H. M. Jackson to Employee Relations Managers Asking for Old Meeting Minutes (1978)

A one-page memo of October 10, 1978, from H. M. Jackson at Johns-Manville headquarters to J-M's employee relations managers. "For a variety of reasons, including legal," Jackson writes, "we have need to complete our records of past Employee Relations meetings," and he asks each manager to list the minutes they had kept "for 1970 and earlier years -- to 1937!" so that copies could be borrowed and reproduced. The file includes J. M. Gadway's reply of October 13, listing meetings he had attended from 1965 to 1970 and saying he had no minutes of any of them.

What it shows

By late 1978, with asbestos lawsuits multiplying, J-M was gathering its own records of what had been discussed among its managers over four decades. A month later Jackson, who had worked on J-M's industrial health program since the 1940s, was interviewed by the company's lawyers about that history (notes of the interview).

In Johns-Manville's chronology

Johns-Manville's own chronology of what the company knew describes this document as follows:

Jackson writes to J-M Employee Relations Managers, 10/10/78, stating that "for a variety of reasons, including legal, we have need to complete our records of past Employee Relations meetings." Jackson asks for a list of all the meeting minutes retained by the E.R. Managers from 1937 to 1970.