Asbestos Company Liability

Manufacturers, plants, and companies that produced asbestos-containing products between 1940 and the 1970s were aware of the dangers of asbestos and chose not to inform their workers. Because of this emphasis on profit, rather than on the health of their employees, thousands of workers were blindly working in an environment that regularly exposed them to a potent carcinogen.

Even before asbestos was in widespread use, knowledge of its dangers was available. Internal documents from corporate files shows that not only did the companies know of the hazards of asbestos, but that they also took deliberate steps to prevent publication or mention of asbestos related dangers.

An obvious instance of this coverup is when Sumner Simpson, the president of Raybestos-Manhatten, wrote to Vandiver Brown, head of Johns-Manville's (a large asbestos company) legal department in 1935. In the letter he said, "I think the less said about asbestos the better off we are." Brown replied, "I quite agree with you that our interests are best served by having asbestosis [an asbestos caused disease] receive the minimum of publicity."

In the late 1930s, asbestos company officials met in New York City and there agreed to secretly finance animal experiments at the Trudeau Foundation's Saranac Laboratory in Saranac, NY. The purpose of these studies was to support a defense to lawsuits that were beginning to be brought against the asbestos companies. In early drafts of the report, there were references to the findings that animals exposed to asbestos developed cancer. however, the final report made no mention to cancer. The revised report was also silent in its criticism of the asbestos dust threshold limit value (TLV) and previously published studies that linked asbestos with cancer.

As information regarding the dangers of asbestos became more widely known to asbestos manufacturers, the industry grew increasingly fearful that the dangers of asbestos would be widely publicized, damaging their profits. Asbestos companies opposed a health and safety booklet regarding asbestos because "the booklet creates fear in the minds of buyers, users, and workers without justification. These fears would be damaging to the entire industry." The asbestos industry was aware that this was a problem that affected the entire all asbestos manufacturing companue, and consequently worked together to keep the dangers of asbestos from becoming well known to the public.

The bottom line, with regard to the liability of asbestos companues, is that the companies that made and marketed asbestos products knew that the products they were releasing to the American public and to the American workforce could cause serious illness, including asbestosis, lung cancer, mesothelioma, and other cancers. Rather than removing employees from this potentially deadly environment , they chose to let their workers continue working in an asbestos hazardous environment; the asbestos companies chose to put profits over the lives of their employees - and their customers.