“Nobody uses water,” one man in a Dodgers cap said in Spanish when Maria Cabrera approached, holding flyers about silicosis, an incurable and suffocating disease that has devastated dozens of workers across the state and killed men who have barely reached middle age.
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The disease dates back centuries, but researchers say the booming popularity of countertops made of engineered stone, which has much higher concentrations of silica than many kinds of natural stone, has driven a new epidemic of an accelerated form of the suffocating illness. As the dangerous dust builds up and scars the lungs, the disease can leave workers short of breath, weakened and ultimately suffering from lung failure.
“You can get a transplant,” Cabrera told the man in Spanish, “but it won’t last.”
In California, it has begun to debilitate young workers, largely Latino immigrants who cut and polish slabs of engineered stone. Instead of cropping up in people in their 60s or 70s after decades of exposure, it is now afflicting men in their 20s, 30s or 40s, said Dr. Jane Fazio, a pulmonary critical care physician who became alarmed by cases she saw at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center. Some California patients have died in their 30s.
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If you improperly use a knife and cut your finger off, is it the knife’s fault? Improperly using a tool or process can and will cause problems.
And yet if you cut your finger off at work the employer is still liable for workers’ compensation.
If they aren’t using a mask at home when they are making countertops as a hobby, fine, that’s on them. But they are at work.
An employee-employer relationship is born of a contract, a bargained-for exchange of labor for money, and with it an employer has a right to control. If the employer fails to exercise that right in order to protect its workers, such as by failing to compel PPE, the employer is more culpable than the employee. The employer could have taken the step of firing an employee who won’t comply with PPE in order to protect the worker, such an employer is therefore doubly culpable, in my view. It’s that element of compulsory control over the means and manner of work, including the employer’s right to terminate an employee who won’t use PPE, which excuses the employee from responsibility for resulting injuries.