The Struggle to Keep America’s Workers Safe
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What historical event highlighted the need for workplace safety reforms?
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When Eric Reyes-Buriga first got a job in the stone fabrication industry, he liked it. He worked with customers and learned a skilled trade.
For me, it was interesting because I'm the kind of person that likes to learn a lot of things. It was something new.
Reyes-Briga, who's now 36 years old and has two children, was making countertops, like the ones you may have in your kitchen or bathroom. He would take large slabs of stone and cut them to a customer's specific dimensions, then polish and round off the edges, exactly to spec. He says they took basic precautions in his shop. No one told him about the risks.
About two years ago, Ray Espariga's father-in-law, who he worked alongside, had trouble breathing.
He was diagnosed with a disease he had never heard of, silicosis. Silicosis is an irreversible, incurable lung disease caught from inhaling small particles of silica dust over several decades, usually in heavy industrial settings. It's been called Grinder's disease, Miner's pythus, and Potter's rot. It's the world's oldest known occupational disease. There's evidence of it occurring in Neolithic men who chiseled tools and weapons out of stone. It's also been seen in the lungs of Egyptian mummies. Reyes Pariga's wife encouraged him to get a CT scan himself. He had been cutting engineered stone for about a decade. His results came back positive for silicosis.
It was shocking because... Like, pretty much I had to start rethinking about my entire career, that I had to start from scratch again, had to look for a job, had to look for something that I had to be, give me enough money to support my family. Imagine seeing my kids suffering every time they see their grandpa, and then seeing me at the same time, in the same place, pretty much.
It's a disease that's 100% preventable. The appropriate number of people that should get silicosis is zero.
Dr. Jane Fazio is a pulmonologist for the UCLA medical system. In the past five years, she's begun seeing more and more silicosis patients, including men in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Silicosis was something she'd read about in medical school, but it wasn't something she expected to see in 21st century America.
And so that's when I started to ask myself, What is it that you're doing and found that they all had been working in what we call fabrication of stone countertops?
Over the past decade, Reyes-Briga and his colleagues started working more and more with engineered stone slabs instead of natural stone slabs. These kinds of countertop materials have exploded in popularity in the U.S. They're durable, affordable, and they come in all kinds of colors and patterns. Often made to look like marble, they're actually made of a combination of quartz and other materials. In recent years, they've been one of the top two most prevalent counter materials in the country. Many of these engineered stone slabs have an extremely high concentration of silica, far more than marble or other natural stone. While they're safe once installed, they can be extremely dangerous to work with.
When workers like Reyes-Barriga cut, trim, and polish the slabs to fit your kitchen or bathroom, they inhale extremely fine silica dust, which then inflames and scars their lungs.
And once that scarring begins, it is not reversible.
Eventually, the scarring becomes so debilitating that the patients may require a lung transplant. Just this fall, the state of California strengthened regulations around handling engineered stone in the workplace. But it's still unclear if the new measures will be strong enough to prevent workers from catching the disease. This month, Massachusetts issued a safety alert after a countertop fabrication worker was diagnosed with silicosis. After a spate of silicosis cases in Australia, last year the government there banned the use and importation of these countertop materials.
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