been severe and exten sive, but subsequent medical evidence gathered by the board indicated it w as his thyroid cancer and the effects of the radio therapy that actually killed him. But Dod d s may not have been far from death anyway. His doctor, Syme, described him a s a man "dying a slow death from asbestosis when other problems intervened." In fact, without asbestosis Dod d s might wen be alive to day. Khamsi argued at the appeal hearing that it w as only his lung condition that pre vented doctors from operating on the can cerous thyroid. "I believe this man could have been cured with surgery," he said The board has a stated policy of giving the worker the benefit of the doubt. Sitting in a black dress across the table from the commissioners, Odette D od d s lis tens silently while doctors drag out more depressing details of her husband's final years. But she takes it stoically; sh e 's heard it all before. In fact, sh e 's thought of little else these past six years. A deter mined, energetic woman who spe aks lov ingly of her dead husband, she has com piled an extensive scrapbook of their married life-- and a detailed chronicle of his deafh. Outside the hearing room she readily reels off particulars of doctors' re ports, correspondence from the company, rejections from the board. "I m ade a prom ise to John before he died." she explains, "that whatever happened I would keep fighting against asbestos." L.McQ. kioSH \ against compensation. Unions were *4 quick to react last fall when it was reported that an occupational health consultant had advised a group of em ployers meeting in Hamilton about how to f r u s t r a t e compensation claims they Johns-Manville worker (below); Windsor pressure-group members (from left) Bob McArthur, Jim Brophy, John West, Marg McArthur: turning to self-help tactics can't really exercise; he gets too tired." Provincial boa-ds supposedly are in dependent arbiters between labor and industry, but labor has long charged that the relationship between the boards and industry is a little too cosy. The Ontario Workmen's Compensation Board even operates out of the same Toronto office building as the powerful IAPA, which represents more than 53,000 companies. And relations be tween industry and the board worsened in British Columbia under the NDP gov ernment when the board started impos ing more fines on companies violating provincial standards. This caused "some resentment" among companies punished, says Terence Ison, a law pro fessor who served as chairman of the B.C. board at the time. But once the Social Credit regained power--and Ison felt were invalid. "Leave out the social insurance number; then it won't go into the computers," Jack Richman told the Canadian Society of Safety Engi neering. Richman, who acts as a consul tant to several major corporations, came under heavy fire from unions for his remarks. He now says he was only trying to improve communications be tween industry and the board, since leaving out information on the form makes it more likely board officials will phone the employer. This gives the com pany an opportunity--in addition to the space allotted on the form--to raise its objections to ________________ the claim. "Once compensation started, it's late to stop Richman told conference. The most dently contested cases usually in volve disease. Acci dents, which make up the bulk of com pensation claims, tend to be more clear-cut; either a machine cut off an or it didn' But the cause of an illness can be more difficult to pinpoint. Unless a worker's disease falls within the crite ria set by the board, he can have a diffi cult time establishing his claim, says Craig Paterson, a Vancouver lawyer who represents workers at compensa tion hearings. Those seeking compensa tion often find their lifestyles under attack. "They'll accuse a guy of not ex ercising enough," says Charlie Neilson of the Canadian Chemical Workers in Toronto. "But if he's got asbestosis, he Dust-filled cement plant: daily danger Routine worker scan for disease: appalling departed--the board took steps toward easing restrictions on industry by pro posing looser regulations and enforce ment on certain toxic substances. "Now the board is doing the employers' work for them; they have no reason to complain," says Cathy Walker, staff representa tive for health and safety at the Cana dian Association of mIndustrial, Me c chanical and Al o lied Workers. But the real eviof the bias, ac- o cording to labor, is 5 the decisions they hand down. Cer tainly, in rejecting claims on behalf of 10 Bendix workers last February--Tommy Dunn's case is still pending--the Ontario board seemed to agree with the company's ad vice. In a confidential submission to the* board, Bendix specifically argued against compensation for five of the claims. One of those it opposed was filed on behalf of Nelson Masse, a 35-year Bendix veteran who died after devel oping a larynx cancer that forced doc tors to remove his voice box. "He couldn't even talk his last year," recalls his wife, Ivy. In ruling against a wid ow's pension, the board argued that it was not clear Masse's cancer was caused by his work since he'd spent only six years working near one of the most haz ardous parts of the asbestos-grinding plant, although the open-concept design allowed dust to circulate freely throughout the plant (board rules stipu late a minimum of 10 years' "proven" exposure). Meanwhile, Ontario boards closed down two Toronto-area schools in March to spare students and teachers several ilnys exposure to asbestos fi bres falling from the ceiling. At Toron to's Johns-Manville plant--where the death toll now stands at 39--the union is appealing the board's decision to re ject the claim of former employee John Dodds (see box, page <I6). And in Winni peg, a fight may be shaping up over the compensation of workers suffering long-term kidney damage after expo sure to high levels of lead on the job. "Some of these guys are 25,30 years old and. while they don't have kidney disor ders yet, they have such bad stomach cramps, diarrhea and constipation they can't even go out in the evening," says Dr. Percy Decter, a surgeon who has treated the men for these symptoms. Decter is now trying to get the Mani toba board to compensate Canada'9 first case of chronic lead poisoning. Industry's counter-attack isn't con fined to compensation, though. Perhaps even more significant, in the long run, is its push for less government control over dangerous substances in the work place. Industry lobbied Ontario hard for less provincial regulation when the province was drawing up its new health and safety bill, which came into effect Baie Verta strike: more urgent militancy last year. In briefs to the government, both employers' associations and pri vate firms argued against giving gov ernment inspectors too much power and replacing provincial "guidelines" with legally binding standards. In fact, by and large, industry would like a free hand to regulate itself. But labor remains highly suspicious, charging that industry has a poor track record when it comes to initiating its own cleanups and, in fact, often has de liberately withheld information about dangers in the workplace. Workers say less government regulation would only leave them more vulnerable, especially to the thousands of new, little-known chemicals recently introduced into Ca nadian factories. At the Wyeth plant in Windsor, for instance, workers involved in the manufacture of birth control pills got a taste of possible future shock this year when they reported bizarre sexual side effects. Two men said they were growing breasts; others ex perienced a sharp decline in sex drive. As reporters flocked to pick up the details, less sensational stories were filtering out of another section of the Wyeth op- eration: worlers producing Isordil, a drug used to treat angina, were re- L porting high incidentes of vomiting and i \ t severe headache. "Who knows what kind of an epidemic we're sitting on," . says Larry Gauthier, plant chairman of the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers. In the fight over regulation, industry- holds a powerful card: plant closure. The fear of an employer pulling up stakes and moving on weighs heavily on the minds of both workers and civil ser vants. When the Ontario labor depart ment is trying to decide whether to make a guideline on a hazardous sub stance tougher, it also assesses the im pact of any plant shutdowns that may ___ . result. Certainly, the Bendix announce- p rA i-f) ment last February that it was closing one of its two Windsor plants and - moving operations south of the border has been a blow to the union's health and safety campaign. The move was first mentioned three years ago and Bendix denies that it was sparked by worker militancy. But, with unemploy ment running close to 20 per cent in the heavily industrialized city, many workers were drawing just one conclu sion: insisting on safer conditions may jeopardize their jobs. Amid the battle over regulation, de pressing evidence is emerging that even the government-set spfe levels aren't all that safe, al leasf'fthen it comes to can cer. "What no one in authority likes to say is that there's not a shred of evi dence to support the so-called safe lev els," says Atherley of the federal health and safety centre. Owners of a polyvinyl chloride (pvc) plant in Fort Saskatche wan, Albeita, seemed to acknowledge this recently when they decided not to hire women capable of bearing children. The company. Diamond Shamrock Al berta Gas Ltd., was meeting provincial standards at the plant, but medical evi dence suggests fetuses can be damaged by exposure to PVC even at these levels. i The union now cynically believes that 1 men at the plant are equally at risk. Back at Tommy Dunn's house there's similar cynicism. Dunn, who's been off work since December on sick and acci dent benefits, is still hoping he'll be granted compensation. Early this year his friends and fellow workers threw a party for him that raised close to $5,000 to help him with his mortgage pay ments. A huge poster from the party -- with hundreds of signatures from well- wishers--is propped up on the living room table, next to a photograph of Dunn and his wife, Lucy, in happier days. And the company? Dunn shrugs. "You don't,even get a get-well card from them." so