Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner & Newall and the Asbestos Hazard (review)

Geoffrey Tweedale. Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner & Newall and the Asbestos Hazard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xx + 313 pp. Ill. $65.00 (0-19-829690-8).

Particles of asbestos, when inhaled, cause inflammation and then scarring of the lungs, which slowly strangle the victim. As a result, many "asbestotics" also develop heart failure and become susceptible to pneumonia and other infections. Asbestos also gives its victims a greater chance of developing lung cancer. The most dramatic effect of asbestos on the body, however, is mesothelioma, a pleural cancer that "can encase and constrict the entire surface of the chest or abdomen" with a leather-like consistency (p. 152). The shop floor where asbestos is processed is equally dramatic: "snowstorms" of asbestos; visibility of 3-4 yards in some areas; and workers cleaning out exhaust fan hoppers and becoming enveloped by the material. This important book reminds us anew of how the economics of doing business shortchanges workers whose health suffers because of where they work.

Using a remarkable set of company records made available because of a United States lawsuit, Geoffrey Tweedale brings us the twentieth-century story of Turner & Newall, a British corporation that controlled almost every aspect of asbestos processing in the farflung British empire, from South African and Canadian mines to local industries where workers spun and wove asbestos, manufactured and installed spray insulation, and mixed asbestos with cement.

While many Americans remember the asbestos scandals of the 1970s, this is a parallel story of how Turner & Newall made money with the "magic mineral" even as it successfully fought off demands for disability pay for workers or widows' pensions for survivors. Even when Turner & Newall admitted that workers contracted these diseases, it resisted paying the claims, paltry as they were. The company also conducted its own medical research, but often kept such information from workers. Asbestosis was not officially recognized as an industrial disease until 1931.

Tweedale does not let Turner & Newall off the hook for its behavior. Yet, while making a pitch for other groups' shouldering some of the blame, his recounting of the "countervailing forces" available to workers--government, medical professionals, and unions--serves only to underscore the tragedy set in motion by corporate greed. Despite growing and solid scientific evidence of asbestosis and lung cancer in asbestos workers, factory inspectorates and medical scientists trod slowly in their dealings with Turner & Newall, and understaffing and economic connections, respectively, too often undermined their professional objectivity. Sadly, there are few heroes in these groups. Trade unions, according to Tweedale, failed to address workplace health and safety. While he also notes that workers themselves seemed to accept what they received from Turner & Newall, we have no way of knowing how they really felt beyond their written correspondence and their courtroom testimony, which were the major sources available to Tweedale. In any event, the fact that workers did feel entitled as a result of their illnesses provides some indication of their feelings. In the end, Tweedale credits the growing publicity and scandals in the United States and public fears about nonoccupational exposure, which sparked a similar public outcry from the British media, and a number of workers and family members who did not "go away quietly." While family and consumer exposure to asbestos deserves more scrutiny, especially in the context of the environmental movement, that is probably beyond the scope of these particular sources.

Nevertheless, this book is a two-part cautionary tale: First, workers everywhere should not expect their employers, or even medical experts, to keep them informed about the ill effects of what they are inhaling, ingesting, or handling. Second, neither should consumers. But there is another, more disturbing, message. The book opens with the grand funeral of Sir Samuel Turner, founder of Turner & Newall, who died at the age of eighty-four. Tweedale contrasts this "funeral for a king" with...