Corporate cover-ups of asbestos dangers: what decades of litigation have revealed

Barry Castleman wrote a doctoral thesis about the history of corporate knowledge of asbestos hazards and published a book, now in its 5th edition (2005), Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects. As an expert witness in trials since 1979, he’s obtained access to documents disclosed by a large number of corporations in discovery.

In this opinion piece, Castleman shares his insights on what he has learned in a Q&A with Confront.

“What did industry know back then?” With over 200,000 Americans who are estimated to have died from asbestos exposure since 2000, this is the question people have been asking for decades when trying to determine how much companies knew about the lethality of asbestos.

Internal historic corporate documents, revealed in personal injury lawsuits in the USA since the 1960s, have disclosed many ways that corporations failed to reduce asbestos hazards. Later, this was augmented by disinformation campaigns. Ultimately, these documents illustrate how generations of workers and the public were needlessly exposed to mortal dangers by business executives. 

Q: When was it first understood that asbestos dust was lethal?

The hazards of asbestos were noted by British factory inspectors in 1898. In 1918, insurance actuary Frederick Hoffman wrote that it was generally the practice of life insurance companies in the US and Canada to decline to insure asbestos workers “on account of the assumed health-injurious conditions in the industry”.

In the 1920s, the lung scarring disease asbestosis was identified in reports of totally disabling and fatal cases following asbestos exposure. Medical surveys of asbestos factory workers showed that 25% or more of them had asbestosis, and national requirements for asbestos dust control and compensation for asbestosis were enacted in some countries in the 1930s. Asbestosis is a potentially fatal disease, and it still has no known cure. 

The early literature also described the protective measures needed. The first medical survey of asbestosis in asbestos textile factory workers detailed the need for local exhaust ventilation, wet methods of processing, and housekeeping measures to avoid the accumulation of dust on floors and equipment. Dust respirators were recommended as a last resort. 

This 1930 British government report, widely cited in the literature, also recommended education of the worker to a “sane appreciation” of the delayed lethal risk. 

Lung cancer in workers with asbestosis was the subject of case reports in 1935-36. By the end of 1938, German state insurance carriers were compensating lung cancer with even slight asbestosis as occupational cancer. Government officials in Britain in 1949 reported that 13% of (235) people known to have died with asbestosis also had cancers of the lung and pleura. The corresponding pulmonary cancer rate in general autopsies was then only 1%. Epidemiological studies in the US and UK in the mid-1950s confirmed that asbestos-exposed workers had an increased rate of lung cancer.

Primary cancer of the pleura, or mesothelioma, was exceedingly rare when it was first recognised as an occupational cancer of asbestos workers in 1943. In the 1960s, epidemiologists showed that mesothelioma was not only an occupational disease of work with asbestos, but it also occurred among family members of the workers because of the dust brought into the home by the workers on their clothes. Neighbours of asbestos plants – who did not live with anyone who worked with asbestos – were soon also identified as having an increased chance of developing this “signal tumour” of asbestos exposure. 

Q:  Upon learning that asbestos dust was potentially fatal, what was the reaction from the various industries which used asbestos?

Leading companies making asbestos products knew about asbestos hazards decades before they shared such knowledge with their workers and customers. 

It was widely known in major industries in the 1930s that asbestos dust caused asbestosis. 

As one of the most dangerous industrial dusts, various industrial insurance rates (workers’ compensation, group health and group life insurance, and later product liability) were increased for asbestos. 

Many large asbestos, oil, chemical, railroad, automobile, turbine, and shipbuilding companies had knowledge about asbestosis since the 1930s and 1940s. This came through company doctors and industrial hygienists receiving professional publications, subscribing to medical abstracting publications such as the Industrial Hygiene Digest, and participating in the National Safety Council, which had annual conferences and published numerous reports and magazines describing worker health hazards.  

Johns-Manville was the US industry leader in manufacturing asbestos products. Their Board of Directors paid off 11 asbestosis victims in New Jersey in 1933, also getting the lawyer who brought the cases to agree not to file any others. 

Johns-Manville and Raybestos-Manhattan executives repeatedly prevented the trade magazine, Asbestos, from mentioning asbestosis after 1930, a practice that the magazine continued until 1969. 

The Asbestos magazine letters were found in a cache of documents known as the ‘Sumner Simpson papers’. They were kept in a box handed down by Sumner Simpson, President of Raybestos-Manhattan in the 1930s and 1940s, to his son, who was running the company when the asbestos litigation hit.  

Journalists called it the “Pentagon Papers of the asbestos industry”. It showed evidence of secretly editing medical literature, suppressing research showing pulmonary cancers in experimental animals, getting employees’ chest X-rays taken by the Public Health Service after obtaining government assurance that the X-rays would not be given to lawyers, and suppressing an industry survey showing that asbestosis was widespread in asbestos textile plants. 

 

The leading roles in the cover-up were played by Raybestos-Manhattan President Simpson and Johns-Manville corporate lawyer Vandiver Brown. In order to keep asbestosis from being included in New Jersey’s workers’ compensation law in 1935, Brown got the authors to make critical changes to a published medical report on asbestosis at five asbestos plants.

Cancer findings in experimental animal studies were suppressed in the 1940s by asbestos company sponsors, whose right to approve or censor any report of the findings was stated in their research contract with the Saranac Laboratory. Corporate executives from nine sponsoring companies unanimously decided that all references to cancer and tumours must be removed from the published report – this instruction was followed, as shown in correspondence and the edited draft report.  

Q: What were some specific examples of major companies where workers were not being warned and/or protected from asbestos exposure?

Bendix

Bendix (now Honeywell) used Johns-Manville asbestos to make brake pads. In 1966, the Bendix purchasing director passed along an article from a chemical industry trade magazine to the sales manager at Johns-Manville. The article suggested that since asbestos causes cancer, there might be more markets for alternatives from the chemical industry. E.A. Martin at Bendix sarcastically wrote, “If you have enjoyed a good life while working with asbestos products, why not die from it?” 

Bendix, like the rest of the industry, apparently did not consider placing warning labels on boxes of brake pads until after being required to by US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations in 1972. 

Owens-Illinois

Owens-Illinois, a leading glass manufacturer, made widely used Kaylo thermal insulation starting in 1943 and immediately commissioned experimental animal studies of the product’s dust. The work was done by the Saranac Laboratory, whose records were made available by the defunct lab’s parent organisation, the Trudeau Foundation. 

The Saranac director reported to Owens-Illinois in 1948 that the longest-exposed animals all had developed asbestosis. He concluded that it was better to learn that in animals rather than later in industrial workers. “Thus the company, being forewarned, will be in a better position to institute adequate control measures for safeguarding exposed employees and protecting its own interests.”

Owens-Illinois never warned anyone about the product’s dangers, and even advertised Kaylo as “non-toxic” in the 1950s. Then Owens-Illinois sold the business in 1958, still taking on a lot of liability but getting out in time to later avoid filing for bankruptcy over asbestos litigation until 2020.

Alcoa

Alcoa is one of the largest metal producers in the world. Soon after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was created, it issued asbestos regulations requiring notification in writing to workers whose exposures to airborne asbestos dust were found to exceed the regulatory limits. Alcoa’s workers’ compensation manager noted that 50 employees in their Tennessee operations alone were being over-exposed to asbestos, along with 1 per cent of the hourly workforce.  Drawing the picture of indefensible workers’ compensation claims and union demands for safeguards, he concluded, “Perhaps we should consider not notifying the employee and taking our chances with an inspection and citation”.

One former employee with mesothelioma filed suit against Alcoa, claiming that his willful exposure with no warnings constituted intentional harm. Ordinarily, workers cannot sue their employers and are limited to low amounts of compensation under workers’ compensation laws. The plaintiff’s lawyers, in discovery, uncovered no evidence of notification to Alcoa’s workers about excessive asbestos exposure before 1983 and no records of compensation claims for asbestos disease. Alcoa paid to settle the case in 2017 after the court allowed unprecedented discovery of Alcoa records and ruled that the employee’s trial against Alcoa could proceed.

Owens-Corning Fiberglass

Owens-Corning Fiberglass is a Fortune 500 company founded in 1938. It used asbestos in an insulating cement along with fiberglass starting in 1941. Even so, they viewed the asbestos companies as competitors. A 1942 memo from the firm’s public relations chief to its president spoke of a “weapon-in-reserve” of hundreds of pages of articles on asbestosis, to use if they needed to during a pay dispute they had with a union. But this came up just weeks after the US entered World War II, and the union was never warned by Owens-Corning Fiberglass about asbestos. Owens-Corning Fiberglass later bought the Kaylo business from Owens-Illinois and did not apply health warning labels until 1970 or later.

US Gypsum

When US Gypsum finally put the required OSHA warning on its drywall patching compounds in 1973, one commercial customer was the manufacturing homes division of Westinghouse.  Westinghouse was initially unwilling to pay US Gypsum more for an asbestos-free formula. A US Gypsum employee noted that two-thirds of the Westinghouse workers walked off in protest. “Westinghouse’s reaction was to accept the non-asbestos formulation and to fire an agitator and the entire workforce that had left their jobs.” Westinghouse’s corporate industrial hygienist had recommended controls for asbestos dust at least as early as 1946 and 1948, though it is not known whether the recommendations were followed by plant management.

Ford 

It wasn’t until 1980 that Ford Motors affixed health warnings on boxes of Ford brake pads containing asbestos. 

Ford had spent nearly $40 million funding journal articles and expert testimony since 2000, according to a report by the Centre for Public Integrity in 2016. These studies argue that there is no evidence that brake mechanics are at an increased risk of developing mesothelioma. 

The studies contributed little new scientifically; it was mainly re-analyses of previously published work, despite a public health consensus having been achieved long before. The US brake industry trade association publicly warned of the cancer hazard from brake dust in 1978.

Ford continues to receive product liability claims from mechanics who have contracted mesothelioma. The company’s annual 10K report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for 2024 says, “The extent of our financial exposure to asbestos litigation remains very difficult to estimate and could include both compensatory and punitive damages awards… Annual payout and defense costs may become significant in the future.” The report does not say how many personal injury suits against Ford are pending.

Union Carbide

Union Carbide bought an asbestos mine in 1963 and pursued new markets, introducing asbestos commercially in oil-drilling “muds”. A Carbide asbestos salesman in London received the proceedings of the 1964 New York asbestos conference just before reporting on his unsuccessful effort to get a British company to use asbestos to make “sanitary tissue of the internal type”.

The “tampon memo” is emblematic of the lack of restraint in selling asbestos for anything and everything – including children’s modelling compounds, socks, towels, women’s coats, gas mask filters, cigarette filters and cigars.

Q. And what are some examples of actions taken by asbestos industry groups that were revealed in litigation?

Asbestos Textile Institute (ATI) minutes noted a 1949 Scientific American article citing asbestos as a cause of lung cancer. The 1956 minutes noted a medical publication saying asbestos factory neighbours were at risk of lung cancer. The minutes recorded a vote in 1957 against supporting an experimental study on asbestos and cancer: “such an investigation would stir up a hornet’s nest and put the whole industry under suspicion”.  

 

A major international conference on asbestos was convened in 1964 in New York. The conference organiser, Dr. Irving Selikoff, had just published an epidemiological mortality study documenting the highly excessive death rate among insulators from asbestosis, lung cancer, and mesothelioma.

Asbestos industry documents also show that the companies went to great lengths “to find some way of preventing Dr. Selikoff from creating problems and affecting sales,” as a 1965 Owens-Corning Fiberglass memo put it. ATI minutes describe member companies’ protests and threats, successfully preventing the distribution of press releases at the historic asbestos conference in New York in 1964. 

In 1965, the ATI noted that the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association saw the need for “alliance with some university such as McGill, so that authoritative background publicity can be had”. Thus began years of industry-sponsored research at McGill. 

Despite the pandemic recorded at the New York conference, reconfirmed by reports through the 1960s, asbestos use in the industrial nations kept increasing into the 1970s. 

Q. What else did litigation reveal about the actions of the asbestos industry?

Decades of litigation over asbestos have unearthed a veritable encyclopedia of wrongdoings. This history has involved the asbestos industry worldwide. The actions documented include: 

• Suppression of medical and experimental findings, manipulation of published reports, and suppression of references to asbestos hazards in the trade press.
• Publication of statements and reports by trade associations that asbestos products are not toxic, prolonged violation after regulations required health warning labels on asbestos products, and marketing of products without warning labels in some countries after starting to affix warnings on the same products in other countries. 
• Targeting of doctors raising public awareness about asbestos hazards.
• Settlement of damage suits on condition that the lawyer representing the workers file no more similar cases.
• Non-disclosure to employees of asbestosis revealed in their medical examinations. 
• Firing workers and busting unions for protesting asbestos hazards, firing and replacing workers before they had time to develop asbestos diseases from their exposures while employed.
• Exporting banned asbestos products, and labelling asbestos-containing products “asbestos-free”. 
• Wanton disposal of waste around asbestos factories. 
• Prolonged failure to take basic sanitary precautions to keep workers from taking asbestos home to their families on their clothes.

Q. When did asbestos use in countries like the USA decline, and what happened to global asbestos production afterwards?

Global asbestos use peaked in 1975 at about 5 million metric tons. After that, sales in the industrial countries declined. 

The development of non-asbestos brake pads in the 1970s and 1980s set the stage for national bans on all major uses of asbestos. Regulations in the industrial nations had raised the cost of using asbestos and banned its use in thermal insulation and some other products. Liability from selling asbestos products became apparent, particularly in the US, and liability insurance costs and availability reflected this. Media reports continued, and public awareness was growing.  

But a rise in consumption in the developing world was only beginning. Multinational asbestos corporations based in the US, Europe, Australia, and Japan were aggressively expanding markets in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. 

It soon became clear that there was often a double standard; foreign operations of the big companies did not come close to meeting the standards for protection of workers and consumers that these companies observed in their home countries.  

Some companies facing regulation and liability exported their asbestos products to countries where they were still legal to sell. This happened with asbestos insulation in the 1970s and other products in the 1980s. Some giant asbestos mining companies at first limited health warning labelling to sacks of asbestos sold in the US and Canada.  

Q. What are the challenges facing countries that are still using asbestos today?

The political reality was that the vast global record on asbestos disease was insufficient to motivate protective measures in many countries where little disease had been reported.

In most cases, asbestos first had to achieve widespread use in a country for a generation or more. By this point, construction trades or other unions needed to become concerned and try to get some of their members examined by independent doctors who could diagnose asbestos disease.  

Doctors needed to actually diagnose cases of asbestos disease. Then, and only then, could industry resistance and government inertia be confronted with a campaign that could succeed.  Making asbestos disease “visible” in a country was (and is) vitally important in bringing about protective measures in that country.  An epidemic of occupational and environmental disease can be set in motion without any sign for years, only to emerge with stunning force when it starts to be reflected in mortality statistics.

The sale and use of asbestos and new asbestos products have been banned in about 60 countries. Safer substitute construction materials are available to replace asbestos-cement sheet and pipe, the main uses of asbestos in the world. The World Health Organization and International Labour Organization have called for all countries to ban asbestos since 2006. 

However, white asbestos (chrysotile) continues to be mined. World consumption stubbornly persisted at around 2 million metric tons/year from 2000 to 2015, declining to 1.3 million tons in 2023. Asbestos is still too cheap in countries where it is still used, including in India, Indonesia, and Russia. The conditions of use have been widely shown to lack sufficient protective measures. This is an industry that can only be profitable if it largely avoids paying the costs it imposes on society. 

The long delay between the increased asbestos use and the deaths it causes still presents a frightening public health challenge. 

This Q&A was drawn from a conference paper for a conference in 2021, it has been updated and condensed for this article.