The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers, the harrowing debut from journalist Jim Morris, considers a case of corporate malfeasance at Goodyear Tire and Rubber over the course of decades.
From 1957 onward, workers in the Goodyear plant in Niagara Falls, N.Y., were exposed to a chemical called ortho-toluidine. By that time, its manufacturer, DuPont, already knew it caused bladder cancer and put protective measures into place for their own production workers. Goodyear workers inhaled it and absorbed enough that it seeped from their pores. The result was one of the largest and best-documented outbreaks of work-related cancer in the United States.
Morris skillfully interweaves the history of workplace abuses and labor protections in the United States with the stories of several victims of the cancer outbreak and that of Steve Wodka, the lawyer who spent more than three decades representing them. Wodka won settlements and increased screenings for retirees exposed at Goodyear, which resulted in earlier detection for some additional cancer patients, but the lives of the affected workers remained full of lingering fear of the cancer's return. Morris's vivid accounts of their cycles of treatment and despair make heartbreakingly personal the full-picture story of the woeful inadequacy of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's ability to protect workers against chemical exposures. This book does for factory workers in the second half of the 20th century what The Radium Girls by Kate Moore did for those in its first. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library