Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This exploratory Article is intended as the first step in a larger book-length project.Each of its sections is based on a small number of authoritative works canvassing the behavior of each of the three industries under examination.2. The asbestos industry analysis that follows is based almost entirely on the prize-winning volume Outrageous Misconduct by Paul Brodeur, which grew out of Brodeur's series of articles originally published in the New Yorker magazine.See generally Paul Brodeur, Outrageous Misconduct: The Asbestos Industry on Trial (1985).Individual citations will only be provided for quoted material, cited publications, statistical data, and legal cases. 2025] INDUSTRYWIDE CORRUPTION351 the industry were National Gypsum, Raybestos-Manhattan, Armstrong Worldwide, Owens-Corning, Celotex, and Eagle Pitcher.The risks posed by asbestos exposure went unrecognized well into the 1920s.In the industrial boom following the turn of the century, neither Johns-Manville nor other American manufacturers conducted health or safety studies.In England, however, evidence began to emerge that asbestos might be harmful to those mining or working with it.The first English medical report of an asbestos-related death was published in 1924 in the British Medical Journal. 3 This triggered a series of U.K. studies, including one from 1928 to 1929 by the British government's Home Office, that examined the health of textile industry employees who worked with asbestos cloth.4 About twenty-six percent of the workers tested were found to have "pulmonary fibrosis."5 Even more alarming was the finding that the percentage of those affected rose to eighty percent for workers who had spent twenty or more years in the industry.6 These data raised serious health concerns among British experts and constituted notice that asbestos might pose a danger to both employees and customers.Between 1929 and 1931, Dr. Anthony Lanza of the American insurance giant Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (Met Life) undertook a study of health risks among American asbestos workers.7 He found, as had his British counterparts, that workers were suffering lung problems in significant numbers, most particularly if they were long-time employees.This study was sponsored by Johns-Manville and Raybestos-Manhattan and involved their workforces.It put them on notice of some of the dangers of asbestos.This analysis was just one of at least fifty studies available by the early 1930s that warned of the hazards of asbestos exposure.8 Manville and Raybestos decided in 1933 to commission a follow-up Met Life study.Manville also underwrote work at the Trudeau Institute, a research laboratory on Saranac Lake, in New York, to examine animal reactions to asbestos fibers.This work produced evidence that asbestos was a carcinogen.Despite the growing body of troubling evidence, general public attention was, at that time, focused on a different airborne risk: silicosis.The reason was an awful 1936 industrial disaster at Hawks Nest, 3. W.E. Cooke, Fibrosis of the Lungs Due to the Inhalation of Asbestos Dust, 2 Brit.Med.J. 147, 147 (1924).4. E.R.A. Merewether & C.W. Price, Report on Effects of Asbestos Dust on the Lungs and Dust Suppression in the Asbestos Industry 5, 9-10, 19-20 (1930).5. Id. at 9-10. 6. Id. at 10. 7. Brodeur, supra note 2, at 112-13.8. See id.
Author: Landsman, Stephan
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7038559344
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