Document aBOyvOXnn2a1dDKB8gRDbXMxa

If government allows workers to be exposed to the gtis, some of them may die. If it eliminates all exposure, a valuable industry may disappear. Not long- ago, cancer and pltwfte were associated with ch other only in the writings Norman Mailer, where ey serve as symbols of dccadon&e and sclf-destructive-ss in the high-technology society. Since January of this ara series of medical reports has shown this associaon to be a real scientific fact as well. It is now clear that nyl chloride, a gas from which the second most widely ed U.S. plastic is made, causes a fatal cancer of blood 'd cells in the liver; the gas ismlso implicated in a host .'additional diseases, ranging from gastrointestinal ceding to chromosome damage. These discoveries have touched off a flurry of regula>ry activity. The Food and Drug'Administration, the Enironmcntal Protection Agency, and the Consumer Prodct Safety Commission have all banned aerosol sprays sing vinyl chloride as a propellant. But the measure that its deepest was taken by the Occupational Safety and tcaltli Administration. OSIIA has moved to reduce the ermissibie level of worker exposure to vinyl chloride in le plants where it is made or converted into plastic. reparing for the iceberg In the course of these developments, it has become clear lat oui- regulators have a hard lime thinking sensibly bout problems like vinyl chloride. The businessmen beig regulated and the workers affected seem to find it no asier. The fact is that our society seems to have no grecd-upon standards for dealing with situations in hich medical and economic considerations collide hendn. Since collisions of this sort will plainly be numerous 1 the years ahead--the vinyl chloride case is widely idenified as the tip of an enormous regulatory iceberg--it eems useful to get clear on the issues involved. If vinyl chloride were an. unimportant substance, or if were known to be dangerous only in very high concen- Researeh associate:Sydney Ladcnsohn Stern trntions, or if it were easy to keep human beings out of contact with it, there would be no particular problem. In that case the health danger could be completely elimi nated at little or no cost, and the question of what to do would answer itself. Unfortunately, the vinyl chloride issue isn't so simple. It seems to ho very difficult and costly--and it may be im possible--to guarantee that no vinyl chloride worker will be exposed to the gas. Though no one knows for sure, it is possible that even very small exposures may cause sick ness or death. Yet it is also true that the plastics made from vinyl chloride arc extremely important to the Amer ican economy. The market value of the gas being pro duced this year, and of the resin made from it, is perhaps $1.5 billion: the gas and resin industries together employ about 6,000 workers. But what most people think of as the "plastics industry"--the transformation of resins in to products--is a far larger operation. The total number of jobs involved in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) alone is about 320,000; the sales volume runs to many billions. And there are no entirely satisfactory substitutes for PVC at hand. Banning it would be certain to cause grave economic dislocations. ' Thus the regulators at OSHA are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. It is clear that their task should be to find the right "trade-offs"--to devise regulations in which the benefit of increased health for The mosl hazardous job In polyvinyl chloride plants used to be the cleaning of the vats in which vinyl chloride polymerizes into PVC--that 8whitish resin at the worker's feet. Of the sixteen known u.3. cases' cf vinyl-chloride-related liver cancer, fourteen occurred in vat cleaners. The job is presumably a lot less hazardous since the introduction of the respirators, protective clothing, and,air evacuation (provided by the dengting hese) that are shown here. The slainless-stoel-lined vat shown is in B.F. Goodrich's Pc-dricktown, New Jersey, plant, perhaps the most mod ern in the U.S. The vat is entered and cleaned manually only c.nce a month. Until recently vats in most older plants were entered once or twice a day. 50 FOHTUNE OcfofiCf 1974 BFG33900 He.iry Grot*:'1' The View from NIOSH: Make It Safe On January 22, 1974, Dr. Maurice Johnson, environmental health direc tor for B. F.. Goodrich, called on Marcus Key, director of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. Johnson had a discovery to report. Three workers in Goodrich's Louisville polyvinyl chloride plant had died from angiosarcoma of the liver since 1971. Key summoned his top aides, who agreed that they had an emergency on their hands. Two days later a small army led by NIOSH Standards Development chief Vernon Kose, invaded the Louisville plant to conduct the first of many' "walk through" inspections. Within a week. Hose's task force / had a list of recommendations for re ducing worker exposure to vinyl chloride: --protective coveralls, shoes, and gloves for workers exposed to PVC. --airtight suits and respirators for reactor cleaners. --daily showers for exposed workers. --a 50 parts per million suggested ceiling on vinyl chloride monomer exposure. Normally, writing a criteria doc ument--NIOSHese for a recommend ed standard--is an eighteen-month process involving exhaustive study. In this instance,' however. Rose relied on guesswork and precedent. Assum ing that vinyl chloride causes cancer through inhalation and skin contact, he modeled his standards on those used earlier by NIOSII for industrial carcinogens. Aiming for a mid-March deadline, NIOSII organised a hectic series of meetings and studies. By the .end of February, its toxicology group had been unable to determine the carcino genicity of VCM below 50 ppm. The medical group had suggested a bat tery of liver tests for PVC workers, but industry and labor had split over the exposure ceiling. Industry urged 50' ppm, which it knew it could achieve; labor advocated "ho detect able level," refusing to treat workers as guinea pigs. In this situation, Rose simply toughened and expanded' on his ear lier recommendations. Most impor tant, he decided that the ceiling for vinyl chloride be set at "no detectable level"--the only exposure he knew to be safe. "It is doubtful," he conceded in a memo to Key, "that any plant can show workroom levels of non- detected." To meet it, respirators would have to be worn at all times, lie wasn't sure this was practical, but he was certain it was safe. On March 11, Dr. Key submitted NIOSH's recommendation to Assist ant Labor Secretary John Stender. When OSHA proposed its permanent standard two months later, it incor porated most of the NIOSH text ver batim, including the "no detectable level" provision. The View from Firestone: Make it Practical To Todd C. Walker, the towering, outspoken president of Firestone Plastics, OSlIA's proposed standard was as much a crisis as the Goodrich bombshell had been to NIOSII. He was determined to resist the stand ard with "the maximum information" at the OSHA hearings in Washington, D.C., this summer. Walker assembled four task forces --legal, engineering, financial, and medical--to develop a Firestone-rec ommended standard on a crash basis. Four alternatives were to bo studied: the interim 50-ppm standard, "liondetectable," and two intermediate levels chosen arbitrarily--10 ppm maximum with a time-weighted aver age (TWA) of 25 ppm, and a 15-ppm ceiling with a TWA of 10 ppm. For each level the questions were: is it safe and is it feasible? Weeks later, the medical group was unable to say positively that any of the levels was unsafe. An epidemio logical study of Firestone's rubber and PVC workers showed no signifi cant differences, suggesting that 50 ppm was not relatively unsafe. The engineering group reported that the nondctcctable level was un attainable. It also forwarded a cri tique of OSHA's proposed work prac tices. Protective clothing for all workers was unnecessary, it said, be cause PVC dust is not a carcinogen. VCM gas, which is, could be kept away from the skin only by air-tight suits, which would be "hot, cum bersome, expensive, and dangerous." OSHA's provision for air-supplied respirators for all exposed workers was also ill advised. These would be uncomfortable ("an instrument of torture"), fatiguing, probably haz ardous, and would interfere with work. One portable type weighs twenty-eight pounds and would have to be changed three times an hour. Nonportable respirators could be used, but workers would be attached to air hoses (themselves a workplace hazard) and confined to a radius of lc3s than fifty feet. The financial group reported that capital investment would have to double to attempt reaching a nondetectable level. The legal staff conclud ed that OSHA's proposed standard was unfeasible and therefore illegal. When it came to deciding what level he would recommend. Walker had a problem. His medical evidence showed the three levels above nondctectable to be equally safe. His en gineers said that the feasibility of the lowest of these (15-ppm ceiling with a 10-ppm TWA) was uncertain, and Walker ruled it out. Left with a choice between the two higher levels, he opted for the 40-ppm ceiling with a 25-ppm TWA to show that Firestone was willing to do more than the mini mum. Thus, with a practicality rem iniscent of NIOSlI's decision to rec ommend a level it knew was safe. Firestone ended up recommending a level it k?iew it could achieve. I 152 FORTUNE Oclobef 1974 BFG33902 vorkers is balanced against the increased cost to the plas:ics industry and society as a whole. Unfortunately, this -sk has remained largely unacknowledged. JSHA probably will end up compromising on the de cree of exposure to the gas it will allow; its decision is ipt to be announced this month. But the agency has been under terrific pressure to view the issue before it in ab solutist terms, as if its only legitimate concern were the preservation of absolute security for the vinyl plastics industry, or the achievement of perfect safety for vinyl ;hloride workers. For a while, it seemed a foregone conclusion that OSHA itself would opt for perfect safely. On May 10, it formally proposed that the new standard for vinyl chlor ide be set at "no detectable level," i.e., that no plant would be allowed to operate so long as any of the gas could be found in the air or in contact with workers. The industry replied, in effect, that any such standard would be techni cally impossible and economically disastrous, and that if OSHA went through with it, the polyvinyl chloride in dustry would be put out of business. OSHA's final decision will affect more than this single industry and its customers. The vinyl chloride issue may be viewed as the first major test case for a new movement in government regulation. The leaders of the movement are three of the newest federal regulatory agencies, all created since 1970: EPA, CPSC, and OSHA. One general idea behind all of these agencies is that business can no iger promiscuously pass on to society all the indirect of running a modern economy. As Sheldon W. Sam uels, health director of the Industrial Union Department' of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., put it, "The free ride on social costs is at an end. In the plastics industry you're seeing a manifestation of social costs." With jurisdiction over virtually every product and sub stance, these agencies, together with the FDA, are be ginning to use their sweeping powers to reduce the pub lic's risk of chronic disease, especially from industrial products. Some of the agencies are subjecting new sub stances to rigorous pretesting before they are allowed on to the market. And with the vinyl chloride case, they have tackled the first of a long list of basic substances on which our industrial economy is already built t It could put you to sleep During the first decades of its commercial existence, vinyl chloride seemed a most unlikely candidate for the role of heavy in a historic regulatory drama. Put into full-scale U.S. production in 1939, polyvinyl chloride was hailed as a "miracle" material: cheap, stable, fire-resist ant, and able to assume an extraordinary range of soft and hard forms. Its major applications now include coated fabrics (like those used in automobile seat covers), wire insulation, floor tiling, pipe and`conduit, phonograph scords, and medical supplies, e.g., blood-storage bags. In the beginning the vinyl chloride gas seemed to be virtually harmless. The only apparent dangers were of explosion (at concentrations beginning around 36,000 parts per million) and narcosis.. In fact, during the 1940's the gas was tried out as a medical anesthetic, but doctors abandoned it when it was found to cause heart arrhythmia. With low prices providing little incentive for conservation, producers paid no particular attention to workplace exposure levels so long as they were safely below the point of fire and explosion. And yet exposure levels in plants producing the gas itself were probably not very high even in the early years. Vinyl chloride is synthesized from chlorine and petrochemical feedstocks (usually ethylene) in a con tinuous closed process. The plants, which resemble oil refineries (and in some cases are'attached to them), are open to the air. Historically, the heavy exposures have occurred in the plants where vinyl chloride is polymer ized into PVC, the whitish powdery resin from which .actual plastics are made. II could make you "high" Polymerization is a batch process:.vinyl chloride mon omer (VCli) and other substances are put into a pres surized vat, heat is applied, and hours later, when polymerization is completed, the vat is emptied, opened, and cleaned for the next batch. The process is full of leaks. In most of the early plants the gas could be smelled almost constantly (VC1I has a faintly sweet odor that seems to be detectable at concentrations above 2,000 parts per million), and workers occasionally got "high" from the fumes. It is widely agreed that in this early period, lasting into the 1950's, exposures of several thousand ppm were common. During the 1950's, as the vinyl industry grew, a trickle of little-noted and often inconclusive medical reports be gan to raise doubts about the monomer's presumed harmlessness. In 1949 a Russian group found a hepatitis like condition in more than one-fourth of sevonty-three PVC workers examined, and over the next ten years European researchers encountered other symptoms: skin lesions, a circulatory disorder, gastritis, and derma titis, to name a few. By the niid-19G0`s these had been confirmed and were described collectively as "vinyl chloride disease." Later in the 1960's, acroosteolysis, a disease involving a degeneration of the finger bones, was identified among workers who clean polymerization vats. As these findings accumulated, producers began to reduce exposure levels. In 1961 the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists, a voluntary standards-setting organization, had put the maximum safe exposure at 500 ppm. During the 1960's industry began working to get much lower than that, and by the early 1970's exposure levels were generally in the 100-to200-ppm range, with short-term "excursions" to levels many times higher. In this general downward movement, Dow Chemical continued page 200 fQQL-OLVZ BFG33903 FORTUNE October 197 1S3 Books'& Ideas coniiMuerf ^i policy action, like a stone dropped- into a pool, sets off ripples of reaction. Since the economy responds with varying ->e lags, a second stone is often dropped ile the ripples from the first are still roiling the economic waters. When this "stabilization" exercise is repeated often enough, the result is greater instability. There are also technical objections to using, a full-employment budget to justi fy federal deficits, as the Mixon Admin istration did in 1972. Such a budget no longer measures the true irripact of gov ernment spending and lending on the economy. Federal activities totaling lens of billions of dollars annually--among them the farm credit agencies, the Ex port-Import Bank, and the Federal Na tional Mortgage Association--have been spun off into independent corporations. A better yardstick Another defect is even more serious. "Full employment," a concept intended to measure economic slack, is still de fined solely in terms of joblessness. Last year,- unemployment averaged 4.9 per cent, and the federal budget showed a surplus on the full-employment basis, suggesting that there was still room for ' fiscal stimulus. Yet shortages of all kinds, notably in basic materials, plagued the nation. Full ` employment ought to be measured in terms of our total capacity to produce, including labor, plant, and capital. If such a yardstick had been in use a few years ago, we might have had more timely warning of today's raging inflation. Despite such problems, Jim Tobin clearly believes that the new economics is still the road to millennium, provided that we adopt a number of fiscal and monetary reforms. Two have been put into effect since the book was written. By setting the international value of the dollar free to float, the Nixon Adminis tration gave the Federal Reserve free dom to pursue a more flexible monetary policy. And Congress at last has created budget committees to set overall guide lines for spending. But Tobin also demands changes that have little chance of adoption. For in stance, he would give the President pow er to adjust appropriations to fit budget targets. And lie wants Congress to sep arate tax reform from bills to raise or cut taxes, so that temporary surcharges or credits can be enacted speedily to stabilize the economy. If adopted, such proposals would only lead the government back to fine tuning with "macro," or broad gauge, economic policies. That is like using a shotgun where a rifle, would be more appropriate. At comparatively small cost, we could open-end the duration of unemployment insurance, a step that would aid mature, trained workers. There should be, as Chairman Arthur Burns of the Fell has suggested, a much enlarged public em ployment program when the jobless rates go up. It would help mostly young peo ple and those without the skills to com-- pete in a modern economy. Putting SOO,- 000 people on a government payroll at 55,000 a year would cost about 54 bil lion, but it might reduce unemployment, by a fifth (i.e., from 6 to 5 percent). In Tobin's program, public-service em ployment is only an adjunct of much more ambitious--and expensive--macro economic policies. In today's changed economic environ ment, the new economics has become the old economics. The old solutions are r.o: only inflationary, but of dubious help to the people who need it most. Broad- gauge policies for economic stability should be stable themselves. There is r.o need to change them to offset each wiggle on economists' charts. END Vinyl Chloride continuedfrompageJS3 was far and away the leader. In 1961 it had conducted an animal experiment showing liver effects at levels as low as 100 ppm and had decided to get its own plants below 50 ppm. By the early 1970's, Dow had achieved average ex posures in the neighborhood of 25 ppm in its copolymer' plants (one of whichl produces resins for Saran Wrap). In 1970, Dr. Pierluigi Viola, an Italian physician study ing acroosteolvsis for Solvay, a major European PVC producer, reported an unexpected discovery. After twelve months' exposure at 30,000 ppm, many of his experi mental rats had developed cancers. Doubts about Viola's procedures led Montedison and other European producers to commission Dr. Cesare Maltoni to undertake a largescale animal experiment to sec if this carcinogenic effect could be replicated at lower exposure levels. By the end of 1973 Maltoni's well-executed study had shown that levels of VCM as low as 250 ppm induced a variety of cancers in rats, including angiosarcomas of the liver. In June, 1974, he reported angiosarcomas at 50 ppm. American producers began to join the inquiry into vinyl chloride and cancer in 1973. Early that year the Manufac turing Chemists Association decided to commission two massive studies. One was an animal study somewhat like Maltoni's (it has since confirmed his findings). The other was an epidemiological analysis of the morbidity and mortality history of American vinyl workers. In December, Dr. John L. Creech, a Louisville, Kentucky, surgeon who is plant physician for B.F. Goodrich's mas sive PVC installation there, received a report that one of the workers had died of angiosarcoma of the liver. Re membering that another worker had died of the same cause two years earlier, he notified a superior. In midJanuary, 1971, while a systematic mortality study of Goodrich workers was being organized, Creech received a report of a third angiosarcoma death. On January 22. B.E. Goodrich announced the three deaths and their cause. To date, a total of eight persons employed at the Louisville plant have been found to have contracted this disease. They blew the whistle themselves As of January, 197-1, literally all the information link ing vinyl chloride to cancel- had been developed by the industry on its own initiative. As Ralph L. Harding Jr., president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, ob served, "This is a unique situation. Industry financed the studies, and industry blew the whistle on itself." But this was quickly forgotten in the furor that arose during the weeks following B.F. Goodrich's continued page 202 200 FORTUNE October 1374 BFG33904 nnouncement. Within days, regulators, public-health actors, and union Officials had-begun to dominate public scussion of the vinyl problem. Within weeks, the Louis- ; Times initiated a series of stories alleging that inrstry had engineered a Watergate-style cover-up of the ngiosarcoma discovery, which it abandoned only when it iw that the information was about to leak anyway. This large was symbolic of the manner in which the initiative asscd out of the hands of industry. It was seized, rapidly, by a loose but not uncoordinated jtwork of regulatory agencies, government research initutes, academic medical teams, labor unions, and other oups united by a common commitment to eradicate enronmental causes of disease. This "regulatory-medical implex" is largely the creation of a decade's federal legistion in the medical and environmental fields. Its unoffial leader is Dr. Irving J. SelikofT, professor of community edicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New ork City. fie one-man power elite White haired, gracious, and preternaturally energetic, elikofl" is best known as the man who explored the haz els of asbestos and who fought for many years to get icm reduced. But a glance at his credentials shows him ' hold so many other distinctions and positions that he institutes a virtual power elite all by himself: a recipient the Albert Lasker Award of the American Public ilth Association, he is also director of Mount Sinai's vironmenlal Sciences Laboratory, governor and past esident of the New York Academy of Sciences, editor in lief of Environmental 1'cscarch, president of the So oty for Occupational and Environmental Health, and msultant to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. as well as to an almost endss list of medical organizations and government instites. lie seems personally as well as professionally close nearly everyone who matters in government occupaonal medicine, and has excellent contacts in the press, hich he uses skillfully. Though he insists that he is only scientist, SelikofT is also a crusader and reformer, and e weapons he takas into battle, aside from his many rsonal talents, arc research and publicity. Within a month of B.F. Goodrich's announcement, df of Sclikoff's stafl' was working on a series of medical id epidemiological studies of workers at three older VC plants. Besenrchers from the Harvard School of iblic Health began an analysis of morbidity and morlity in Goodrich's Louisville plant. The National Insta te of Occupational Safety and Health, which does rearch and standards development for OSIIA, began a ajor epidemiological study of workers at four older ants, and together with OS HA sent out numerous teams conduct "walk-through" inspections of PVC producm facilities across the nation. In May, Selikoft' conicd in New York City a large international working group on vinyl chloride, held under the auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences. As Dr. Joseph K. Wag oner of NIOSH described the position of the many re searchers who entered the field, " `Seek and ye shall find' is where we're sitting right now." What they found was a great deal of information that linked vinyl chloride ever more closely to a variety( of diseases, and this information in turn generated news paper copy. To an attentive reader, the cumulative im pression conveyed was of a hidden crisis slowly uncov ered. With each passing week, the discovery of yet another angiosarcoma case or the release of a new report . seemed to show the crisis to be graver and more wide spread than it had been the week before. The tacit message was. that industry had failed, and that govern ment would have to step in and do something fast. Federal regulators were quick to respond. By early February NIOSH and OSIIA were actively at work on the problem of workplace exposure. (See the report on page 152.) By the beginning of April OSIIA had issued an emergency temporary standard of 50 ppm'and in May it proposed "no detectable level" as a permanent standard. But during the summer, the plastics industry, which had maintained a low profile' .during the preceding months, reassumed the initiative under the leadership of S.P.I.'s Kalph Harding and Jerome H. Heckman. The burden of the industry position was that OSlIA's pro posal was not required on medical grounds and was tech nically and economically unfeasible. In its place S.F.I. advocated a phased reduction to 10 ppm as an average ar.d 25 ppm as a ceiling by 1976. The industry case was set forth in considerable detail and with much documentation during the OSIIA hearings that began on June 25. Making policy in a desert It was clear at the hearings that, in the end, the vinyl chloride decision was going to be made in an informa tional desert relieved by only the most occasional oasis of knowledge. It was established that vinyl chloride causes cancer and other diseases. It was also established that, over the course of two decades, industry had re duced exposure levels in its plants by a factor of some thing like 50 without experiencing notable hardship or burdensome expense. But beyond that almost everything was uncertain. One large area of uncertainty concerns the shape of the so-called "dose response" curve for vinyl chloric!a.. between 0 and 50 ppm--the range within which, presum-K, ably, OSIIA will set the permanent standard. To date, r.aj animal experiments have been completed at exposurO levels below 50 ppm, and since historic exposure levels inv| most existing plants have been above that level, it is exJ tremely unlikely that epidemiological studies can reveqft? anything about human response below the level. The datcr1 for Dow Chemical's Midland, Michigan, copolymer plant, continued page 203 2 Fortune October 1974 BFG33905 where exposures have been monitored for upwards of a decade, are dilllcult to interpret. Dow's own studies sug gest no adverse health or mortality effects for workers at exposures below 200 ppm; however, Dr. Selikoff's group reports a significant incidence of abnormal symptoms even among Dow workers. Where data are unsatisfactory, one must fall back on inference and theory--but these have proved even less satisfactory, and much more subject to dispute. At the theoretical level, there is disagreement over how cancer is caused. Advocates of the "no detectable level" argued for the so-called "one-hit" theory of cancer causation, which holds that there can be no such thing as a risk-free exposure to a carcinogen. The theory implies that any identifiable exposure to vinyl chloride is certain to cause angiosarcoma, at however low a rate. But there is another theory of cancer causation, which emphasizes the role of the body's immune system in com bating cancer. According to this theory, cancers appear when the immune system breaks down. If what a carci nogen does is to weaken the immune system, and if the weakening process requires a certain level of dose, then it is possible that there is a risk-free level of exposure. At the present time, there is no definitive way to evalu ate the truth of these competing models. Thus when OSIIA chooses a standard, it will do so in almost total ignorance of the different rates of cancer and other dis eases to be expected at different exposure levels. The cost of approaching zero The agency will be just as uncertain about the other major point in dispute--the level below which it is not economically feasible for industry to reduce exposure. "No detectable level" advocates point to the huge ex posure decreases that industry has already achieved, to the fact that many producers got below 50 ppm soon enough after the emergency standards were issued on April 5, and that not a few were far below that. To many regulators, it seemed obvious that industry could get to a near-zero level if it really wanted to. Industry representatives argued vehemently that a nondetectable level simply could not be attained. "Even a system that doesn't leak, leaks," thundered Todd C. Walker, president of Firestone Plastics, at the OSHA hearings. The companies also argued that efforts to ap proach zero would be extremely expensive. Firestone, for instance, detailed every capital expenditure that would be necessary if it tried to reach "nondetectable" exposure levels and concluded that the total cost would equal the entire value of its existing plant. Even then. Firestone insisted, it would not ultimately achieve a "nondetectable" exposure and would'be forced to go out of the plastics business.. _________________ --t-. "By the end of the summer, it appeared that even the OSH staff felt the standard might be unjustified. An August, 1974, report by the agency's Division of Program Evaluation and Research observed: "First, it is not cl.: that it is technically feasible to comply with the propn.-. standard without a shutdown of the entire vinyl chtoi-:-. industry. Second, ilis notrlenr from ovi-g iw nvrOTim,., and other historical ihiln that a `no doli'ctalili* h-viT ........ ard is justified. And third, it is quite clear that complia:.: with the proposed standard will require substantial c:.; ital investments and lead times." They'd call it a sellout If these findings should lead OSHA to compromise-- to set an exposure standard of, say, 25 ppm--the agent; should not expect to he praised for its moderation, it may even be assailed for violating its charter. The Occur.;, tionat Safety and Health Act of 1970 states that OSH ' in regulating toxic materials, "shall set the stand.:; which most adequately assures, to the extent . the basis of the best available evidence, that no cwr,!.-.y-- will suffer material impairment of health or function, capacity even if such employee has regular exposure .. . for the period of his working life." Members of the regulatory-medical complex woul' surely insist that a compromise was incompatible wit'., these words--and would see it as an unprincipled sellout, sacrificing lives for dollars. Industry, meanwhile, is apt i. view whatever level is allowed as an arbitrary interven tion, reflecting political emotionalism rather than reason. And whatever the level, it is hard to believe that the nev. vinyl chloride standard will do much to end the confusfc-:. and uncertainty that currently prevail in many different industries subject to regulatory power. The vinyl chloride hearings have made it dear that practically nobody in government, industry, or labor is willing to discuss these regulatory issues in trade-cf: terms. "We don't equate lives with dollars and cents--not at the Department of Labor," John Stender, Assistant Secretary of Labor in charge of OSHA, declares: Even spokesmen for industry seem unwilling to chal lenge Stender's formulation head-on. "If we know weTe exposing our workers to a known health hazard, we get out of the business," says Dr. Ben Holder of Dow. In the course of the long argument about vinvl chloride stand ards. businessmen have shied aw.-v 'vom n*sci~';"g : some level of mortality might arfunllv.be "w* " In stead. they have tried to-smuggle some practical consid erations into tne discussion by pointing to problem* r - "engineering and economic feasibility"--as if feasibility were an absolute. One reason for the general reluctance to think in cost- benefit terms is to be found in the language of the Occu pational Safety and Health Act itself. But another rea son lies in the ethos of the regulatory-medical complex, which has something more on its mind than the rate at which people get sick or die. It is committed as well to a larger conception of the good society. In this society the idea of health is central. Ever more . T . 24^597*" BFG33906 FORTUNE October 1974 20? e causes of disease would be eliminated. The role Ralph Langner, an industrial hygienist at Dow Chemical, 'icine in this society would be different; it would says, "Vinyl chloride is to industrial hygiene what :r merely cure, but would actively redesign the Rachel Carson was to the environmentalists." onment and ways of living to prevent disease. In- In any case,'if Americans are now going to assume the oly, it would be a society in which doctors, by virtue responsibility of deciding what is a "socially acceptable :ir expertise, possessed considerable power. The role risk," and thus of implicitly putting a price on human life, irkets would be sharply curtailed, inasmuch as they surely it is desirable that the critical decisions not be left lead people to make decisions contrary to their best entirely to business--or to any one group or center of* cal interests. In this sense the regulatorv-mpdicai. authority. A process of indeterminate struggle between >lcx is a political movement. such it perceives.hi business and antibusiness forces, yielding decisions more S such as the vinv! ohlm-ilie ctardord n cymhnlir- !m.-- -political than rational, scorns preferable to a system in tnce that transcends the particular mcrHa-in-votugd. which a single cooperative establishment coolly announces - don't like business the exact going rate at the close of every business day. Even so, it seems clear that the process of conscious nd, of course, it is an antibusiness movement in its ness-raising could usefully flow in the other direction as wlying commitment. American regulatory agencies well. The regulatory-medical complex would not be any i to reflect the times in which they were founded; the the worse if it had a clearer sense of the novelty of the regulation was established in an era of intense con- concept of health it is promulgating and of the uneasiness and hostility to business, and there is little prospect of its relationship to the existing economic system. And ie movement's suddenly acquiring another personali- it could take more fully to heart the potential conse For all its unattractive implications for regulatory quences of its regulatory interventions for ordinary liv ity and consistency, this fact is not entirely without its ing standards. As G.J. Williams, vice president of Dow icming aspects. By pressing industry hard, these agen- Chemical, remarked recently, "You could probably not wfll hasten economic modernization. It is clear that find a single thing in the world that's essential, but (hey >* have long since achieved immense success in raising all go towards making life pleasurable. You can do with Ilh consciousness in industry and labor alike. As Dr. out almost anythingj but not without, everything." end 3 Bounded Pvlain finqcd from page 231 iperation. Ironically, there's a good mce that the U.S. will be leading the nd to unilateral action. erpretations of innocence Because of the diversity of its inter:s in the sea, the U.S. had been expectto play a keystone role in locking tother a compromise among all the dirgont points of view represented at iracas. In fact, however, the confer ee was one of the first manifestations a remarkable reversion in the interttional posture of the U.S. From a precupation with the politics of peace, we ive moved to a preoccupation with remrces and revenues. The clash between >is new U.S. stance and the ideological reoccupations of the .less-developed ations brought the sea-law negotiations > a standstill at Caracas. To be sure, American economic coneras originally began the erosion of the freedom-of-the-seas principle. In 1945, President Truman unilaterally de clared the U.S. to be sole owner of the mineral resources on its underwater continental shelf, where oil and gas had recently been discovered. This move was quickly followed by a rash of unilateral claims by other nations, not merely to offshore resources but also to territorial waters wider than the traditional three miles. In most cases, the new limits were set at twelve miles, but some coun tries, beginning with several in Latin America, claimed absolute sovereigntyover areas extending as much as 200 miles to sea. At that point, the U.S. woke up to what it had set in motion, in particular the implications for shipping and avia tion. Traditional maritime law recog nizes the right of "innocent passage" through any nation's territorial waters but has always been vague as to what the term meant. With the advent of new kinds of traffic, including airplanes, mis sile submarines, nuclear-powered ships, and supertankers, various states have adopted their own interpretations of innocent passage--such as prohibiting aircraft overflights, requiring advance notification of warship passage, making submarines travel on the surface, or forbidding passage to tankers in order to avoid the danger of oil spills. Planners in sore straits When combined with the almost worldwide adoption of territorial limits greater than three miles, these con straints on innocent passage bad serious implications for all maritime nations, but they especially worried the U.S. Xavy and its Soviet counterpart. The heart of the problem was the "straits issue": with even twelve-mile limits, more than 100 important international straits fall entirely within national jurisdiction. Cold-war military planners wqre ap palled by the prospects of emergencyship and aircraft deployments being held up by a straits nation or of ballisticmissile submajjg^-^jia^obliged to HJ4 FORTUNE October 1074 BFG33907