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YU-LING KU 16 Human Lives Valued Less Than Dirt Former RCA Workers Contaminated by Pollution Fighting Worldwide for Justice (Taiwan) BASED ON ACTION RESEARCH and in-depth interviews, this chapter reveals the Radio Corporation of America’s (RCA) illegal toxic dumping practices in Taoyuan, Taiwan. RCA’s two decades of misconduct have seriously contaminated people, soil, and groundwater in Taoyuan. When Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revealed that RCA’s Taoyuan plant had been permanently contaminated in the 1990s, 216 former RCA employees already had died of cancer. In addition, 1,059 people were suffering from various kinds of cancer and 102 others developed tumors, with the numbers increasing every year. The RCA story demonstrates how developing countries have served as sites for manufacturing and assembling plants and how the flow of international capital prioritizes capital over labor and profits from exploiting human lives. This brings into question whether RCA’s economic development model should be pursued. The former RCA workers’ struggle should be taken as a warning against the effects of international capitalism. The following story describes Mr. Bon-Tsu Liu’s family tragedy and what happened to his wife, a former material management worker at RCA. When we first met Mr. Liu in January 2001, he told researchers from the Taiwan Association for Victims of Occupational Injuries (TAVOI):1 My wife started to work in the RCA factory soon after she graduated from high school. During the 11 years of her RCA career [1979–1990], she was assigned to material management. Every day she would have to work in a closed environment, handling all sorts of disposal buckets previously used for containing plastic materials and organic solvents. She was laid off in 1990 because of the recession. She became a full-time mother. When my third daughter, Wen-Shen Liu, was about four-months old, her belly started ballooning to the size of a basketball. Later diagnosis by doctors confirmed she had hepatoblastoma. In a series of operations and chemotherapy treatments for three years, Wen-Shen became skinnier day by day and it was unbearably heart-breaking for us, but more painful for her. She died at the age of three from multiple organ failures caused by fulminant hepatitis. This marked the beginning of the great sorrows and terrible pains that will never escape us. After the death of our baby, I started to worry about my wife’s health and kept asking her to get a medical examination. She did so and unfortunately, the examination report suggested she had breast cancer at a critical stage. 182 YU-LING KU She had surgery immediately, hoping that all cancer cells could be completely removed. During the following three years, she was given regular chemotherapy treatments, but it was all in vain. Bone cancer had developed, and she lost her hair and physical strength. Even her muscles were totally destroyed from the side effects of chemo treatments. Every movement was a torture for her. In her last six months, she had to rely on morphine to kill the sudden pain that would strike without warning. My doctor told me that my girl might have contracted cancer cells while still in her mother’s womb, and that breast-feeding might also have come into play. It was 1995 before my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it took years to develop into the critical stage. This means that my wife could have contracted cancer while she was still working for RCA. Nobody in my family or her family has ever had cancer; even her 90-year-old grandmother is still very healthy. It was during the period of time that we witnessed the takeoff of Taiwan’s economic miracle that my wife was still working. She sacrificed her most precious time of youth to a society that exploited her when she was still capable of contributing, but then totally forgot her and deemed her useless. RCA denied any negligence or wrongdoing, and said it has never made its workers use groundwater. The Council of Labor Affairs was reluctant to identify the whole situation as a vocational disaster and continued researching in order to be sure about the underlying causal relation, before it would agree to our legitimacy claim for compensations.2 Medical treatments were so expensive. Even worse, there was no National Health Insurance Program as we have now. Even now, with the Insurance Program, we still have to shoulder the full costs for drugs...

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