The Cancer Factory: A Book Review

In 1979, film maker Josh Hanig released a powerful documentary called Song of the Canary, Part One of which dealt workers at Occidental Chemical in California who manufactured the pesticide dibromochloropropane, better known as DBCP.

To make a long, tragic story short, a group of OxyChem workers realized at one point that none of them was having kids. Studies later showed that at least 20 of the 50 workers in the DBCP unit were sterile.  The infuriating part of the story was the fact that 16 years before this discovery, the so-called Torkelson study, sponsored by Occidental, was published showing reproductive health effects of DBCP in rats.

This led to one of the most chilling movie scenes I’ve ever seen — a dialogue seared in my memory for over 40 years.

When asked about the study, the company’s Vice President, James Lindley, claimed his initial feeling when he found out the men were sterile was “Shock! We, I had no idea at all that we had any kind of process here in our plant operation that could do such a thing to human beings.”

When asked specifically about the findings of the Torkelson study, Lindley admitted that

“Well there was a study funded by Dow, the Torkelson study, and it did not show sterility in rats. What it showed was that with very high doses of DBCP you could get testicular atrophy, if you will, the shriveling up of the testicles. I talked to two scientists who are familiar with that work and they both said  ‘Heck, we just didn’t draw the conclusion that there would be sterility from the fact that the testicles were shriveling up.'”

You can watch Part One here and Part Two (which deals with cotton dust) here.

‘Heck, we just didn’t draw the conclusion that there would be sterility from the fact that the testicles were shriveling up.'”

The good news is that OSHA soon thereafter issued an emergency temporary standard regulating DPCP.

Now, you might have gone to bed in the late 1970s assuming that after that shocking story, life in these United States would change. Chemicals would no longer considered innocent until proven guilty by the illness and deaths of exposed workers. Chemical companies would from then on be required to fully test chemical for health effects before they were put into commerce.

But you would be wrong.

Workplace “Accidents” are the Tip of the Iceberg

Every week I publish The Weekly Toll, a chronicle of some of the hundred or so workers killed in the workplace every week. These are the somewhat obvious tragedies that sometimes make the news: a worker falling off a rooftop, suffocated in a trench collapse, crushed in a machine, shot during a robbery or killed in a vehicular incident. Most of these “accidents” don’t even make the news and they go unnoticed by anyone except the worker’s family, friends and co-workers.

But as numerous and tragic as these stories are, the hundred workers killed every work in the workplace are only the small tip of the workplace death iceberg in this country. The workplace tragedies that almost never make the news — or the pubic consciousness — are the 100,000 workers estimated to die every year from occupational diseases — over 250 every day — mostly due to exposure to hazardous substances like asbestos, silica or thousands of other chemicals many years before they became sick.

DBCP was hardly the only hazardous substance workers getting sick and dying from exposure to substances that were previously known to cause grievous harm to workers. Anyone reading the history of asbestos, lead, vinyl chloride and many others maiming and killing workers long after studies showed their harm.  Asbestos, lead and vinyl chloride are regulated by OSHA, but thousands of others remain uncontrolled despite strong evidence of their toxicity.

The workplace tragedies that almost never make the news — or the pubic consciousness — are the 100,000 workers estimated to die every year from occupational diseases — almost 175 every day — mostly due to exposure to hazardous substances many years before they became sick.

In The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers, veteran investigative journalist Jim Morris tells the stories of one group of workers that fell victim to this country’s failure to control chemical exposures. Morris focuses in on workers at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company chemical plant in Niagara Falls, New York, who were exposed to ortho-toluidine, a chemical used in the plant since since 1957 to make tires more pliant. Ortho-toluidine also causes bladder cancer.

The Cancer Factory chronicles one of the nation’s worst, and best-documented, outbreaks of work-related cancer.  78 cases of bladder cancer have been identified among former workers at the Goodyear plant, four times what would be expected in the general population.

Working at the Goodyear was considered a good job in the 1950s and 1960s. It allowed blue collar factory workers to own homes, buy boats and go on vacation. But that wasn’t all they got. As Morris describes, these were largely veterans who had survived some of the fiercest battles of WWII. But when they went to work for Goodyear, they faced

…an adversary they couldn’t see, one that weakened untold numbers of them over time and lopped years off their lives. This was the bargain they unknowingly struck in exchange for company picnics, Thanksgiving turkey giveaways, and paychecks big enough, with overtime, to allow the purchase of fishing boats and weekend cabins. Many stayed in the same factory for years and believed what their employers told them: “Substance X won’t hurt you.” Or, in extreme cases: “You could eat Substance Y for breakfast and be fine.” Employers and their trade associations, we now know, understood the enormity of such falsehoods.

But Morris also makes the point that the ortho-toluidine bladder cancer epidemic is hardly unique. Chemicals in this country have more rights than human beings: they are considered innocent until proven guilty. And there has never been the political will or funding to actually fully test chemicals before they enter the workplace or the environment.

The tragic irony is that, legally, the exposures that caused this cancer outbreak are perfectly “safe” — according to OSHA’s long outdated standard. OSHA’s permissible exposure limit for ortho-toluidine is 5 parts per million in air, a threshold based on research conducted in the 1940s and ’50s, research that didn’t even consider the chemical’s ability to cause cancer. Current research indicates that orto-toluidine’s actual safe level would be thousands of times lower than OSHA’s current limit — although only “no exposure” would fully protect the workers.

OSHA has never updated the outdated standard that has been on the books since OSHA was created over 50 years ago.   Goodyear, and its chemical supplier, Dupont, knew that two of the chemicals used in the plant had been shown to cause cancer, but made little effort to protect the plant’s workers until the cluster of bladder cancer cases–and deaths–was undeniable. DuPont had information dating from the early 20th century that ortho-toluidine was hazardous and likely caused cancer, but it wasn’t until 1973 that DuPont issued a warning about the chemical’s hazards to its customers like Goodyear.

A Tragic History of Failure to Protect Workers

But it’s not just a depressing story of workers getting sick and dying far too early from excruciating and preventable work-related illnesses. It’s also a story of the good guys, primarily lawyer Steve Wodka who represented the Goodyear workers and spent years digging through secret documents to find out what the chemicals companies knew and when. Over the years, Wodka won compensation for dozens of workers, settled a major class action suit for the stricken workers and pushed the federal government for tighter controls.

It’s the story of the workers’ union, the former Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers, and their fiery official Tony Mazzocchi who was the inspiration for a generation of health and safety activists in this country (including me). It is the story of union safety and health officials like the United Steelworkers’ Mike Wright and OCAW’s Christine Oliver — and public health advocates like Barry Castleman and many, many others.

And it’s a history of the abject failure of our government to protect workers from chemical hazards.

Morris reviews OSHA’s early history, when the agency, unburdened by subsequent damaging court decisions and Executive Orders, was able to issue tough chemical standards in a matter of months rather than the decades it currently takes. The early progress resulted mainly from the energy and dedication of Jimmy Carter’s OSHA head, Eula Bingham, as well as strong advocacy and expertise from labor unions.

But industry’s constant lawsuits, followed by adverse court decisions — and the anti-regulatory Reagan administration soon sapped the agency’s budget and fervor, while the courts added more and more burdensome requirements to the agency’s rulemaking efforts. Today, instead of taking months for OSHA to issue a single standard, it takes years — or even decades.

Corporate malfeasance

It is a painful story of corporate malfeasance and governmental impotence. Morris’s history also tells the describes how corporate scientists spent decades covered up evidence and studies showing the harmful effects of its products, leaving workers to suffer the consequences with preventable cancers.  (For more  more in-depth discussions and history of corporate malfeasance and its effects, check out Doubt is Their Product and The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception by Dr. David Michaels and Deceit and Denial by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner.)

But this isn’t just an academic book about chemical producers and users hiding their chemicals health effects from workers.  Morris dives deeply into the lives and fatal illnesses of Goodyear workers like Harry Weist, Hank Schiro, Rod Halford and many more who had lost friends to bladder cancer, and eventually their own lives. They lived their lives fearing every time they urinated that they would see blood in the toilet. And many eventually got the bad news.

It’s hard to read some of these passages. One example. In 1981, OCAW Local President Ron Halford, alarmed by four cancer diagnoses among exposed workers, sent a letter to Goodyear seeking industrial hygiene results and information on  cancer mortality and incidence

By the time Halford wrote his letter, Hank Schiro’s cancer had migrated from his bladder to his prostate. Both organs were removed-as was his urethra, which had been irreparably damaged by all the cystoscopies at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where he spent twenty-three days. The head of Schiro’s penis was closed with sutures; he had to urinate through a hole in his body called a stoma, to which a plastic pouch was attached. When the pouch was full, he’d empty it. He had a penile implant, hoping to revive his sex life, but the outcome was unsatisfying. “Because my urethra [had been] removed, my penis would not get rigid in an upright position. It would be in a bowed position,” he testified in a deposition. Sometimes the urine-collection bag would come loose and leak. Schiro found this particularly embarrassing during arbitration or contract negotiations: “I would develop a leaker and I would wet my pants and I’d have to excuse myself from the table and go clean myself up.

Schiro’s story was repeated over and over, the workers’ suffering relieved only by their early death.

A Sordid History of Deception

Ortho-toluidine had been shown to cause health effects in animals since the 1930s and cancer since the 1940s. DuPont, the chemical’s American main manufacturer, had recognized the hazard since at least since the 1950s and eventually took strong measures to protect its own workers.

In 1977, DuPont warned its customer, Goodyear Tire, that ortho-toluidine had caused cancer among rats. But DuPont reassured Goodyear that it had never found cancer among its own workers, neglecting the fact that they had never looked for cancers among its own workers. “The DuPont letter in 1977 caused no great concerns for Goodyear, which continued to operate its Niagara Falls plant in a fashion that, a NIOSH analysis later found, grossly exposed Department 245 production workers to ortho-toluidine for another seventeen years. ”

DuPont also failed to advise Goodyear “that the OSHA exposure limit for ortho0toluidne — 5 parts per million, measure in air — was formulated not to protect workers from cancer but to guard against the chemical’s immediate toxic effects.”  DuPont had realized that skin absorption, as well as inhalation could expose workers. The company dressed exposed employees in “moon suits,” and regularly tested their urine — the only way to detect skin absorption. But the company provided no information to Goodyear about skin absorption, nor anything about the need for skin protection or the necessity of urine tests to monitor exposure.

DuPont reassured Goodyear that it had never found cancer among its own workers, neglecting the fact that they had never looked for cancers among its own workers.

Consequently Goodyear did only air monitoring until 1992, “congratulating itself” on maintaining air level below OSHA’s inadequate standards.

Men, of course, weren’t the only victims. Women and their unborn children are also vulnerable to chemical exposure — including chemicals brought home on the clothes of their husbands. Companies that produced and used chemicals attempted to address reproductive concerns by prohibiting women from working in contaminated workplaces, neglecting the fact that exposure to men can also cause reproductive problems.

One company, American Cyanimide, required women working around hazardous chemicals to undergo sterilization in order work in the higher-paying chemical jobs.

Mazzocchi was having none of it:

“There isn’t a single worker, including those at Dow, who knows what the hell he works with in the first place,” he said. “No industry has allowed us to look at monitoring data. We aren’t told what is carcinogenic or what is teratogenic. We are learning being after the fact.” It was the union’s position, he said, that neither women nor men should have to be removed from a job to protect the unborn; “our position is to make the workplace safe for everyone.”

Governmental Impotence: OSHA’s Regulatory Process is Broken

The root cause of OSHA’s failure to regulate chemicals like ortho-toluidine is the agency’s broken regulatory process and tiny budget.

The OSHAct requires OSHA to prove that exposure to a chemical presents a significant risk to workers — which the Supreme Court has determined to be 1 cancer per 10,000 workers. The law also requires new standards to be economically and technologically feasible. That means that OSHA has to analyze the economics of every regulated industry to prove that required measures to control exposures are possible and will not cause the death of any industry.

A 1996 law requires OSHA to conduct a small business impact review before a standard is even proposed, and various Executive Orders have imposed lengthy and complex cost-benefit analyses. Once OSHA issues an official proposal, there is a lengthy public comment period, followed by weeks of hearings, and finally another lengthy White House Review. Those requirements take years to satisfy and generally amount to hundreds of highly technical scientific and economic analyses included in the Preamble of every standard.

All of this must be conducted in the shadow of constant attacks from regulated industries who complain that the new OSHA standard will put them out of business, kill jobs and crush the economy.  And after the standard is issued, the industry inevitably files lawsuits attempting to kill the standard.

Over the entire 50 year history of OSHA, the agency has issued only 40 health standards and only 19 chemical standards.

All of this “progress” assumes a Democratic administration that actually attempts to move standards forward, however slowly.  But Republican administrations don’t issue major OSHA standards, so most regulatory work came to a halt during the W. Bush and Trump administrations.

The result: Currently fewer than 500 chemicals currently regulated by OSHA and most of those standards are inadequate, adopted soon after OSHA was founded and based on science from the 1960s or before.

Over the entire 50 year history of OSHA, the agency has issued only 40 health standards and only 19 chemical standards. Over the last 25 years, OSHA has issued only three chemical standards  — hexavalent chromium in 2006 (under court order), silica in 2016 and beryllium in 2017. Each of the last two took 20 years from start to completion. And for both of these it was known decades before that the OSHA standards were not protective.

EPA to the Rescue?

Some progress is being made controlling chemical exposures, not at OSHA, but at the Environmental Protection Agency. While the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), passed in 1976, was aimed at protecting the public from hazardous chemical exposure, it essentially put the burden of proof on EPA to prove that chemicals were harmful.

A 2016 modernization of TSCA attempted to shift the burden of proof back to the chemical manufacturers who would have to show the new products didn’t present “unreasonable” risks. The new law also allowed EPA to evaluate chemicals where other agencies, like OSHA, were not adequately regulating the substance. But the Trump administration delayed implementation. Even under the Biden administration — with the huge number of chemicals being used — Morris estimates that at EPA’s current rate of review, it would take 1500 years to complete risk evaluations for even 10% of existing chemical.

And TSCA has other problems. Under Section 8(e) of TSCA, companies are required to immediately report to the EPA any evidence they identify that their products might present a substantial risk to human health or the environment. Wodka discovered documentation from 1993 in DuPont’s files  showing that they had information that the permissible exposure level for ortho-toluidine was at least 37 times too high to protect workers. When he filed a complaint with EPA in 2021, “the agency concluded DuPont that they met their 8e obligations.” EPA cited a DuPont document that the agency claimed was “Confidential Business Information,” and could therefore not be released to the public.

OSHA: Don’t Trust Our Chemical Standards

And all of this is a disaster for workers. OSHA’s inadequate standards give employers the ability to reassure workers, legislators and the media that worker exposure to toxic, cancer-causing chemicals was not a problem, because the exposures were far below government limits.

The inadequacy of OSHA chemical standards is so dire that in 2013,  then-Assistant Secretary David Michaels admitted in a press conference that OSHA’s standard-setting process was broken, and that OSHA’s chemicals standards were outdated and inadequately protective. Michaels put a statement on OSHA’s website stating that “OSHA recognizes that many of its permissible exposure limits (PELs) are outdated and inadequate for ensuring protection of worker health.”

“You can’t lie and say you’re offering protection when you’re not. It seemed much more effective to say, ‘Don’t follow our standards.'”  — Dr. David Michaels

The agency published on its website more up-to-date and protective “voluntary” (meaning unenforceable) standards issued by organizations like NIOSH, CalOSHA and the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH).

“To me, it was obvious,” Michaels said. “You can’t lie and say you’re offering protection when you’re not. It seemed much more effective to say, ‘Don’t follow our standards.'”

Following Dr. Michaels’ statement on the inadequacy of its chemical standards, business associations like the Chamber of Commerce blasted him, claiming that it was improper for an agency head to state that the agency’s own standards were inadequate. The Chamber went on to warn its members that employee knowledge of more protective standards could lead to more OSHA enforcement under OSHA’s General Duty Clause. The General Duty Clause allows OSHA, in certain situations, to cite employers for hazards that are not covered by specific OSHA standards.

Heroes and Villains

In one sense, this is a story of heroes, villains, and victims. The heroes, like Steve Wodka. The villains, like DuPont, Goodyear and other chemical companies who put profits over workers’ lives.

The victims are the workers who suffered and died too young from excruciating cases of bladder cancer and other preventable diseases. And those who continue to be exposed to hazardous chemicals for which there is no assurance of their safety.

But maybe those characterizations are too simple. Wodka, Mazzocchi, Wright and DuPont gadfly William Heupner (who uncovered DuPont’s malfeasance) are hardly the only heroes out there. Others include workplace safety and health advocates, public health activists, union members and anyone who has risked their job by rejecting the notion that workers have to choose between their jobs and their lives.  These are the everyday heroes that most will never hear of and who will never be recognized.

And among the heroes must be counted investigative journalists like Jim Morris and many others who expose the hazardous conditions American workers continue to suffer despite this country’s ability to make work safe.

Maybe the real heroes are those who go to work every day to support their families, knowing that their jobs will kill likely kill them far before their time.

And maybe the real heroes are those who go to work every day to support their families, knowing that their jobs will kill likely kill them far before their time.

Over 20 years ago, shortly after the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, I wrote a paper entitled “Acts of God Acts of Man” which discussed how Americans had eagerly learned every detail of the lives of the 7 astronauts killed on the shuttle, but they knew nothing about the 15 workers who die in this country every single day, mostly one at a time, due to traumatic workplace incidents. And the many thousands more who die every month from workplace disease that they acquired from toxic exposure many years before.

Who are the real heroes, I asked?

It takes courage to fly into space, knowing the dangers, knowing that you may die far from home. But what about the courage it takes for an immigrant to go to work on a hazardous construction site to feed his family, unable to change his working conditions and knowing that he may die far from home?

What is the difference between the courage needed to go into space, assured that billions of dollars are being spent to bring every astronaut home alive, versus going down into a deep, unprotected trench, suspecting that your employer is cutting corners on safety to save a few bucks.  Millions of workers go to work every day in this country understanding that this society accepts a certain level of death in the workplace, while it demands 100% safety in the space program.

No Happy Ending

Spoiler alert. Most of the workers Morris writes about died painful deaths from bladder cancer. Ortho-toluidine is still being used by Goodyear.  Workers are still exposed. The regulatory process is  still in shambles and the agency is currently not working on developing or updating any chemical standards. OSHA’s budget remains miniscule. The agency spends only $3.99 per American worker, a figure that makes my hands shake as I type them.

The standard for ortho-toluidine remains at 5 ppm, based on research last conducted in 1963-research that didn’t consider the chemical’s potential carcinogenicity. It took an improbable confluence of events-unrelenting pressure on the company from a strong union, an airtight health investigation by the federal government-even to uncover the bladder-cancer epidemic at Goodyear in Niagara Falls, let alone to address it. In 1983, about 20 percent of all workers in the United States belonged to a union; only about 10 percent belonged in 2022. If a cancer cluster like the one at Goodyear were percolating at a factory-or dozens of factories-at this moment, it might never be found.

Morris quotes a NIOSH study that shows that although Goodyear eventually took some measures to protect workers and reduced the exposure level far below OSHA’s outdated standard, workers still have a lifetime bladder cancer risk twelve to sixty-eight times higher than the Supreme Court deemed legally acceptable for an OSHA chemical standard. The answer, of course, is to reduce worker exposure to zero.

Even in the twenty-first century…many blue-collar workers were still being treated like vassals, easily replaced if they got sick or made trouble.”

The takeaway from a 2019 Congressional hearing was, as Morris summarizes “was that even in the twenty-first century, hardly the dawn of the industrial age, many blue-collar workers were still being treated like vassals, easily replaced if they got sick or made trouble.”

What is to be Done?

Warning: The tragic  stories Morris tells are depressing and infuriating. But these are stories that all Americans must be aware of.

They should not just make you angry, but they should generate a call to action for our legislators and government agencies to take much stronger action to protect workers from chemicals.

Morris doesn’t spend a lot of time on recommendations to fix the problem, although he does cite some limited progress that could be replicated. He describes a project by Dr. Steven Markowitz, a physician and professor at City University in New York, who has used CT scans to detect over 200 cases of lung cancer in 14,000 former and current US Department of Energy workers, most in early stages. But that’s just one government program.

How can blue-collar workers at elevated risk of lung cancer be identified and enrolled in screening programs? There’s no central exposure registry, no requirement that employers provide screenings after retirement or termination, no worker-education campaign. Few primary-care physicians bother to inquire about patients’ occupations when examining them. The result? Stunning advances in medicine but an impoverished environment in which to apply them.

Aside from more screening, a central exposure registry, better education for workers and physicians about occupational disease, there are clearly other measures that need to be taken such as changing the Occupational Safety and Health act to make it faster and easier to issue chemical standards, or standards regulating groups of chemicals with similar characteristics rather than individually.

Stunning advances in medicine but an impoverished environment in which to apply them.

And significantly increasing OSHA’s budget to issue new standards, and EPA’s budget to screen more new and in-use chemicals.

Finally, of course, as effective as Morris’s book is, it’s just a book. The fury he generates has to be transformed into action.

We are in an election year. It is imperative to elect representatives and a President who believe that workers have a right to a safe workplace, that chemicals should be considered guilty until proven innocent, and that unions are the best way to defend workers’ lives.

Because, although most people don’t realize it (unless they’ve read this book), their vote largely determines a worker’s chance of coming home alive and healthy at the end of the day.

Postscript: We Can Do Better

As I mentioned earlier, Morris’s story of bladder cancers at Goodyear is not unique or uncommon — or in the past.  The same preventable tragedies continue to occur, as Morris describes in a recent article:

In reporting for my book and the nonprofit news organization I run, Public Health Watch, I’ve encountered two clusters of the ancient lung disease silicosis among workers who cut and grind artificial-stone countertops. In each case, the victims were relatively young Latino men happy to have a steady job that paid $14 an hour.

When I interviewed a gravely ill Juan Gonzalez in California’s San Fernando Valley in October 2022, six months before his death at age 37, I asked him what message he had for consumers.

“Many of us continue working in this field out of necessity, and many continue because of ignorance, not knowing what causes the damage: the stone,” he said in Spanish. “Behind the kitchen, basically, there’s sweat and blood and, at the worst, even death.”

We are in the third decade of the 21st century. The disease that consumed Gonzalez was killing miners and stone-cutters in Greece and Rome two millennia ago. We can do better.