Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
"Workers are a kind of controlled experiment," says Dr. Sandra Steingraber, author of "Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment," an authoritative study of the growing body of evidence linking cancer to the environment. "We know they work in certain workplaces for a certain number of hours with certain kinds of exposures. It's considered unethical to go out and do human experiments on a group of folks who aren't workers -- but this happens de facto in a lot of workplaces. Workers are the canaries in the mines."
In the East Fishkill lawsuit, former IBM workers Michael Ruffing and Faye Calton are the parents of Zachary Ruffing, 15, who was born blind and with facial deformities so severe he cannot breathe through his mouth or nose. They originally sued for $40 million in damages. Other Fishkill cases name cancers of the gastrointestinal and lymphatic systems; of the skin, bone and brain; and, most commonly, of the breast and testes. The cases filed by Cottle Road employees reflect a similar suite of cancers, the majority of which -- like the cancers listed above -- have all shown increased rates over the past 20 years and show longer-term increases that can be traced back at least 40 years, megatrends that correspond with the proliferation of synthetic chemicals following World War II.
In fact, workers' compensation statistics show that exposure to toxic chemicals -- coded as "systemic poisoning" in California -- is twice as likely to be a cause of occupational illness in electronics workers as it is for workers in other manufacturing industries. National figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the percentage of work-loss injuries and illnesses involving "exposures to caustic, noxious and allergenic substances" in recent years (1992-1998) was consistently between three and four times higher for workers in the semiconductor industry than in manufacturing industries as a whole, a group that includes manufacturers of petrochemicals, paper, petroleum, coal, steel, aluminum, plastics and rubber.
The BLS statistics do much to erode the perception that the high-tech industry is somehow "cleaner" than its predecessors. But what of the companies themselves? How much did they know about what they might be subjecting their workers to, and how hard were they trying to find out?
The simple fact is that it isn't in the high-tech industry's interest to know too much about the long-term health consequences of exposing its workers to toxic chemicals: The more it knows, the greater its legal liability. Of the few industry-funded studies of clean-room-related worker health problems, the two most significant examined workers' reproductive problems. One study was funded by the Semiconductor Industry Association, or SIA, the other by IBM. Both studies were conducted after activists raised concerns about the toxicity of a group of chemicals called ethylene glycol ethers, or EGE, used in photoresist.
The IBM-funded study, whose preliminary findings were released in 1992, found that pregnant employees at IBM's Fishkill lab who were exposed to EGE were roughly 1.5 times more likely to suffer a spontaneous abortion than unexposed workers. The authors emphasized that no conclusive causative chemical could be identified, but IBM acknowledged that it could be "inferred" that the cause of the increased miscarriages was exposure to EGE. Eventually, IBM and most of the industry stopped using EGE. (The SIA study came up with the same conclusions.)
What's noteworthy is that the gloomy results of this study didn't lead the industry to carry out more research into the long-term health consequences of exposure to other chemicals.
See no evil is a wise corporate strategy. But the Santa Clara lawsuit declares that IBM should have known that something was very wrong in its clean rooms, based on trends visible in its Corporate Mortality File, a database with work history on over 10,000 deceased IBM employees. Public access to the mortality file is currently restricted by a gag order, but the facts cited in the Santa Clara complaint are corroborated by statistics in a 1996 article in the scientific journal Epidemiology, "Brain Tumors Among Electronics Industry Workers." The file is a substantially complete (99 percent) database of all U.S. IBM workers of five or more years who died between 1975 and 1989; the records were constructed from death certificates obtained by IBM "for administrative purposes"; and the cause of death in 149 of the total 10,331 cases was primary brain cancer. (The article never specifically identifies the subject company, but a footnote identifies IBM as the funder of the research, and the mortality statistics are identical to those included in the complaint.)
That's quite a lot of brain cancer, about 2.5 times that of the general population, without factoring in biases for gender and age. More significantly, what this study found was an upward slope in brain cancer deaths among male electronics workers as duration of employment lengthened.
Because of the gag order, the other charges in the complaint -- that these records prove IBM knew that workers involved in manufacturing electronic devices were at a significant risk not only of brain cancer but of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, gastric cancers and leukemia -- cannot be independently confirmed. (IBM will not comment on pending litigation.) But if one traces the citations in the Epidemiology article back through the scientific literature a pattern emerges that raises troubling, unanswered questions about elevated risks of cancer among workers in the manufacture and repair of electronics, and particularly among workers with long-term work histories -- specifically, 10 or more years -- and with probable exposure to solders and organic solvents.
In 1985, the same year the elevated brain cancer mortality rates began showing up in the scientific literature, Gary Adams, a chemist working in the material analysis department in Cottle Road's Building 13, where IBM disk drive coatings were developed, wrote a memo to IBM corporate headquarters. The memo alerted IBM officials to a cluster of cancers in his building. Eight out of his 14 immediate colleagues had fallen ill with some form of cancer.
Brain cancer had killed Adams' colleagues John Wong and Al Smith; lymphatic and hematopoietic cancers killed his colleagues Gordon Mol and Dwayne Johnson; and gastric cancers killed his colleagues Robert Cappell and Ken Hart, states the complaint. When Adams and another colleague, Fred Tarman, developed bone tumors, they decided it had to be more than a statistical fluke.
"All of a sudden we began to worry," Adams told "Dateline NBC" in 1998. "And then when another one [was diagnosed] and another one, it really began to hit home." Adams said the response of a staff doctor to his request that the company monitor its workers' health, particularly in Building 13, was to say such a program would be a waste of time, because "workers did not get cancer from their jobs."
The official stance of the semiconductor industry has long been similar. At the end of each year, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the results of its survey on occupational health and safety, the Semiconductor Industry Association, which calls itself "the leading voice for the semiconductor industry," and whose member companies constitute more than 90 percent of U.S.-based semiconductor production, issues a press release announcing that the industry ranks among the safest manufacturing industries in the nation. (The current SIA chairman, incidentally, is John Kelly III, a senior vice president at IBM.)
Molly Maar, a spokeswoman for the SIA, says too little is known about the chemicals involved to point fingers at any particular industry. "What we're finding," she says, referring to cancer risks among clean-room workers, "is that there's not much scientific data out there ... Studies aren't inexpensive, and when you have many companies coming together, these things don't happen overnight."
IBM's short, official statement following the Fishkill settlement admits of no doubt:
"No scientific data supports the allegations of [the plaintiffs]. No evidence conclusively links the cause of [the plaintiffs' son's] birth defects to the chemicals in question or, for that matter, any specific chemical at all."
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