Aug. 2, 2001 | Read "Poison Valley," Part 1 and Part 2.
I've read the first part of Fisher's two-part report on increased cancer rates in technology manufacturing workers, and all I can do is scoff.
These people have absolutely no reason to bitch. There are many coal miners, lumberjacks and construction workers who experience greater risks and increased mortality rates than those in the article. These [tech workers] are exceedingly lucky to have such a safe, well-paying job. It's become an American modus operandi to demand perfect safety in all things and for all time, and to find someone to blame if things fail to meet those standards.
As a molecular biologist working in a lab I know that statistically my life will be foreshortened by about seven years due to the chemicals inherent in the environment in which I work. I know of this and the possibility of other dangers and I accept that because this is my profession.
These people who got ill in greater numbers due to exposure to chemicals in the workplace are most deserving of sympathy, but the pretense that they simply had no idea it could be harmful is another matter.
-- Gregory Dyas
Well, I read Part 2, and I still think you are painting with far too broad a brush. You mention ARC again in the wrap-up, despite the fact that there's only the most tenuous link between the research that started IBM's chip manufacturing and the contamination problems that are the focus of the article. After all, it's not like the lab guys get to set the worker safety standards!
And again, the comparison to mercury mining is way off base. Those mercury miners would have thought they'd died and gone to heaven to get a job in a chip fab plant!
Lumping in software companies in the "what new terrors will the future hold" paragraphs is also complete B.S. The only worker safety problem you could possibly find at those companies is carpal tunnel syndrome, and perhaps the usual overwork-related items of headaches and eyestrain. Software is pure office work and has no impact on the environment. Since it's uniquely suited to telecommuting, it even has less impact on traffic than other forms of office work.
It's also wrong to lump the systems manufacturers like Apple in with the chip makers. As far as I know, making systems is completely chemical-free -- they just snap together components made elsewhere. You might have some solvents used in circuit board manufacture -- though I've heard that water shortages have made them clean up some of that.
Anyway, if I were writing this, I'd have thrown out all the blame spread outside the basic chip-manufacturing facilities. Most of the rest of the valley, including all the leading-edge companies (which concentrate on software, not chips), is as clean as it's possible for a company to be.
For the chip companies that remain, you've got a point. Still, it's strange what people will put up with. You quote Joe LaDou:
In the early days, it was not unusual to see people in first-stage anesthesia -- fairly drunk, staggering -- from solvent exposure. We treated literally dozens of hydrofluoric acid burns every day. The safety and health provisions in these companies were primitive at best.
Who puts up with this?! It's not like chip fabrication workers are particularly well paid. I used to get midnight snacks at the IBM company cafeteria on Cottle Road, during third shift lunch. That's as blue collar a crowd as you could find. Some of the jobs are so mind-numbing, you couldn't pay me any amount to do them. But from their talk, none of them made much doing it. If I had to put up with health problems as well, or even just foul stinks all day, I'd find another job. It can't be that horrible to work retail!
That might seem like an irrelevant point, but as you note in the article, it's the economics that drive all this. The companies are not out to deliberately poison people. Most of the managers probably think it's smelly, dull work, but no worse than a factory or farm. And the managers live with the exact same environment, since they are looking over the shoulders of these people all the time.
The bottom line is that these jobs only get better when it gets harder to find people to do them. Then either the salaries go up to compensate or the conditions get better. (Or they move the jobs overseas, where poor people are happy to take them!)
It does seem as if the companies deliberately look the other way. They lobby against safety legislation and don't spend much money to analyze the hazards. Part of the reason is that corporations rightly live in terror of both the legislature and the legal system. Either one can suddenly focus on some detail and assess random, unpredictable and huge damages on a company, no matter how hard it tries to be safe.
And it's completely true that a company that routinely monitored employee health in order to find the first sign of a problem would also be providing ammunition to the other side in a lawsuit. For most big companies, and all small companies, the only way to deal with the law is to try not to attract any attention.
Some kind of reform in this area would go a long way toward making companies be more responsible. As it is, companies have to balance safety (to avoid lawsuits in the first place) with creating too detailed a paper trail (which means they lose all the lawsuits, justified or frivolous). After all, in any set of detailed records, you are going to be able to find some correlation -- two people who worked in a clean room together and both got the same cancer. In court, it won't matter that this is like two people in a room having the same birthday. You'll lose regardless, and read press stories about your gross negligence!
Next page: Chemicals so toxic, the computers corroded after two years