Compensating Asbestos Victims

Law and the Dark Side of Industrialization

Andrea Boggio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409419075
• eBook ISBN: 9781317162933
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This book traces the emergence and transformations of asbestos compensation to explore the wider issue of to what extent legal systems have converged in the era of globalization. Examining the mechanism by which asbestos compensation is delivered in Belgium, England, Italy and the United States, as well as the cultural forces and actors which contribute to its emergence and transformations, the book advances our understanding of how law operates within cultural norms, routines, and institutional relations of capitalist societies. With material gathered from 50 interviews and from primary and secondary sources, the author considers law as a cultural phenomenon, national styles of legal culture and the convergence and divergence of legal cultures, and law as a form of institutionalized power.

Chapter 1
Asbestos disease and compensation

L’amianto era una cosa veramente subdola perché comunque sia non la si vede, magari non la si sente, però esiste, e adesso ultimamente una o due persone alla settimana muoiono tra i cittadini, tra gli ex-lavoratori. [Asbestos is a very sneaky thing: you can never see it, you can sometimes smell it, but it exists. Lately, one or two people have died every week among the residents of this town, among those who once worked with asbestos.] (Romana Blasotti)1

I grabbed his face and put it between my hands and said, “Honey, honey, honey!” I was screaming bloody murder, “Oh my God, he’s gone. He’s gone.” (Karen McQueen)2

Death in old age is inevitable, but death before old age is not. (Richard Doll)3

… toute la structure sociale est présente au coeur de l’interaction, sous la forme des schèmes de perception et d’appréciation inscrits dans le corps des agents en interaction. [The whole social structure is present at the heart of the interaction, in the form of schemes of perception and appreciation inscribed in bodies of the interacting agents.] (Pierre Bourdieu)4

Our problem is to work out a social organization which shall be efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life. (John Maynard Keynes)5

… sans considérer que c’est toujours le mauvais côté, qui finit par l’emporter sur le côté beau. C’est le mauvais côté qui produit le mouvement qui fait l’histoire, en constituant la lute. [… irrespective of the fact that it is always the bad side that in the end triumphs over the good side. It is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing a struggle] (Karl Marx)6

Law and the dark side of industrialization

The poignant words of Romana Blasotti, a soft spoken 83-year-old woman and longtime resident of Casale Monferrato, a peaceful blue collar town in Piemonte in Northern Italy, set the stage for this book: the story of how victims of asbestos exposure have been compensated for injuries caused by this invisible killer. Ms. Blasotti lost her husband, her sister, her daughter, a nephew, and a cousin to asbestos.7 While Ms. Blasotti represents one of the most tragic accounts of how asbestos has killed throughout the years, her story is far from being unique. Victims throughout the world have been heard screaming “bloody murder” just like Karen McQueen did in San Antonio, Texas, after realizing that her beloved husband and father of two had just been killed by asbestos.8 Asbestos use has caused a global epidemic in which its deadly effects affected hundreds of communities, thousands of families, and tens of thousands of men and women throughout the world. Data on 82 countries published by the World Health Organization indicate that, from 1994 to 2010, 128,015 persons died of mesothelioma.9 An estimated 20,000 asbestos-related lung cancers and 10,000 cases of mesothelioma, an invariably deadly form of cancer, occur annually across the population of Western Europe, Scandinavia, North America, Japan, and Australia. The asbestos epidemic kills one person every two hours in the United States, one every four hours in the United Kingdom, three every day in Italy and Germany, two every day in France, Japan, and Australia, and one a day in the Netherlands.10

All these deaths were premature and certainly evitable, as Sir Richard Doll’s words suggest. Even worse: they were man-made because they were the result of the decision to use asbestos extensively in the course of the industrialization process that led to Fordist production of the twentieth century. Asbestos disease is a man-made epidemic and thus a social event, as Pierre Bourdieu argued, as it can be construed as an “inscription” of the social structure on human bodies. Indeed, the social structures that are involved in the making of this epidemic are primarily economic. It is capitalism with its inherent tension between profit and equity. Asbestos disease thus offers an opportunity to investigate the capitalist tension between profits and equity and resulting social struggle between victims and corporate powers. I am particularly interested in the mediating role of institutions and law. In fact, the rise of the asbestos epidemics has led to the emergence of an array of institutional mechanisms aimed at compensating the victims of the asbestos epidemic. While industrialized nations with experience of asbestos use have developed some form of asbestos compensation, norms, institutions, and procedures of asbestos compensation vary greatly across nations and across time.

This book presents a comparative study of the emergence and transformations of asbestos compensation in the past century in Belgium, England, Italy, and the United States. While grounded on an analysis of formal law, I construe and analyze these mechanisms as cultural responses to the rise of the asbestos epidemic. Legal redress for asbestos disease is seen as a social event, and more specifically a cultural practice that emerges from the cultural fabric of our societies and it contributes to its constitution. Engel and McCann defined a cultural approach to the study of law as emphasizing “the ways that legal practice is embedded within the larger framework of cultural norms, routines, and institutional relations.”11 This assumes that law is a cultural phenomenon. Throughout the book, asbestos compensation is thus understood as a set of cultural responses to the broader challenges of addressing risks generated by industrialization, its dark side, and assignments of responsibility, compensation, and obligation related to injury caused by exposure to asbestos. Framing asbestos compensation as a cultural phenomenon allows me to investigate and expose the deeper social tensions that compensation practices address, and in particular the tension between individual profits and social costs that is inherent to capitalism. Asbestos compensation emerged and developed as cultural response aiming to address this tension between efficiency and equity, or in Keynes’s words, as “a social organization” aimed to make our societies as “efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life.” This book unfortunately shows that asbestos compensation failed to satisfactorily address the fundamental capitalist tension: compensation was bitterly contested, came too late, and did not include all victims of the asbestos epidemic. Furthermore, the individuals and organizations that significantly contributed to the emergence of the asbestos epidemic have for the most part escaped accountability. Asbestos disease is a dark side of industrialization that the laws of compensation failed to fully redress.

Asbestos use and industrialization

Asbestos is a naturally occurring mineral with such extraordinary insulating properties that, since the early days of its modern use, it was labeled as the “magical fiber.”12 Its remarkable insulating properties, as well as its abundant, relatively cheap availability and its adaptability, made this product an almost indispensable ingredient of industrialization. As a result of industrialists’ interest in the mineral, towards the end of nineteenth century, many asbestos mines were opened. A consortium of capitalists opened the Balangero mine in Northern Italy. Others looked at Québec and its vast reserves of chrysotile asbestos. In a matter of a few years, asbestos became available in large quantities and at a very reasonable cost. Other entrepreneurs processed asbestos fiber and created a brand new form of cement that was easy to install and allegedly indestructible when applied as a covering to boilers, steam pipes, hot blast furnaces, and stills. Others started traveling around the world, some to Russia and South Africa to purchase land that offered promising prospects of containing asbestos, and to Australia to set up pipe manufacturing plants. Even cities named after asbestos appeared on the map: Asbestos—a 7,000 resident town of Southeastern Québec, developed around the Jeffrey Mine, the world’s largest asbestos mine in the world (in 2005, Canada contributed 40 percent of the worldwide production of asbestos).13 Another example is Asbest City—a mining town in the Ural Mountains with a population of 71,000. The city continues to be the source of 25 percent of the chrysotile asbestos that is used worldwide.14

In a matter of a few decades, hundreds of applications were introduced, which propelled a flourishing industry.15 Asbestos truly became the “magical mineral” and contributed to the development of the industries that defined the economic growth that took industrial nations from the Second Industrial Revolution into the twentieth century. During these times, the remarkable insulating properties of asbestos were an essential ingredient of the widespread availability of electric power, internal combustion engines, and assembly lines. Insulating properties, versatility, and cheapness made asbestos a highly successful product, used in countless applications in countless industries: from shipbuilding to cars, from roofing to cigarette filters.

With all these products on the market, asbestos soon became a permanent presence, often an invisible presence, in the lives of people throughout the industrialized world. Commercial building, private homes, offices, schools, hospitals, post offices, as well as boats, airplanes and most of the other means of transportation were filled with asbestos. The asbestos miracle led people to mix asbestos fibers with flour and other ingredients to make muffins, to add it to the soil as a garden fertilizer for homegrown vegetables, and to insert its fibers in cigarette filters to protect smokers’ fingers. People ate and smoked asbestos.

Unfortunately, the story of asbestos is not simply a tale of success: it is also a tragic story of death and suffering. In fact, it is now clear that asbestos is a highly toxic substance: exposure to asbestos fibers may cause various respiratory problems, eventually leading to death. A well-established body of medical evidence shows that asbestos may cause respiratory conditions, lung cancer, and mesothelioma—a rare and incurable form of cancer of the pleura and from which patients often die within a few months of diagnosis.16 Typically mesothelioma is diagnosed in victims who worked in asbestos mining but also in jobs in industries such as textiles, railroads, shipbuilding, car manufacturing, and construction. However, in recent years, victims are increasingly counted among “end-users often exposed when installing asbestos products or handling asbestos materials still in place (construction workers, electricians, plumbers, heating workers, etc.).”17 While pleural mesothelioma is a signature disease, the causes of lung cancer are various. Smoking in particular is responsible for a large proportion of cancers of the lung, and unfortunately many asbestos victims smoked during their lives. Attributing lung cancer to asbestos exposure is thus harder than in the case of mesothelioma.18

Besides the two forms of cancer discussed above, exposure to asbestos is also linked with other diseases of the lung. Among them, asbestosis occupies an important place. This chronic inflammatory and fibrotic medical condition affecting the tissue that surrounds the lungs is caused by the inhalation and retention of asbestos fibers and is dose dependent: the greater the cumulative dose, the higher the incidences of asbestosis. Asbestosis is a condition that ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Acts
• List of Cases
• Preface
• 1 Asbestos disease and compensation
• 2 Asbestos compensation in Belgium
• 3 Asbestos compensation in England
• 4 Asbestos compensation in Italy
• 5 Asbestos compensation in the United States
• 6 Asbestos firms and their liabilities
• 7 Asbestos compensation as a set of cultural responses to the dark side of industrialization
• Bibliography
• Index