Workers are Frontline Downwinders Dying for That New Sofa

Before you're initiated as a citizen into the reality of the politics of environmental health, before you lose your civics virginity, you want to believe such things are not possible. Surely things aren't that bad. The company wouldn't let it get that bad. The EPA wouldn't let it get that bad. Not in.. (fill-in the year) But more often than not, it IS that bad. And not just bad, but novel-worthy bad. Bad in ways you couldn't imagine when you started out. That's how bad this story is.

 Sheri Farley walks with a limp. The only job she could hold would be one where she does not have to stand or sit longer than 20 minutes, otherwise pain screams down her spine and up her legs.

“Damaged goods,” Ms. Farley describes herself, recalling how she recently overheard a child whispering to her mother about whether the “crippled lady” was a meth addict.

For about five years, Ms. Farley, 45, stood alongside about a dozen other workers, spray gun in hand, gluing together foam cushions for chairs and couches sold under brand names like Broyhill, Ralph Lauren and Thomasville. Fumes from the glue formed a yellowish fog inside the plant, and Ms. Farley’s doctors say that breathing them in eventually ate away at her nerve endings, resulting in what she and her co-workers call “dead foot.”

A chemical she handled — known as n-propyl bromide, or nPB — is also used by tens of thousands of workers in auto body shops, dry cleaners and high-tech electronics manufacturing plants across the nation. Medical researchers, government officials and even chemical companies that once manufactured nPB have warned for over a decade that it causes neurological damage and infertility when inhaled at low levels over long periods, but its use has grown 15-fold in the past six years.

Such hazards demonstrate the difficulty, despite decades of effort, of ensuring that Americans can breathe clean air on the job. Even as worker after worker fell ill, records from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration show that managers at Royale Comfort Seating, where Ms. Farley was employed, repeatedly exposed gluers to nPB levels that exceeded levels federal officials considered safe, failed to provide respirators and turned off fans meant to vent fumes.

There's an 8-minute film with Ms. Farley and other characters from the NYT story on the same page as the printed piece. Both are devastating in their directness. Everyday Farley and her co-workers would go to work and be enveloped in that yellow glue fog for 8-10 hour shifts. sometimes it only took weeks after being hired before the most severe neurological symptoms began to appear. This is in North Carolina, not China, or Mexico.

Even though the piece focuses on the workers at this one facility, what are the odds that people living adjacent to it were also being enveloped in the yellow glue fog? If a company doesn't care about its workers, it's not going to care about its neighbors either. Catch the warning about the harm of breathing in low levels of the glue over a long period of time? 

There are many other takeaways from this piece, including

 – How much attention OSHA pays to physical hazards that are well-understood like ladders and stairs, but not so much to chemicals in the workplace that affect us in more insidious ways – like robbing you of the use of your limbs.

– Why it's important to think things through to avoid a "Regrettable Substitute" like the yellow glue that was supposedly better for the ozone layer than what was formally used, but turned out to be a public health disaster on the ground. This is why we need the Precautionary Principle to test and verify the toxicity of the chemical BEFORE you release it into the marketplace. We know, completely radical idea.

– How ineffective "the system" was at protecting workers from chemical hazards that were way, way over the top – 860 times what the industry group recommended. And conversely, why workers need strong and effective unions to protect them.

Even if you think you've lost your ability to be shocked, this story will shock you.