Johns-Manville, Application: Manpower, Recruiting, Training and Supervision, for Home Insulation Crews (1946)

A 13-page Johns-Manville guide from 1946 for managers of its Home Insulation business on choosing, training and supervising installation crews, the men who blew insulation into the walls and attics of houses. Most of it is about production and customer relations: age, stature, manners, appearance and attitude. Under "Health" it says applicants should have no respiratory illness, "such as tuberculosis or other lung ailments, which dust and working conditions might aggravate," and that if a man "has ever suffered from silicosis or other respiratory diseases, good judgment on our part would be not to hire him."

What it shows

The guide treats dust on home insulation jobs as something that could harm a man's lungs, and its answer is to screen out applicants whose lungs were already damaged. It says nothing about protecting the crews from the dust. J-M had faced dust disease claims from home insulation work since the early 1930s (see Maryland Casualty's 1933 letter on home insulation silicosis claims). The guide does not say what the insulation was made of; the training panels it describes include asbestos shingles among the wall and roof coverings the crews would open and close.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

J-M in-house publication shows awareness of some home insulation contract unit risk; i.e., do not hire respiratory impaired due to dust aggravation potential. (Presumably relates specifically to silica, since units did not install asbestos until later.)