The Cover-up

Get ready for the biggest corporate horror story you’ll ever hear.

Parallels
Almost two thousand years ago, a Roman philosopher and naturalist named Pliny the Elder noticed that slaves from certain mines tended to die young. (They were asbestos mines.) His solution was for the slaves to wear masks made from thinly sliced leather to protect them.

But nobody enforced Pliny’s suggestion. So the slaves continued dying.

In 1943, the United States government issued standards for workers employed around asbestos in the wartime shipbuilding industry. Their solution was to segregate activities that stirred up dust from other workers, ventilate the workplaces, and have the workers wear respirators to protect them.

But nobody enforced the government’s suggestions. And today, the former asbestos workers are dying of mesothelioma, lung cancer, and asbestosis.

Numbers don’t lie
In 1918, a man named Frederick Hoffman kept medical statistics for the Prudential Life Insurance Company. A report he wrote that year stated that insurance companies in the United States usually wouldn’t offer coverage to asbestos workers because of their dangerous occupation.

Four years later, in 1922, another man, this one named Louis Dublin, also kept statistics, this time for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. His report stated that asbestos workers were in danger of lung problems.

But in the 1970s, over fifty years later, when injured asbestos workers began filing massive lawsuits against the companies responsible for their injuries—companies that had made millions of dollars of profits through the years at the expense of their workers’ lives—company management claimed they hadn’t known of the dangers of asbestos exposure.

Were they telling the truth?

Liar, Liar
Not a chance.

In 1977, lawyers for some of the injured workers got their hands on the private papers and correspondence of a man named Sumner Simpson, who had been president of Raybestos-Manhattan during the 1930s and 1940s. A more damning stack of confidential memos, reports, and correspondence would be hard to imagine. A few examples:

• In 1933, doctors employed by MetLife diagnosed 29% of the workers at one asbestos factory with asbestosis. There is no indication the workers were ever told.

• In 1934, officials with two asbestos companies, Johns-Manville and Raybestos-Manhattan, didn’t like the conclusions reached by a MetLife doctor concerning the dangers of asbestos fibers. They edited the report into one they liked better.

• In 1948, Owens-Corning officials were told by their research department that their new insulation, Kaylo, produced asbestosis in lab animals. Company officials ignored the warning and advertised the new product as “non-irritating and non-toxic.”

• In 1951, more asbestos company officials deleted all references to cancer in the findings of research they had sponsored, before allowing the paper to be published.

The Simpson papers clearly document a cold-blooded business decision on the part of the major asbestos corporations to milk the American workforce for huge profits—at the cost of their lives. It’s a litany of death, fueled by greed.

A ruling from the Florida Supreme Court in 1999 called it “a blatant disregard for human safety.”

One study estimated that the death toll from asbestos could reach 200,000 Americans by the year 2030. And that doesn’t count the workers in other parts of the world, especially in Canada and Africa, where asbestos is still mined. It’s an occupational epidemic that didn’t have to happen.