Asbestos is the Greek word for unquenchable, which fairly describes its devouring effect on the human body. It is a fibre embedded in a rock found in many parts of the world — Canada (where there are the largest deposits). Zimbabwe. Russia and Cyprus. South Africa has a lot of the especially unquenchable blue asbestos and the USA is the world’s principal manufacturer of asbestos products. The rock is quarried from holes in the ground, then crushed to extract the fibre which can be processed into yarns and cloth or compounded into rubber and cement. Its great value is in a high resistance to heat and to electricity, which means that it is widely used in the building industry and for gasket and brake linings.
It is only in recent years that asbestos has been recognised as a deadly killer responsible for incurable, agonising illness. One of the victims featured in the TV film about asbestos sufferers — Alice, A Fight for Life — recalled when the mill workers would lark about with the stuff, wearing it in wigs and beards, unaware of the appalling risks they were running. Now, a local council sends its workers-to rip the stuff out of houses and flats dressed in space suits of protective clothing, as if they were handling the most perilous of radioactive materials.
Asbestos kills through the inhalation of a dust of its minute but durable fibres which stay in the lungs for life, causing asbestosis — a respiratory disease — lung cancer or mesothelioma, a cancer of the membrane of the lungs or the abdomen. One of the companies exposed in the TV film — Turner Brothers Asbestos (TBA) — described it as a process in which the asbestos particles "get right down into the lungs and file away the tissue”. This sounds ghastly enough but was in fact a clumsy attempt to play down the risks.
This same safety memorandum, which was given to all employees of TBA. asserted that: "Health problems are caused only if a lot of asbestos dust is breathed into the lungs over many years". In truth there are examples of people contracting asbestos-related diseases after as little as two weeks’ contact and the woman who once fooled around with an asbestos wig worked with it for only nine months. One study of the TBA factory in Rochdale found that 58 per cent of the employees were showing the first symptoms of asbestos-related diseases; another found one worker in four actually suffering from the diseases.
The recognition of asbestos as a twentieth century industrial killer has loosed a flood of demands for compensation for its victims, which threatens to gather force into a deluge. This might force TBA to pay out rather more than the no-obligation grant of about £10 a week they have made to some of the families of their dead employees. Sometimes they gave nothing at all, other than the wreath which they sent to the funeral. (The TV researchers traced a lot of the asbestos victims through pathetic thanks for the flowers in the Deaths column of the local paper.)
While their workers were suffering and dying. TBA were devoting themselves to concealing the extent of the problem. Their safety memorandum breezily assured everyone: “Working with asbestos is a bit like working with gas — you've no problems so long as you stick firmly to a few simple rules". They did not publish a report of their own company doctor which showed the incidence of asbestos-related diseases at TBA to be 75 times what the company admitted to. Weeks after the TV programme, in face of the mounting evidence of the dangers, TBA conceded that some of their estimates had been wrong but they adopted a new, equally spurious, defence — that 30 per cent of mesothelioma cases happen spontaneously. TBA did not concede that they make their profits through putting people to work with a peculiarly nasty and dangerous material; the work could be a lot safer — as safe as human ability allows—but this would cost a lot of money and file away some of those profits like workers’ lungs.
TBA is not the only asbestos company to be in trouble. In America there is the more spectacular and provocative Manville Corporation, which was once the world's largest processor of asbestos. We say "was" because Manville recently went bankrupt. There was no suicide among the corporation’s penitent executives over this because Manville is in fact financially healthy. According to the Guardian of September 7, at the time it had $15 million in cash, apart from its other assets, and continues its business as normal. Manville's bankruptcy was a ruse, calculated to protect it against the claims of the sick and crippled workers. There are some 16,500 of these claims at present and more are on the way.
Of course there was an indignant outcry at Manville's cynical but effective manoeuvre. One American Congressman accused the Corporation of leaving behind “. . . the wreckage of their workers’ and consumers' lives". But there was also some support for the company, from American bankers and lawyers, who are trained to applaud an effective preoccupation with taking in the profits, even if it costs the lives of the people who make them. The tragic fact is that those smug, desiccated business people who stood up for Manville had social reality on their side, unlike those who were in pain or dying because they had worked for the Corporation or the others who were angry about it all.
The first part of that reality is that asbestos can yield some very impressive profits for the people who own the quarries where it is extracted and the plants where it is processed. The second part is that those profits arise, not just from the fact that human beings apply their abilities to the mining and the processing, but that this takes place under certain social relationships. The owners, who receive the profits, are part of a social class who monopolise the means of production and distribution. The workers, who make the profits, have no ownership; their part in the relationship is to be exploited as they produce asbestos, or things made from it, with the object of being sold to realise the profits.
Within this relationship there are no rights or moral obligations; there is only an antagonism of interests. The employers don't owe their workers a living and when a worker is killed as a result of their employment the employers are being generous when they send a bunch of flowers to the cemetery. If the facts about asbestos make an embarrassing scandal that is only because the employer/worker relationship is so widely misunderstood and obscured.
Any investment in industrial safety must be subject to those same actuarial principles. Safety itself is a profit element; to kill workers too early in their life effectively reduces the supply of future exploitation-fodder. The skill — if that is the word — is in finding the balancing point, when safety measures cost too much or when adverse publicity from meddling media people begins to affect investment in the firm. In any case it is always worthwhile to fight a rearguard action, even if it is over the wrecked and wasted bodies of the victims of actuarial principles.
Another woman in the TV film, who died at the age of 55. was at first judged to be ineligible under the rules for any compensation at all; although she was dying from asbestosis the doctors who "examined" her found no symptoms. Two months before she died, in great pain, hardly able to move and heavily drugged, she mistook the date when her disability began, which meant that under the rules she was entitled to only a limited payment. After her death, and a post mortem, the authorities agreed that she had been completely disabled and should have received a total of about £18,000.
No comment was made on the degradation of it all — the exploitation, being put to work with a lethal substance; then the sickness, the withering away onto the scrap heap observed by doctors and bureaucrats, all concerned that nobody should get more than the rules allowed. No comment was made, that all of this was done in accordance with those actuarial calculations so essential to a society in which the overriding priority is the production of wealth for profit.
At the end of the 18th century a child called Robert Blincoe was sent as an apprentice to various factories in Nottinghamshire. There he was beaten and tortured, his hair torn out and his teeth filed down in his head. His was not an isolated case and eventually there was a massive protest. His sufferings were in accordance with the actuarial principles of the first days of industrial capitalism, which laid it down that it paid to operate factories and mines with starving, battered children.
Has capitalism improved since then? Observe how those same principles operate now — the tortured bodies of the asbestos victims, the contemptuous evasions of the employers’ public relations staff, the insult of the company flowers on the grave. And be warned that here, behind the anger and grief, is this society’s enduring reality.
Ivan
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