T&N Exposed
During the school holidays, Robert Ballantine played with his friends on the riverbanks near his Sunderland home. There was a huge unfenced site which the boys favored; it was an idyllic spot to explore, play games, let off air-rifles and dig for treasure. During the dry Summer days, there was a lot of dust but the boys overlooked this. They weren’t to know that the dust contained asbestos and that this dump, larger than the Royal Albert Hall, belonged to a subsidiary of the UK’s biggest asbestos company. Mr. Ballantine died aged 50 from malignant mesothelioma on July 13, 1998. Although Newall’s Insulation Co. Ltd. admitted liability for his environmental exposure, the company disputed financial elements of the case, claiming that a previous lump sum payment of £39,228 by the DETR under the 1979 Pneumoconiosis Act should be deducted from the agreed damages. On October 14, 1999 the High Court in Newcastle upon Tyne ruled that only £13,310 for nursing care and loss of earnings should be deducted from civil compensation of £144,473. The defendant plans to appeal the verdict.
Newall’s Insulation (NI) was one of four specialist companies that merged to form Turner & Newall Ltd. (T&N), an enterprise which eventually dominated the UK asbestos industry. According to a government report: "from the time of its formation in 1920 T&N had steadily strengthened its position as the leading, indeed the dominant, producer of both fibres and asbestos products. Smaller manufacturers... certainly existed, but after 1928 none was comparable in size or range of interests to T&N." By the late 1930’s, ten thousand people worked in all stages of asbestos processing at T&N’s asbestos mines, factories and subsidiaries at home and overseas. "So prominent had the firm become that in 1939 it was obliged to issue a report denying that it was a monopoly, as it only had 20 per cent of the world asbestos market!" By the late 1950’s its sales had overtaken those of US asbestos giant: Johns Manville: "while Johns-Manville had sales of $304.1 million in 1959, T&N had sales of $450 million the previous year." Of course, T&N is a well-known company; it is a frequent defendant in both US and UK personal injury cases. Although much has been written about the company (see Barry Castleman’s authoritative: Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects ), speculation has continued over the company’s state of knowledge, effect on government health and safety legislation, levels of workmen’s compensation, legal strategies and attitude towards dust control. These and other subjects are dealt with in remorseless detail by Dr Geoffrey Tweedale in a new book: Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner & Newall and the Asbestos Hazard. Pain-staking research and access to a vast archive of internal corporate documentation shed light on how a substance once revered for its versatility and indestructibility was also a ruthless occupational killer. Placing the individual corporate behaviour within the historical context of the twentieth century, the preface explains: "The micro-environment of Turner & Newall provides an understanding of the wider social and economic climate in which the asbestos business operated... This book is not simply a muckraking tale of corporate misconduct (though some may choose to read it that way)... the failure by management, capital, the state, and labour to provide effective safeguards against asbestos inevitably has a considerable contemporary relevance for debates about every aspect of occupational health -- a subject we neglect at our peril."
A thorough and at times harrowing examination of medical files, company reports, memoranda and correspondence led Tweedale to conclude: "The company’s attitude towards matters of health over so many years may be regarded as strikingly irresponsible. In the last decade or so, T&N has tried to defend itself in court actions by arguing that it has always applied government safety regulations, that it has always adequately warned workers about the risks, that it has paid ‘fair’ compensation, and that it has supported medical research. Its archive shows such claims owe more to public relations than to fact. Turner & Newell provided significant opposition to the government dust control and medical schemes between the 1930s and 1960s; it neglected to implement such schemes fully in both the UK and especially overseas; it failed to warn customers; refused frequently to admit financial and moral liability for the consequences of its actions; often paid only token amounts of money for industrial injuries and deaths; tried to browbeat doctors, coroners, and the Medical Board; sought to suppress research linking asbestos and cancer; gave the government inaccurate data about disease amongst its shipyard workers; and disseminated imprecise information about the ‘safety’ of asbestos." The book (ISBN 0-19-829690-8), published by Oxford University Press, will be available in March, 2000 at a cost of £40.00. An order can be emailed to: book.orders@oup.co.uk
A grant received in 1996 from the Wellcome Trust, the UK’s foremost independent medical charity, made it possible for Tweedale to work on the subject of industrial asbestos disease for three years; this generosity is acknowledged in the book’s second paragraph. The backing for an alternative view of the subject is not quite so clear cut. Dr Peter Bartrip has written 160,000 words, currently in search of a publisher, with T&N’s "support." When questioned about this arrangement, Bartrip confirmed the company’s financial "support" during a year’s leave of absence from teaching. The grant was not administered by his college but was paid "directly" to him. As I have not seen the manuscript, it is not possible to comment on it. Nevertheless, examination of another paper by this author is illuminating. In Too little, too late? The Home Office and the Asbestos Industry Regulations, 1931 Bartrip portrays the asbestos industry in a positive light, asserting that the representatives of the asbestos firms "expressed willingness to render every possible assistance" during regulatory consultations with Factory Inspectors in the early 1930s. Nowhere in the seventeen page article does Bartrip mention any assistance, either monetary or practical, from T&N. It is only in a rebuttal to scathing comments by Dr Morris Greenberg and Professor Nick Wikeley that the corporate link is disclosed. A telephone enquiry to T&N’s Manchester office on the nature and size of the company’s assistance to Dr Bartrip was referred to Kimberley Welch, Vice President of Corporate Communications at Federal-Mogul (FM), now T&N’s parent company on January 24. No response was received from her. Neither did she choose to clarify whether T&N had ever contributed to the British Lung Foundation (BLF), the "only UK charity specialising in the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of all lung diseases." Amongst the thirty major corporate supporters listed in the charity’s Annual Review of 1997/98 was "T&N." A short statement by Darren Sanders, Publications and Communications Manager for the BLF, confirmed that his organization had in the past "received a relatively small amount of money from Turner and Newall. However, we no longer seek or receive money from this source and do not plan to do so in future." At the beginning of February, a spokesperson from T&N’s UK head office corroborated the fact that donations had been made.
In many ways, T&N was a model for twenty-first century multinationals. Even before the 1920 amalgamation, T&N’s forefathers thought internationally. In 1907 Turner Brothers Asbestos (TBA) registered a Canadian selling agency, the precursor to Atlas Asbestos. Ten years later, TBA directors joined the board of Rhodesia & General Asbestos Corporation as the UK company started buying up mines in Southern Rhodesia. In 1925, the new consortium acquired virtually all the shares of Ferodo Ltd., the leading UK manufacturer of brake linings and other friction materials. In 1931, Ferodo bought several textile concerns in north-west France and began production, becoming one of the main employers in the region. S. A. Valeo, the company which took over Ferodo’s operations, was found guilty of "faute inexcusable" (inexcusable fault) in the case of Mr Alfonsi, a deceased Ferodo worker, on May 27, 1999 by the Appeal Court of Caen. The ruling notes that Ferodo’s highly specialised business was inextricably linked to asbestos: "usage was not haphazard or occasional but continual and massive." The parent company is mentioned by name on pages 13 and 14 of the judgement including the comment that "the British company Turner and Newall (was) one of the biggest asbestos concerns..." Thousands of miles from the Normandy Court, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division ordered the seizure of all stock owned by T&N, Ltd. including that for Ferodo Limited and 52 other companies in a case brought by Owens-Illinois, Inc. On August 24, 1999 a default judgment totalling $1,630,604,268.29 was entered against the Defendants for alleged participation "in a scheme to defraud and a conspiracy with other asbestos fiber suppliers to create and protect a demand for asbestos through the suppression and misrepresentation of information concerning health risks to users of finished insulation products containing asbestos." At a preliminary injunction hearing on December 20, 1999, a federal judge vacated the default judgment. T&N’s motion to "permanently set aside the judgment" will be heard in February, 2000. Against potential liabilities such as these, one wonders if FM’s directors are having second thoughts about their company’s take-over of T&N plc. Two years ago, the spectre of asbestos claims didn’t seem to bother the new owners. At that time, FM’s General Counsel said: "We are pleased with T&N’s innovative efforts to manage this serious problem and intend to build on those efforts for the future." T&N’s 1997 accounts promised that the take-over would "provide the resources required to match the provision set up in 1996 to meet past and future asbestos liabilities." They may well need those and more.
May 2, 2000
