EPILOGUETurning the Tide on Toxic Chemical Ignorance

The most effective means of finally achieving worker and community knowledge has been through the local efforts of multiple local coalitions of public health activists, local labor unions, citizens, and even certain business leaders who are turning the tide on toxic chemical ignorance.

—Eula Bingham, 1983

Turned out of office by the Ronald Reagan administration, Eula Bingham was back in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the early 1980s, teaching toxicology at the University of Cincinnati. There she had an excellent vantage point from which to assess recent gains in the struggle for the right to know. Along with the Ohio River Valley Committee on Occupational Safety and Health and diverse other insurgents, she helped pass a municipal ordinance in 1982 that granted a right of access to chemical hazard information. In a brief commentary in the American Journal of Public Health, she proudly identified the Cincinnati reform as part of a “legislative revolution” that had won not only local ordinances but also statutes in ten states. Although she astutely predicted that conservative US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) leaders would at last finalize a weak federal standard on hazard communication, Bingham still found much to celebrate in the progress of the movement toward an expanded right to know about carcinogens and other health threats.¹

The decade after the coalitions on occupational safety and health (COSH groups) undertook their national right-to-know campaign produced a harvest of progressive change. The events during this brief interval of progressive change, and subsequent developments as well, have received some scholarly attention and merit much more. The modest aim here is to illuminate salient aspects of the dynamics of change and of the milestones achieved (leaving lots of room for future research to fill in the picture more satisfactorily). To that end, we consider activists’ coalition-building skills, organizational infrastructure, tactical repertoire, and strategic resourcefulness.²

Proponents of transparency operated in an inhospitable environment. The long economic boom that most Americans enjoyed for roughly thirty years after World War II finally ended. In the manufacturing sector, where fears of toxic materials were most acute, rampant deindustrialization and accelerated flight from union strongholds left workers in a weaker position. With increasing frequency, US capital fled to third world sites where dangerous working conditions were less likely to be challenged. A recessionary contraction of the economy in the early 1980s left workers in an especially precarious state. Unions withered, sometimes to utter impotence. At the same time, the political climate became markedly more conservative. The rise of the New Right and the persistence of potent elements of the Old Right, epitomized by the election and reelection of Ronald Reagan, dimmed prospects for government intervention to regulate the transfer of any business-related information. An ideological devotion to deregulation, buttressed by a resurgence of radical individualism that sometimes veered into outright social Darwinism, guided public policy. The fact that right-to-know proponents made substantial gains against these headwinds is extraordinary.³

In contrast to the unfavorable political and economic circumstances, the context regarding societal awareness of work-induced illness served to validate and thus help to promote receptivity to reforms. The steady accumulation of revelations regarding the magnitude of the plague of occupational disease and, in some instances, the nefarious methods by which that phenomenon had been concealed continued unabated. In 1977, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) admitted that it had failed to notify tens of thousands of workers about its findings that they had been, and in many cases still were, exposed to carcinogens. The following year, Daniel Berman's Death on the Job: Occupational Health and Safety Struggles in the United States began with the story of asbestos worker Marcos Vela, whose diagnosis of asbestosis was kept from him by the physicians retained by his employer, the Johns Manville Corporation. The massive wave of product liability lawsuits by victims of asbestos-induced diseases or by their surviving families generated a good deal of media attention. These legal battles and the concealment of hazard evidence that inspired them received thorough treatment in Paul Brodeur's unsparingly titled book, Outrageous Misconduct: The Asbestos Industry on Trial. In a major Hollywood production that starred Meryl Streep, the film Silkwood in 1983 dramatized the lengths to which corporate cover-ups might go. No event during this period did more to illuminate the risks borne by communities near hazardous workplaces than the gas leak in December 1984 at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, run by a subsidiary of Union Carbide Corporation. This worst-ever industrial catastrophe, which killed thousands in the plant and in surrounding areas, received prominent news coverage for a protracted period of time, in part because the firm operated a similar facility in West Virginia. Whether they took a restrained reportorial stance or a sharp accusatory one, the drumbeat of incidents, revelations, and indictments lent legitimacy to demands for hazard transparency.⁴

Widespread public recognition of carcinogens and other dangers and the possibility of their concealment particularly aided occupational health activists in their quest to build coalitions. Union and COSH activists were at pains to stress that theirs was not simply a labor problem. Proving that risks were not confined to the workplace drew support from environmentalists and residents of communities located close to industrial sources of ambient pollution. The results of systematic recruitment of allies were often impressive. The Philadelphia Area Project on Occupational Safety and Health (PhilaPOSH) and other parties set up the Delaware Valley Toxics Coalition (DVTC) in 1979. The DVTC soon grew to more than forty member organizations, including Friends of the Earth, local branches of the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, and other environmentalist groups. DVTC also brought in many community associations—the Philadelphia Council of Neighborhood Organizations and a number of its affiliates from hard-hit working-class areas. Immediately upon winning for Philadelphia the nation's first municipal ordinance granting information rights to both workers and the general public in January 1981, the Delaware Valley group was bombarded by far-flung requests for guidance. This leadership position created an opportunity to disseminate a model for reform in which the appeal of a community right to know led to the formation of class-bridging coalitions. The presence of DVTC agitators in southern New Jersey contributed substantially to the labor-environmental coalition that won the New Jersey Worker and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1983. Caron Chess of DVTC produced a handbook for activists that conveyed not only the lessons of the Philadelphia breakthrough but also the experiences of several other winning campaigns across the country. Those experiences invariably involved coalition building as a crucial aspect of organizing. In Cincinnati, reformers enlisted the local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Sierra Club, the League of Women Voters, and the social justice arm of the Catholic archdiocese.⁵

The much-strengthened infrastructure of the right-to-know movement gave agitators a sizable supply of human resources in numerous sites. The primary catalyst for growth in institutional capacity was the New Directions education and training program initiated by the Jimmy Carter administration. From the beginning of her tenure as the head of OSHA, Eula Bingham understood the value of promoting worker education. Shortly after her appointment as assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, Bingham offered a fresh perspective to a congressional committee examining her agency's lackluster past performance: “We must reach employees, every employee, to inform them of possible workplace dangers which they face and their rights under OSHA. A workforce which is sensitized to the work environment is the frontline in any campaign to eradicate workplace hazards.” Such a declaration could not have come from any of her Republican predecessors. The New Directions program aimed to help implement this policy principle of promoting worker self-help. By the end of the 1970s, almost half of the twenty COSH groups in existence had New Directions grants. Organized labor was arguably an even bigger beneficiary of this stream of federal funding. Numerous national unions and other components of the labor movement received grants. Newly acquired in-house expertise enabled unions to support their local health and safety committees, promote COSH participation, negotiate over access to information, and engage in other tasks related to winning entitlements to information.⁶

Tactical ingenuity also distinguished the right-to-know offensive of the 1980s. Creative, militant actions energized adherents to the movement, attracted media attention, and embarrassed political decision makers. In one widely publicized maneuver at a sensitive formative moment for the movement, PhilaPOSH found a novel way to influence the Philadelphia City Council. On October 6, 1980, the United Auto Workers (UAW) activist Bill Kane arrived at hearings of the council's Health and Welfare Committee with a gas canister meaninglessly labeled X17. When Kane flipped a lever releasing the mysterious contents (compressed air), the legislators scattered and pleaded for information as to what they were inhaling, to the amusement of the more than two hundred right-to-know supporters in attendance. The committee voted to support the DVTC bill before it. Challengers elsewhere wore full-body protection while delivering large steel drums full of pro-reform letters and mounted raucous public demonstrations.⁷

The tactical repertoire advanced a pragmatic strategy. Advocates of a national right to know made a significant gain in 1980 when OSHA produced a standard that opened access to some employer-held records, although it did not mandate the creation of such records. Workers, retired workers, and their designated representatives obtained the right to see medical and hazard-monitoring documents. On the question of a broader entitlement to information, however, the paralysis continued. The first act of the Reagan administration's OSHA leadership was to withdraw their predecessors’ last-minute proposal for a hazard communication standard. Faced with this impasse, activists adopted a strategy that amounted to federalism from the bottom up. Numerous legislative advances took place at the local, county, and state levels. As of August 1983, New York, California, and eight other states had enacted statutes, and several other states were discussing proposed measures. Although the laws and ordinances exhibited many similarities, each had its peculiarities. This plethora of differing requirements was a nightmare for chemical firms and other enterprises subject to these strictures while operating in a nationwide market. As a result, the deregulators set aside their antipathy for centralized bureaucratic government in order to put in place a rule to preempt as many of the existing lower-level requirements as possible. Despite its preemptive effect and other limitations, the hazard communication standard issued on November 25, 1983, did impose long-awaited obligations on employers to label containers of hazardous materials, make available material safety datasheets, administer educational and training programs, and take other steps to expand employees’ knowledge of health risks. Subsequent litigation forced OSHA to revise its standard to eliminate some flaws. A decade after the COSH groups launched their campaign for transparency, American workers possessed a potentially formidable legal right to know what might kill them on the job. Daniel Berman celebrated this exception to the tendency for federalism to pit states against one another to ensure freedom from regulation. In his view, the American system of fragmented public authority had given “the new social movements and labor the space to regroup and continue their bureaucratic guerilla wars over control of the chemical industry.” Continuing the guerilla warfare, organizers intensified efforts to build on this victory by attempting to establish a right to act on hard-won knowledge.⁸

Since the turn of the twentieth century, challengers have taken on the sponsors and beneficiaries of toxic ignorance. This book has sought to identify the wide range of men and women who helped to invent the right to know—government officials like Eula Bingham and Irma West, unionists like Daniel Hannan and Anthony Mazzocchi, COSH activists like Rick Engler and Dan Berman, and others who had multiple affiliations like Alice Hamilton and Herbert Abrams. It has tried to describe and explain the obstacles that those insurgents faced, and the creativity and determination with which they fought to overcome those obstacles. It has tried to demonstrate that many of the advocates of transparency saw their cause not only as a humanitarian endeavor but also as an integral part of the larger project of establishing human rights that expanded the scope of democracy, especially in the generally undemocratic realm of employment relations.

Despite the considerable progress made thus far, partisans of democratization of access to hazard information and to decision-making power still have unfinished business. In waging the battles that remain, contemporary activists might draw a bit of encouragement from the knowledge that they carry on a long tradition. This pattern of engagement originated with a small number of dissidents but eventually grew into a sizable, successful national movement, which should indeed be encouraging.