posted
I learned a couple of interesting pieces of information today. The first was that in the city I recently moved to, the cancer rate among men is 34% higher than the provinical average. It's an industrial town (two of Canada's five refineries and a number of other big chemical plants; I work at one of them), so the elevated level isn't surprising, but the magnitude of the difference is... well, it's big.
The second thing I learned was that every year in Ontario, five hundred new chemicals are introduced into industrial workplaces with no prior testing, meaning that no one actually knows the effect that exposure (at any level and of any duration) has on humans. Many of these chemicals are trade secrets, so companies are tight-lipped about their precise compositions, which doesn't exactly help matters.
Oh yeah, I also learned that Canada's largest toxic waste dump is around here somewhere (also unsurprising), and that another big toxic waste dump is about thirty seconds' drive from my office (unsurprising but disappointing).
Anyway. I have some thoughts on the subject.
A lot of cancer in older people here is caused by asbestos. Asbestos seemed like a pretty sweet deal when it was first introduced, until people realized what it does to lungs. Not unlike pesticides, really (DDT, anyone?). This sort of thing happens incessantly in my industry, and much to my chagrin it looks like it still happens. I think that while things may have changed for the consumer, they have not changed for the worker (and by "worker" I really mean the operator: the union guy who's out there with a wrench making things run the way I, the engineer, need things run).
Nowadays a lot of lip service is paid to safety. "Safety first," everyone says. But in my experience the grownups don't really believe it. One of my first bosses used to handle styrene jugs barehanded all the time. No gloves, no lab coat, no safety goggles, nothing. At least he did it in the fume hood.
In cases where we don't know the effect of a compound on humans, protective equipment is not required by law or, generally, by corporate policy in the chemical process industry. So operators will think nothing of grabbing a handful of whatever with no gloves. That may not seem like a big deal, but when you do it every day for forty years and then suddenly find out that you've got cancer, and then you can't link it to your job because the effects of the chemicals you work with are unknown, so of course you can't prove your illness resulted from your job... well, you see where I'm going. Workers are being used as guinea pigs. A lot of the data that companies possess about workplace hazards comes from epidemiological studies that can only be conducted after lots of people get sick and die. The a posteriori approach just doesn't do it for me when you're talking about lives.
I guess I could try to get a job with the Ministry of Labour or the Ministry of the Environment, but I'd feel like a band-aid. I guess I could try to get into law school and specialize in industrial regulations. But there's so much opposition to doing anything for pure safety reasons in this industry. If the Return On Investment is insufficient or the initial capital cost of upgrading is too high, companies won't make changes. There are two places, the way I see it, that real impetus for change can come from. The first, I'd like to hope, is my generation. I'd like to think that we are interested in more than lip service, we want to make real changes. Whether or not that desire will be beaten out of us by years in industry remains to be seen. The second is government, but both the provincial and federal governments here seem pretty reluctant to make any sort of meaningful revisions to the relevant regulations.
This whole business makes me sad. I see a few ways that I could potentially effect real change: 1) I can secretly maintain these desires until I'm the president of a big company, 2) I can somehow wind up in public office without being beholden to industry, or 3) I can join or start a successful design or consulting firm. While the third seems the most attainable, it also is the least likely to have a measurable impact on much of anything. Still, my friends and I keep the notion of a startup in the back of our minds for the future. I, of course, would head up the Oceanic division.
I dunno. It takes decades to change anything in this industry and the inertia is huge. I guess the bottom line is that while they're making some progress, it's going way too slowly for my taste and the underlying corporate culture isn't really changing, and that's too bad.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
Wow. That is tough to deal with. I have a good friend from Libby, Montana (the town with the highest level of Asbestosis in the nation) and the dynamics of what's gone on there are surreal. The town's been devastated, and it's taken 50 years to figure it out.
It makes me very, very wary of just about everything we haven't had experience with.
Posts: 285 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:It makes me very, very wary of just about everything we haven't had experience with.
Exactly. So why, at the very least, don't more companies require operators to avoid contact with pretty much everything if at all possible? I mean, wearing gloves all the time when you're out in the plant handling stuff should be a no-brainer, just like hearing protection.
I'd love to see some basic testing required for new chemical components, too, even if it's just bacterial testing. But here in Ontario, at least, there are hundreds of hazardous chemicals that are not, legally, on the list of "designated substances" controlled by law. Companies have rules about handling them, because they are legally obligated to protect their workers, but still...
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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