The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [68]
The lyrics to one of my favorite songs, More Than a Paycheck, by the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, go like this: “We bring more than a paycheck to our loved ones and families... I bring home asbestosis, silicosis, brown lung, black lung disease, and radiation that hits the children before they’ve really been conceived.”144 It’s true. Workers are on the front line, routinely exposed to toxic chemicals by touching them, inhaling them, and sometimes carrying them home on their clothing to share with their families. They bear the heaviest, unfiltered brunt of exposure to toxic inputs and dangerous processes and products. As Dr. Peter Orris, chief of environmental and occupational medicine at the University of Illinois Medical Center, laments, “These diseases and deaths are completely preventable. Civilized society should not tolerate this unnecessary loss of life either on the job or in our communities.”145
The National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH) is the government entity focused on safety and health in the workplace. NIOSH believes that millions of workers in the United States are routinely exposed to substances found to be carcinogenic in animal studies and that millions more may be exposed to yet-undetermined carcinogens, since more than 98 percent—nearly all—of the substances used in our factories today have not yet been tested for carcinogenicity.146 NIOSH estimates that work exposure to carcinogens causes about twenty thousand cancer deaths and forty thousand new cases of cancer each year.147 And cancer is only one of a number of diseases linked to exposure of toxic substances at work; there’s also cardiovascular disease, reproductive and neurological disorders, skin problems, respiratory diseases including asthma, and more. Maybe Sweet Honey should rewrite their song: “I bring home more than a paycheck to my loved ones and family, but I can’t tell you what else I bring home since no one has bothered to study these chemicals that I inhale and handle all day at work.”
But at least in the United States today there’s growing awareness of the risks that workers face and increased safety regulations in the workplace. Back when environmental health activists first started raising concerns about industrial chemicals, many companies brushed aside concerns and focused their employees’ attention on how environmentalists threatened to close factories and risk jobs. Corporate managers often framed the issues as “jobs versus environment.” For a while this served to divide the two groups—representatives of labor versus environmental defenders. Ultimately it became clear that a healthy environment and good jobs that protect workers’ health are integrally connected and mutually dependent.
In large part this shift in understanding came about through the work of one of my heroes, the late great Tony Mazzochi, a labor leader with the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, who is frequently referred to as the Rachel Carson of the labor movement. Throughout the 1960s Mazzochi informed workers about toxic threats, exposed information about workplace dangers to the public and policymakers, and, very important, built alliances between labor and environmentalists, defeating the attempts to keep these two powerful constituencies isolated. Today’s movement for green jobs—dignified employment that is good for workers and for the planet—owes a debt to Mazzochi’s tireless efforts.
We still have a ways to go in the United States before our factories are entirely green and toxics free, but meanwhile one of the tragic side effects of our cleaning things up at home has been exporting the nastiest production processes to poor countries around the world. I’ve seen many a dismal factory on nearly every continent, but my most gut-wrenching experience was in Gujarat,