U.S. Maritime Commission Conference on Health and Safety in Shipyards, with Philip Drinker's Address (1942)

A 35-page excerpt from the stenographers' minutes of a meeting held in Chicago on December 7 and 8, 1942, by the U.S. Maritime Commission and the Navy on "minimum requirements for industrial health and safety in shipyards," attended by shipbuilders, insurers and Navy officers. Dr. Philip Drinker of the Harvard School of Public Health, who had toured the yards for the Commission and the Navy, presented the proposed health standards. He said that respirator programs in the Maritime and Navy yards "have not been at all good," and that asbestosis "is caused in connection with the handling of asbestos," adding: "we rather expect it to occur in shipyards, because we have seen asbestos being handled in installation work with little or no precautions."

What it shows

Drinker told the meeting that asbestosis, silicosis and lead poisoning "can really not be controlled satisfactorily unless systematic, periodic examinations of men are enforced." The conference opened on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and its chairman, Daniel S. Ring, stressed that the objective "is based upon production, because everything else is subsidiary to that." By late 1942 the hazard of asbestos insulation work in the shipyards was being put plainly to the shipbuilding industry by the government's own consultant. A week later a shipyard doctor and a British factory physician reached the same view about asbestos removal (memo on Bethlehem Steel's Quincy yard).

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

On 12/7/42, Drinker advises attendees of a conference on safety and health in the shipbuilding industry that shipyard workers are at some risk of asbestosis.