Breath and Justice

The force of the Quaker admonition to “speak truth to power” was vividly demonstrated a few weeks ago when sixty members of the Carolina Brown Lung Association testified in Washington, D.C. before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a division of the Labor Department, and the federal agency responsible for industrial health standards and enforcement. The sixty people representing the two year old organization had all been forced to retire from their jobs as textile workers, some while in their 40s and 50s, because they had developed byssinosis, or brown lung disease.

This disease, caused by breathing cotton dust generated in the textile mills, affects not only the lungs but also the heart and the nervous system.

The members of the Carolina Brown Lung Association came to Washington with bottles of medication, oxygen tanks, and breathing machines necessary for their survival; some came in wheelchairs. They represented thousands of other afflicted textile workers in this country. Their disease could be controlled or eliminated through cleaner and healthier work environments in the mills.

The retired textile workers of the Carolina Brown Lung Association spent years working in conditions that were physically hazardous, with low pay, no benefits, no medical compensation, and no representation by unions. The Carolina Brown Lung Association’s concern is not only compensation for themselves, but to create conditions in the mills which would prevent future generations of workers from developing the disease.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration hearings in Washington are part of an ongoing study to determine cotton dust standards. The members of the Carolina Brown Lung Association were optimistic that they could be heard by the Carter administration, despite the array of witnesses ranged against them by the textile industry at the hearings. The Watergate investigation demonstrated the consequences of an administration’s indifference to the plight of textile workers. It uncovered a memo from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the North Carolina OSHA, urging them not to make any controversial inspection visits until after the 1972 election was over. Not surprisingly, textile manufacturers were heavy contributors during Nixon’s election campaign.

The present “acceptable” level of cotton dust per cubic meter is one milligram; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposes that the dust level be lowered to .5 milligrams now, and .2 milligrams in 7 years. The Carolina Brown Lung Association feels that seven years is an excessively long period of time to clean up the mills, considering the fact that it takes a worker only five years to develop a case of brown lung.

In its position statement, the Carolina Brown Lung Association said that it “believes that cotton dust exposure levels must be set at .1 milligrams now … Textile industry’s protests of ‘too expensive’ ignore their own large profits and the devastating costs to byssinosis victims.”

Behind the statistics, dry words and convoluted language of the proposed federal regulations are human lives at stake. For example: the Carolina Brown Lung Association is asking the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for a strict medical surveillance program. At the present time, this monitoring is done by company doctors. Periodic medical tests are conducted (though not as frequently as they should be), and in many cases workers are not told of the results of the test; or, if diagnosed as having brown lung, are told nothing of that diagnosis.

The Carolina Brown Lung Association is asking that if a worker is diagnosed as having brown lung, or as developing a predisposition to it, that worker should have a right to move jobs to a “cleaner” area of the factory, and not suffer loss of seniority or pay because of that move. The point they make is one that should be elementary to understand and execute: a healthy environment is a right, not something a worker must bargain away as part of the privilege of working.

Workers have been told that their shortness of breath, the feeling of tightness in their chests, and excessive coughing, come from “nerves,” chronic bronchitis, asthma, or emphysema. Never are they told that any of this might have something to do with working in the mills, or that cotton dust might be remotely responsible. In addition to the demands for honest medical diagnosis, the Carolina Brown Lung Association is asking that adequate warning signs be posted in the more dangerous areas of the mills, and that workers be educated as to the potential dangers of their jobs.

The group testified before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for one complete day. Bea Norton was quoted in the Washington Star as saying, “We worked there because there’s no place else to work in the area and you have to have money to support your family. When I first saw the plant, there was lint from end to end, and over the years it hasn’t got much better … you just got used to it. At times it would be so thick that they would open up the windows on both sides of the plant and the wind would take the dust up and sweep it out the other side, covering everything outside with dust.”

Also at issue is periodic on-site inspection for the level of cotton dust. At the present time, with the less stringent regulations prevailing, mill owners have placed dust measurement devices directly under ventilation equipment, and not in the middle of the room: consequently, they get much lower readings on dust levels, readings which are not accurate regarding the risk to workers. Carolina Brown Lung Association members told stories of looking for husbands or wives in other parts of the factory and not being able to see them from 25 feet away because dust was so thick in the air. They testified to the current practice of state Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials (who are supposed to enforce federal regulations on a local level) to call mills several days in advance of an inspection visit, giving owners a chance to clean the mills up.

In addition to the testimony at the Labor Department, the members of the Carolina Brown Lung Association also met with members of their Congressional delegations, and with Carter’s advisor on health matters, Dr. Eula Bingham. The group was surprised and encouraged by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who agreed to introduce a bill that would give federal compensation to brown lung victims, much as federal compensation is given to people with black lung.

These textile workers, for the most part, have no union. Many parts of the South exist in “pre-union days.” The factory conditions, hostility to unions, and efforts to marginalize those workers who support them are old, old tactics still used by industry. In the few plants which have unionized, such as Burlington Industries, new machinery is already being installed which lowers the level of cotton dust. Increasingly, textile workers see the unions as the chance for improving conditions and bringing economic justice to the workplace.

The sixty workers who came to Washington raise a very frail voice, opposed as they are by the powerful voices and pressures of corporate influence. They did not fly to Washington; they traveled on a rented bus. They stayed in seminaries and convents, not in luxury hotels. They ate in cafeterias and in church basements, not in restaurants.

The people of the Carolina Brown Lung Association are poor, but they refuse to accept the lies and deception of the cotton industry. On the second day of their visit to Washington, they went to the American Textile Manufacturing Institute, whose members in the past have claimed that byssinosis is not really a problem, and that “certainly no one has ever recorded a death from it.” The doors to the Institute were locked, and so they moved to the busy Washington street below, where passers-by were confronted with signs saying: “Blue Jeans for You, Brown Lung for Me,” and “J.P. Stevens Took My Breath Away.” Their sidewalk press conference was replete with bags of dust gathered in the mills.

The farmworkers have taught us a hard lesson: that the food we eat is given to us by people who do not have enough to eat themselves. The Carolina Brown Lung Association is beginning to teach us (if we listen) an equally hard lesson: that the cotton we depend on so much can come to us at a high price, the price of people wheezing, coughing, people who walk out of the mills covered with cotton dust, people who may die too soon and too painfully.

The motto of the state of South Carolina is: “While I breathe, I hope.”

The cotton industry has an advertising slogan: “Cotton Keeps America Comfortable.”

The Carolina Brown Lung Association has a button that says “Cotton Dust Kills” and with that button, they wear another, which says, “… and it’s killing me.”

It is difficult to describe these people in words and do them any kind of justice. Their bodies are crippled, but their spirit is not. They are angry, joyful, humorous, gracious, energized by their struggle: they are hopeful. They are asking for a justice that they should not have to ask for. They are dignified, religious, and painfully honest. Because of that, it is easy to forget they are sick. But more eloquent than their words, is to sit in a room with them and hear the labored breathing and the dry, incessant coughing which are the bitter fruits of their labor.

Rachelle Linner is a member of the Community for Creative Nonviolence in Washington, D.C., where she serves on the editorial board of the Catholic pacifist quarterly Gamaliel. She reviewed the film Union Maids in the May 1977 issue of Sojourners.