NEW SOLUTIONS, Vol. 21(2) 299-311, 2011

Voices

AMANDA HAWES: A FORMIDABLE FORCE FOR

CHEMICAL COMPANIES TO CONTEND WITH

IN WORKER HEALTH AND SAFETY CASES

ANN SAPONARA

Amanda Hawes’ pioneering exploration of how far law and science can mesh

for occupational health and safety is four decades running and still going strong.

Mandy, as she is known by many, sues chemical companies on behalf of clients

who have developed cancer, or whose children were born with birth defects, after

industrial exposure to toxic chemicals. Her work is based on the belief that

these illnesses could have been prevented in safer work environments. I worked

for Mandy from 1996 to 1999 as a young lawyer. I interviewed Mandy in October

and November of 2009 and then interviewed current and former clients, col-

leagues, expert witnesses including neonatologist Dr. Cynthia Bearer, and finally

Mandy’s own son, Kyle. Mandy has a very clear purpose and commitment to

translating complex scientific concepts into legal arguments that chemical com-

panies “should have known better” than to put their workers in harm’s way.

Mandy Hawes is a 1968 graduate of Harvard Law School, one of fewer than

25 women who graduated that year, and has been suing chemical companies for

almost 40 years. Petite, tenacious, and fearless, she has represented hundreds of

workers with cancer after many years of industrial exposure to chemicals. She

argues that the chemical companies knew that exposure to the organic solvents

used by workers to make microchips, electronics, tires, aluminum cans—all

manner of products we consumers consume—could cause gene mutations or

could irreparably harm a developing fetus when a pregnant woman is exposed

to toxics on her job. On solving the mysteries of how workers or their kids

got sick, Mandy says: “I piece together both what the workers were doing, what

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chemicals they were exposed to and if it was preventable, what was done by

the chemical companies or not done that caused this to happen.” She scours

the scientific literature with the trained eye of a self-taught scientist and the

single-mindedness of a lawyer. Representing one worker at a time, or sometimes

a group of workers with similar types of cancers, against some of the biggest

chemical companies in the world is her life’s work. It’s a hard way of winning

change in an intransigent industry, but it has been Mandy’s way.

My first experience with Mandy was while working on a case on behalf of

one worker against eight chemical companies. We represented the widow and

two children of a worker whose name was Glenn. Glenn worked at an aluminum

manufacturing plant where for many years he was exposed to paints, coatings,

and can liner sprays. He developed an aggressive brain tumor and died. The

workers who showed us the plant and talked about the chemicals and the

processes loved Mandy; she easily forgave those who did not want to talk, and

she was at complete ease with suing eight major chemical companies represented

by legions of lawyers for supplying the same chemicals that Glenn had been

exposed to—or different versions of them. She knew the science inside and

out and the litigation, too.

On one occasion I tagged along with Mandy for a deposition of a chemist

speaking on behalf of a chemical company sued in the case. He had been chosen

by the company to defend the hazard information his company provided to

workers about the hazards of chemicals Glenn had used before he died. While

waiting for the deposition to start, Mandy was chatting with the chemist and

the other attorneys about soccer with a happy familiarity. Mandy is easy-going,

a sports enthusiast, a runner of 43 marathons, and pretty unassuming at

5’1” and 110 pounds. Things changed when the deposition started. Although I

knew Mandy had an uncompromising agenda of accountability for chemical

companies, I had never seen it fully in action. Neither had the chemist. Sitting

around a huge conference table with the court reporter typing, there were a few

preliminaries about the chemist’s name and his work history and his job, which

was in an office and not at the plant. He was still at ease. Then, with no notes but

with a wholly unapologetic polite directness, Mandy began naming one chemical

after another, asking about its properties and the chemical make-up of products

the company manufactured. The chemist’s jaw dropped as his answers quickly

revealed he knew far less chemistry than Mandy did. He looked shell-shocked

as he endured citations of epidemiology and toxicology studies and questions

about them. He had not a clue about processes at the plant where the worker’s

exposure occurred. Mandy, again with no notes and in quick succession, asked

him questions about the scientific studies she had found. He could not say he

had read or heard of a single study.

I am sure the chemical companies’ lawyers and Mandy already knew how

that deposition would go down. I think Mandy would have been genuinely

surprised if the chemist did know any of the answers to her questions during the

300 / SAPONARA

deposition. Mandy says they never know because they never look. And the

chemical company lawyers were well acquainted with Mandy’s then 30-year

history of litigating these cases. It was only the chemist and I who got an

education at that deposition. We were the only ones who didn’t know the chemist

was road kill. The chemical companies’ lawyers’ were not taken aback by the

“gotcha” moments because they and Mandy knew that the real battle involves

motion after motion, with expert declarations on both sides about which company

should have known what scientific evidence when, and whether an individual

study can prove “causation” (i.e., that a particular chemical was more likely

than not to cause the worker’s cancer). The chemical companies’ arguments are

always that the studies Mandy cites are “junk science,” and that workers could

not have been protected more adequately than they were, and Mandy’s argu-

ments are always that they should have known long ago what more could have

been done but purposely buried their heads in the sand.

In Glenn’s case, the chemical company defendants argued that his brain

tumor was just a fluke mutation of a gene. Mandy countered their claims with

scientific studies showing the particular type of brain tumor Glenn developed

was statistically significantly more likely to occur after his exposure to

solvents. The chemical companies had experts saying the opposite. I left the

firm for personal reasons during the trial so I do not know the terms of the

settlement for Glenn’s family; Mandy cannot tell me because they are con-

fidential. Whatever they were, one of the goals Mandy has in every case was

accomplished: solely by virtue of litigating the case, Mandy put the eight

chemical companies forever “on notice” of the studies of the chemicals at issue

as well as the opinions of the expert witnesses, whom her firm hired, that

industrial exposure to those chemicals is not safe. In Mandy’s view, win, lose

or settle, her effort was worth it because in the next case, the next lawyer for

chemical companies might have some real problems with the oft-repeated defense

of “we didn’t know.”

Mandy argues in each of her cases that chemical companies are such sophis-

ticated entities, with vast resources and highly trained and knowledgeable

people, that they have the means, the legal duty, and the moral obligation to

read the research on chemicals, to do their own testing of chemicals, to carefully

scrutinize worker safety and to warn workers of the results. Better yet, they

should work as tirelessly as she does to “eliminate the job hazard, not the job.”

Currently, Mandy represents a group of workers who have blood cancer after

years of working for the Uniroyal Tire Company in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

In 2006, Mandy sued Exxon Mobil, Sunoco, Texaco, Ashland Chemical, Shell

Oil, and others, on behalf of Uniroyal Tire Company workers. These chemical

companies allegedly supplied benzene-containing rubber solvent to Uniroyal,

and Mandy believes that occupational exposure to this carcinogenic material

caused these cancers. Mandy maintains that death from lymphohematopoetic

cancer has been a serious problem in the tire industry for years.

AMANDA HAWES / 301

Joyce Jenson is the lead plaintiff and worked at Uniroyal from 1964 to 1974,

before marrying and moving to Michigan. She did administrative work for

the next 30 years at another company. While at Uniroyal, Joyce was a “splicer,”

working two tables with foot pedals to cut sheets of rubber that went to workers

who would build the tire around a drum. From a five-gallon container of rubber

solvent that splicers had at their workstation, she would fill a bottle and squirt

the rubber with rubber solvent (or “gas” as it was known to Joyce and her

co-workers). The “gas” was applied to keep the rubber from sticking to itself so

it would flow smoothly. About two times a day, Joyce also waxed the tables

she worked on and poured “gas” all over them to help defeat the tackiness of

the incoming sheets of rubber. That is a job benzene does in many scenarios,

including as an additive to the gasoline we pump into our cars, ensuring that it

flows smoothly. In 2003, Joyce was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a bone

marrow cancer. Joyce points out that today, gas stations have warning signs

about carcinogens, or cancer-causing agents, in use at the gas pump.

The idea that “gas” could cause blood cancers never occurred to Joyce while

she was working at Uniroyal. “I never gave it a thought,” she says. “I was young

and when you work for someone you have faith that they wouldn’t have you

doing something unsafe. You trust your employer to keep you safe.”

When Joyce was in her early sixties and her days at Uniroyal long since passed,

she broke a rib and her doctor found abnormalities in a bone density test. She

was referred to an osteoporosis doctor who took more tests. While sitting at her

desk at work, she got a call from a medical assistant who told her the additional

lab results were also abnormal and they were referring her to an oncologist/

hematologist. They suspected multiple myeloma. Joyce was shocked, both by

the news and by having received it over the phone. She sat at her desk crying.

“You just assume the worst,” she said. She went home to cry in the arms of

her husband who, ironically, was a safety engineer. She looked up “multiple

myeloma” on the computer and it really scared her. She read the words “longevity

is very short,” panicked in thinking of her son and husband, and decided then

and there to stop reading anything more before she saw a doctor. She then had a

skeletal survey where x-rays of each bone in her body were taken, many urine

and blood lab tests, a bone marrow biopsy, and a seemingly endless Fourth of

July holiday weekend that delayed test results. Finally, on July 18, her oncologist

gave her the diagnosis of multiple myeloma. Luckily, she says, she was “at

Stage I,” the earliest stage of the disease which is called “smoldering,” and her

doctor was optimistic about treatment. She began a new drug that is a “bone

strengthener” and took that for two years. She now goes to the Mayo Clinic once

every three weeks to receive an infusion of a drug newer to the market that is

also meant to strengthen her bones.

Soon after Joyce was diagnosed in July of 2003, she went to a reunion picnic

at Uniroyal tires because she thought it would be nice to see old friends. She

was greeted by a large hanging banner announcing a fundraiser for “Barb,” who

302 / SAPONARA

was in the hospital with very advanced multiple myeloma. Joyce had worked

with Barbara, who was younger than she, and was shocked to hear Barbara was

ill with Stage IV multiple myeloma.

About a year went by and Joyce’s brother found studies published on the

Internet showing benzene can cause blood cancers. He researched more, found

animal and epidemiological studies, and began searching for a lawyer. Mandy

agreed to fly to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in November of 2004 to meet with

Joyce, her husband, Barbara, a friend of Barbara’s who was also a splicer, and a

union representative invited by Joyce. Joyce remembers sitting next to Mandy

observing how fast Mandy was typing, and that she was getting every word.

“She didn’t miss a beat,” she says. Joyce marvels at what a “little lady” Mandy is.

Joyce says she was at first intimidated at the meeting because she “doesn’t have

all those fancy degrees” and was worried about what she could remember

about Uniroyal because it had been so long ago. But Mandy put Joyce at ease.

Joyce now describes Mandy as “very bright but not intimidating,” and always

encouraging and upbeat. Joyce says there’s no question she can ask that Mandy

doesn’t consider important: “if it’s important to you, it’s important to her to

answer. . . . She makes you feel good and makes you feel important.”

As in all the many other cases similar to Joyce’s that Mandy has pursued

over the years, she is unrelenting in the pursuit of chemical companies who

supplied rubber solvent to Uniroyal in Wisconsin. “She really digs,” Joyce says.

Mandy gained access to the Uniroyal plant and has been through it several

times. She has encouraged others to research death records to see if Uniroyal

workers died of blood cancers at a proportionally greater rate than in Wisconsin

as a whole. She has interviewed countless co-workers and plant guards who

saw what was coming and going. Joyce tells of Mandy interviewing her boss,

whom she describes as a “white shirt man,” and who was unwilling to talk to

Mandy at the beginning. When he got cancer himself, he wanted to share

information. Mandy was just as understanding of his unwillingness to talk as

she was of his change of heart.

Barbara died some years ago. Joyce still goes to a multiple myeloma support

group she began when she was first diagnosed. She is the only one in her

group still at Stage I. Others are far worse off. “I’m waiting for the other shoe to

drop but it hasn’t and I just count my blessings,” she says, “The thing you

live with is the hope that there are always new drugs” and Joyce has faith that

her doctor is “very up on” all the new drugs. Joyce worked with a friend at

Uniroyal in Wisconsin who, unlike Joyce, moved with the company to a new

plant in Alabama in 1991. She says her friend still sprays rubber solvent to keep

rubber from sticking together. She can’t believe that after all the studies, toxic

chemicals are still being used in tire production. Her friend has not become

sick and is not worried, and the pay is good. The chemical companies do not

admit to liability, and the case for Joyce, Barbara’s heirs, and a number of their

co-workers is ongoing.

AMANDA HAWES / 303

In order to fight these battles, Mandy taught herself chemistry, toxicology,

and epidemiology in her long career. She says, “I try to take the lessons from

one case or set of cases and work on some way of changing something so harm

doesn’t keep on happening.”

Mandy recently responded to a request on a listserv of worker health advocates,

after the BP oil spill, that asked what the ambient air standards for VOCs (volatile

organic chemicals) should be in the Gulf to protect workers. Toluene is a

chemical present in the oil spill cleanup, and the activists asked for information

about it. Mandy immediately sent a 1993 study from the U.S. Consumer Product

Safety Commission entitled “Hazard Assessment for Spray Paint and Paint

Stripper Containing Toluene,” a Memorandum from the U.S. Consumer Product

Safety Commission in Washington, D.C., dated May 27, 1993. Mandy had

found the document when litigating a birth defects case for a worker’s daughter,

who was born blind and with oral clefts after her mom was exposed to toluene

on the job during her pregnancy. The particular study she forwarded to Gulf

activists on the listserv is a study discussing the history of revised standards for

toluene in 1992, a byzantine process that included many agencies and studies.

This article led the ever-tenacious Mandy to the ACGIH 1992 documentation

on toluene that, in its 13 pages, refers in a single sentence to a 1986 epidemio-

logical survey published in a journal called Safety and Health Aspects of Organic

Solvents [1]. This documentation, in turn, became an element of the liability she

argued applied to the chemical company she sued on behalf of the girl born with

birth defects in 1994. According to Mandy, the employer should have known

about the developmental effects of toluene at levels relevant to the workplace

and had a duty to warn the mom and her co-workers of these risks. As Mandy

says, she “always argues that the most relevant standard is the one that is most

health protective vis-à-vis the most vulnerable endpoint.” Mandy has never

accepted any standard except the one she finds for a particular chemical in a

particular case that is the most health protective; this issue becomes a focus of the

litigation. Mandy then compiles “snapshots” of what was in the peer-reviewed

literature when a particular worker was exposed to a particular chemical, whether

in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s or now. Mandy says, it’s “what employers, chemical

suppliers, etc. [were] supposed to know about, warn about, and most importantly,

do something about.”

The fact that there is not one set of standards for everyone when it comes to

toxic chemical exposure is a major motivator for Mandy’s work—she believes

without compromise that there should be a single set of standards, with the most

protective ever declared anywhere in the world as the one that should be adopted.

The argument she has made in every one of her cases is that OSHA PELs (the

Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Permissible Exposure Limits)

for workers are “no good,” as Mandy succinctly puts it. Looking at the website

by OSHA for the BP oil spill, it is remarkable to see her views of the past 30

years vindicated by the agency itself for the first time ever. In the first FAQ about

304 / SAPONARA

the spill, “Does OSHA use its Permissible Exposure Limits (PELs) to determine

what exposures are safe for workers?” OSHA’s response is:

No. OSHA recognizes that most of its PELs are outdated and inadequate

measures of worker safety . . . [i]n characterizing worker exposure OSHA

instead relies on more up-to-date recommended protective limits set by

organizations such as NIOSH, the American Conference of Governmental

Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH), and the American Industrial Hygiene Asso-

ciation (AIHA), and not on the older, less protective PELS [2].

When I sent the FAQ link to Mandy by e-mail, her response was: “Nice.”

Mandy’s underwhelming reaction is understandable. She has argued long and

hard that chemical companies should not be able to hide behind OSHA standards.

In each of her cases about what the applicable standard should be for what is

“safe” worker exposure, chemical companies say they can’t be liable because

they complied with OSHA. In an interview with Mandy before the BP oil spill

occurred, Mandy spoke of the amazing fact that OSHA standards, which are

meant to protect workers, are far less stringent than environmental standards:

“It took years and huge fights with the chemical industry to get an OSHA standard

of 1 ppm of benzene in workplace air. But environmental standards for benzene

are much stronger and more protective than this 1 ppm standard.” Mandy likes

to pose this question: “How long does a worker have to be exposed to benzene

at the OSHA legal limit of 1 ppm to have been exposed to a lifetime dose of

benzene measured by a health-protective environmental standard? Ten years?

Five years? One year? Three months?” The answer, according to Mandy, is

none of the above: it’s less than three months. California’s Office of Health

Hazard Assessment recommends that exposure not exceed 7 ppb, which is

thousands of times lower than the OSHA “permissible exposure limit” of

100 ppm. And the American Petroleum Industry has been on record since

1948 that “the only safe level of exposure to benzene is zero,”[3] but, Mandy

says, that information has not been shared with workers.

Since that interview I conducted with Mandy on November 13, 2009, OSHA

itself has come to disagree with its own PELs, but that’s just the first hurdle

in Mandy’s cases anyway. Next comes which standard should apply. There are

so many different standards for each individual chemical from a vast array of

agencies, that there is much argument for attorneys on both sides to make.

The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), ATSDR (Agency for Toxic

Substances and Disease Registry), IARC (International Agency for Research

on Cancer), California’s OEHHA (Office of Environmental Health Hazard

Assessment), and the ACGIH (American Conference of Industrial Hygienists)

all publish standards and do not agree on the most protective standard. To

those of us for whom science doesn’t come easily, the agencies themselves

don’t make it easy.

AMANDA HAWES / 305

As David Pellow, a co-editor with David Sonnenfeld and Mandy’s husband

Ted Smith, of Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice

in the Global Electronics Industry [4], said in an interview with Mandy: “You

have been able to demystify this whole science of epidemiology and toxicology.

You’ve broken this very complex stuff down so that people can understand

it. You have developed a real skill to the point where you seem to know this

better than anybody.” In an article Mandy wrote for a nonprofit called “Just

Transition Alliance,” she set forth an explanation that I would rename “Chemical

Knowledge for Dummies.” Mandy’s main points in the article were that while

“organic” means wholesome and natural and healthy to most of us, it is quite

the opposite for “organic solvents” commonly used in industrial settings. In

that case, “organic” only means a compound whose molecule contains carbon.

Organic solvents work well in cleaning fast and leaving shinier surfaces. They

also put the staying power in paint after it dries and after the solvents from

the paint have evaporated. Organic solvents like benzene, trichloroethylene

(TCE), and toluene vaporize (evaporate into the air) and that’s why paints can

be smelly. Unless you are wearing a respirator or are working with fantastic

local exhaust ventilation when you apply solvent-based paints, solvent-based

pesticides, solvent-based cleaning products, or solvent-based beauty products,

you are around solvent vapors. We all instinctively know it’s not wholesome

or good for us but we figure that a few squirts to clean or a little color on our

nails or a little product on our hair or painting our rooms is not going to kill

us. And we’re probably right. It’s never been the consumers or the weekend

gardener for whom Mandy works so hard. Mandy fights to prevent the day-in

and day-out use of organic solvents by workers, since such exposure crosses

the blood-brain barrier and goes “straight to your head.” Chronic occupational

exposure is Mandy’s concern, and harmed kidneys, liver problems, cancer

and birth defects in children exposed in utero are her cases. And many

workers work with more than one organic solvent at the same time, so

that the risks are likely to be greater. Those are the basics of chemicals

and worker safety according to one who has made those two realities her

life’s work.

Mandy is unique in insisting that the law and science must mesh for worker

safety in hard cases that most lawyers shy away from. She doesn’t take the

route of representing workers exposed to asbestos, or to cigarette smoke, where

the science is well established. She takes cases that often require science never

tested in a legal forum before and she pushes to the limit what law and science

together can do on behalf of workers.

Mandy’s son Kyle, who is a firefighter in San Diego, says, “Mom has this

insatiable desire to just go for it in life against the odds; not pity yourself

for having to go against the odds—just get out there and do it because there’s

no reason not to because life is too short.” He says it comes from her dad

(his grandpa), “this feeling of ‘I can do anything.’” “She has this David versus

306 / SAPONARA

Goliath perspective” and “wants to be a voice of the small person” against these

major corporations.

Gail Bateson is the Executive Director of Worksafe!, a non-profit on whose

board Mandy serves. Gail has a master’s degree in Energy and Resources, but

it’s Mandy’s energy and enthusiasm that she reveres: “Mandy is filled with joy

and has a clear internal sense of purpose. . . . She does not live in a place of fear.”

Gail describes Mandy’s attitude as “We’ll get through this and isn’t it fun to

be part of the struggle?”

Dr. Cynthia Bearer, who is Chief of Neonatology at the University of

Maryland, has served as an expert witness in Mandy’s cases nearly a dozen

times. In preparing a case well before she’s involved, Dr. Bearer says of Mandy:

“She will go through piles of literature on any particular topic very thoroughly

for the toxicological properties of every chemical that might be at issue.” She

says, “Mandy has read all the scientific articles I have and she thoroughly

understands the issues.” About Mandy defending her in a deposition, Dr. Bearer

says with a chuckle, “I feel very well-protected by Mandy.” Dr. Bearer thinks

Mandy’s motivation in pursuing her work is akin to that of a scientist: “to know

when you’re moving from the cutting edge of science to a close approximation

of the truth.” Dr. Bearer explains, “in science, we never know what ‘the truth’

is; we don’t have absolute certitude. We only have a current paradigm of what

we think the truth is. Paradigms are constantly evolving. The point at which

we’ve accumulated enough of a body of knowledge to say ‘we think we know

a truth’ is the ultimate question for a scientist.” She thinks Mandy loves this

challenge too, on top of being “an incredibly intense and intelligent woman

always fighting for better conditions for women and, in the work I mostly do

with her, for their unborn kids.”

Dr. Bearer’s work right now focuses on a phenomenon called “lipid rafts.”

She is exploring how solvent exposure can cause dysfunction of lipid rafts so

that communication to the central nervous system is impaired. As Dr. Bearer

explains, when a pregnant woman is exposed to solvents, the lipid raft dys-

function from solvents can have a devastating impact on the developing brain

of her unborn child. Making the connection between Dr. Bearer’s research (and

others’) and chemical companies’ accountability to a child born with birth

defects is not for your average lawyer or scientist. Mandy melds both worlds.

Mandy explained to me that Dr. Bearer’s research was about the mechanisms

of fetal damage from lipid-raft disruption secondary to solvent exposure. It’s

relevant, Mandy says, because her work “helps eliminate any lingering doubt

about whether regular exposure to industrial solvents during pregnancy is

‘okay.’” She continues: “It’s not and it never has been.” Chemical companies

always argue that unless a scientifically plausible mechanism has been identified

and is generally accepted in the scientific community, it is simply too soon to

rush to judgment and conclude that there is an association between the chemical

and any adverse health outcomes (and therefore that the chemical company has

AMANDA HAWES / 307

some responsibility). Dr. Bearer said in our interview, “If it’s already in a

textbook, that means it’s dated and there’s probably more recent research out

there to be considered too.” One of the standards for establishing causation in

law is biological plausibility. It’s the plausibility part that fascinates Dr. Bearer

and motivates her work and, I think it does for Mandy, too. For Mandy, the

“generally accepted” chemical company standard is far too late for working

people “to get real protection from toxics like substituting safe production

methods” rather than current exposure realities to toxic solvents.

During the course of our interviews, when I asked Mandy to put all humility

aside, she shoots a look as if to say I’ve crossed the line from asking softball

questions to playing hardball. She is relentless in wanting to deflect credit and

focus attention to others. So I ask her why she does what she does. She says,

“I’m not afraid of anything. Having a law degree and having mixed it up with

the outfits I’ve mixed it up with, either you just get totally disgusted and fed

up or you go, well, I can do this just as well as you can but I got news: I can last

longer than you. Because I really do care and believe in what I’m doing and

I don’t do it for the money.” Mandy lives modestly and invests much of what she

earns as a lawyer into supporting nonprofit environmental and health groups,

and in doing her best to be well prepared for her next case.

The most high-profile cases Mandy has been involved with were the IBM

cases on behalf of “clean room” workers. Clean rooms are immaculately clean

of even the smallest particles, such as dust, for the manufacture of semiconductor

chips. Mandy represented hundreds of former IBM employees in San Jose,

California, and Fishkill, New York, from 1997 to 2005. Her clients believed

their rare cancers or their children’s birth defects were caused by the industrial

exposure to the many hundreds of chemicals that went into making the chips.

Ultimately, the various IBM cases resolved differently. A judge in San Jose

adopted the chemical companies’ “junk science” arguments and excluded a

great deal of key scientific testimony, which resulted in a finding of no liability

against IBM in a highly publicized fraud case brought by two IBM workers

from the San Jose plant who had developed cancer. In New York much of that

same scientific evidence was found admissible.

An exposure that was common to most of the electronics workers from

the 1970s whom Mandy has represented came from “vapor degreasers” used to

clean computer components by immersing them in solvent vapors generated by

converting solvents from the liquid to the gas phase. Mandy says, “the degreasers

in that era were very primitive. They typically had a ‘cooling coil’ around the

top degreaser to turn the vapor back into liquid. And when maintenance workers

would sometimes pass out from the accumulation of heavier-than-air vapors

escaping the degreaser, these events were hushed up fast. Product literature that

would have the worker believe that the vapors created by the degreaser would

all stay within its confines was a form of magical thinking. Many workers later

were disabused of this magical thinking in ways that were tragic for them and

308 / SAPONARA

often for their offspring exposed in utero.” While these problems were occurring

on the shop floor, “the EPA took action because of concern that escaping vapors

of these chlorinated solvents would cause a hole in the ozone layer,” she con-

tinues, and therefore many of these solvents were gradually phased out. With a

ferocious intensity, Mandy says: “You sure as hell don’t have to get as far as the

ozone layer to realize these vapors are horrible and can be lethal for the people on

the ground, feet touching earth, exposed to this day in and day out on their jobs.”

Several excellent articles have been written about the IBM cases, one by

a graduate student in journalism at Stanford named Lily Bixler called “The

Clean Room: Why did so many IBM employees come down with cancer after

working in Silicon Valley?,” which appeared in a Stanford-published journal

of new voices [5]. Another, by Jim Thompson, was called “Poison Valley: Is

workers’ health the price we pay for high-tech progress?” and was published

by Salon in 2001 [6].

The IBM cases were a David-versus-Goliath fight, the only kind Mandy

fights. Although she was gravely disappointed by the verdict in the one San Jose

case that went to trial on claims of fraudulent concealment by IBM, one of

Mandy’s proudest moments as a lawyer is that a large health monitoring database

that IBM kept for more than 30 years was made available for analysis. It took

Mandy five years in litigation to uncover the raw data that comprised what

IBM itself called the “Corporate Mortality File” and have it analyzed by

epidemiologists; when the judge in San Jose excluded the analysis from the jury

hearing the fraud cause, she vowed to “get the data sprung.” It was. In 2006,

Dr. Richard Clapp, an epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public

Health, published a set of results based on 31,941 workers who died between

1969 and 2001, who had worked for at least five years and whose death infor-

mation was collected in the corporate mortality file with “a unique identifier . . .

so that the death and work history data for individual decedents could be linked.”

The article appeared in the May 2006 edition of a peer reviewed journal,

Environmental Health [7]. When accessed online, the article is highlighted

as both “Highly Accessed” and “Open Access.” What was cloistered by IBM

for so long now has had many readers on the Internet. The study found signifi-

cantly elevated levels of specific cancers in manufacturing workers: including

lymphohematopoetic cancers, brain and central nervous system cancer, kidney

cancer, melanoma of the skin, and pancreatic cancer. The San Jose jury in the

case of Alida Hernandez and Jim Moore did not have access to the data or

the analysis, but word that it has been “highly accessed” since then is music

to Mandy’s ears.

Mandy has ridden a tumultuous 30-year route that has at times seen environ-

mentalists pushing aside labor and belittling the word “worker” as pejorative.

On the flip side, labor unions have belittled environmentalists as ivory-tower

types knowing nothing about life with feet on the ground. Mandy doesn’t care

about those long-thriving tensions, and she never has. What she cares about

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is what she calls a “life-cycle approach.” As she describes it, she would do

nothing less than:

Close the gap between workplace and environmental standards. Phase out

organic solvents in industrial processes. ‘Replace the job hazard, not the

job.’ If it’s worthwhile, you can find a way to do it without hazardous

materials. Green jobs should not only mean jobs that help the environment

but also jobs that are non-toxic for workers doing them. Medical surveillance

to exposed workers should be commonplace instead of steadfastly avoided;

it would make early detection of worker ill health possible. And doctors

should have to report all suspected cases of industrial poisoning; that very

documentation could save the next person’s life.

Mandy is amazed that even cancer doctors often don’t obtain patients’ work

histories. She calls it a head-in-the-sand approach. “If it’s not an oncologist’s

job to record work history information for an epidemiologist or public health

official to analyze, then whose is it?” she says. “For decades Scandinavian

countries have prioritized worker health and shown that prevention does pay.

For example, when kids are born with serious problems, what Mom and Dad were

doing for a job has been important information that is recorded; patterns of

exposure and any adverse birth outcomes are taken seriously. Similar concern

and attention is paid to worker exposures and patterns of chronic disease. Around

here, this level of concern for protecting health of chemically exposed workers

and their families is all too rare. And the human costs of not taking preventive

action end up being ‘outsourced’ to the victims and to the public sector.”

Mandy wants chemists, doctors, and environmental community activists to

take a life-cycle approach so we get the chemicals out of the stream of commerce

before people are made sick at work for making the products:

Messing around with BPA [bisphenol-A] in baby bottles is the consumer-end

or the waste-end and then you’re missing the biggest opportunity which is

the process of how it’s made. The chemical companies love the disparity

between the consumer end of it and lame OSHA laws; they’re not scared

at all. They have blinders on for a purpose. We should be talking about

prevention, fighting the development of disease . . . if we all have to pay for it,

then we’ll be more interested in employers being proactive and protecting

their workers. And if chemical companies are held accountable for failing

to protect and warn workers of toxics, then they’ll begin to think their

responsibility goes beyond their shareholders.

About consumer advocacy to remove chemicals from toys and plastics and nail

polish, Mandy says: “Think about it: where did those products come from?

They got made someplace. And the choices about what materials get put in the

product impact tremendously whether they’re a problem in an environment.”

Joyce Jenson wonders and fears whether Mandy, who is the same age as she

at 67 years old, will one day retire. Mandy’s son Kyle says he doesn’t see it.

310 / SAPONARA

“There’s lots she still wants to do and she says she won’t stop until she stops

enjoying it,” he says. “She’s still making progress.” As for Mandy, she’s working

on a project to index scientific studies to more easily prove when chemical

companies were “on notice” of harm their chemical products could cause,

either as identified in animal studies or in epidemiological studies. She is still

litigating. And she is still taking time every week to dance in the garden with her

granddaughter Roma, a time she calls “Romatherapy.” She’s still running and

dancing in her spare time and she intends to outrun her chemical company

competitors in some of her latest cases.

NOTES

1. Peter C. Holmberg, et al., “Solvent Exposure and Birth Defects: An Epidemiologic

Survey,” in Safety and Health Aspects of Organic Solvents, eds V. Riihimäki and

U. Ulfvarson (New York: Alan R. Liss, Inc., 1986), pp. 179-185.

2. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “Frequently Asked Questions on

Health Hazards and Protections,” http://www.osha.gov/oilspills/interim-guidance-

qa.html#qa (accessed February 26, 2011).

3. American Petroleum Institute (API), Toxicological Review: Benzene, September 1948

(p. 4).

4. Ted Smith, David A. Sonnenfeld, and David Naguib Pellow, eds., Challenging the

Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

5. Lily Bixler, “The Clean Room: Why did so many IBM employees come down with

cancer after working in Silicon Valley?” http://journalism.stanford.edu/studentworks/

2010/bixler-clean-room.pdf (accessed February 26, 2011).

6. Jim Thompson, “Poison Valley: Is workers’ health the price we pay for high-tech

progress?” Salon, July 30 & 31, 2001, http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2001/

07/30/almaden1 (accessed February 27, 2011).

7. Richard Clapp, “Mortality Among U.S. Employees of a Large Computer Manufacturing

Company: 1969-2001,” Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source, 5:30

(2006), doi: 10.1186/1476-069X-5-30.

Direct reprint requests to:

Ann Saponara

43153 Luzon Dr.

Fremont, CA 94539

e-mail: AnnSaponara@gmail.com

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