Johns-Manville Board of Directors Minutes on Asbestos and Health (1968–1972)

Excerpts from the minutes of eight meetings of Johns-Manville's board of directors, August 21, 1968, to June 28, 1972, with year divider pages. In 1968 the board approved a $162,500 contribution to the Johns-Manville Fund to start a health study of insulation workers with Dr. I. J. Selikoff at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Asbestos Workers Union. The later meetings deal with dust control, falling exposure limits, the first lawsuits and the 1972 OSHA rules.

What it shows

August 21, 1968. The president reported that an industry-wide effort to study insulation workers' health had failed, and that management "recognized, probably more so than the company's competitors in the insulation field, the potential hazards." An advisory group was formed of A. E. Hutchinson of the Asbestos Workers Union, Dr. F. L. Pundsack and J. B. Jobe of J-M, Dr. George Wright, J-M's medical consultant, and Dr. Selikoff. The J-M Fund would buy Mount Sinai $112,500 of equipment and give $50,000 more; the union would contribute $150,000 to $180,000.

January 15 and February 19, 1969. The board received an updated report on "the asbestos/health situation" (see the January 1969 report to the board). In February it approved $535,000 for a negative pressure dust control system at Canadian Johns-Manville's Toronto Transite pipe plant, whose collector could no longer meet the limits proposed by the U.S. Public Health Service.

October 15, 1969. The minutes recognize "a textile worker health problem." The Threshold Limit Value (TLV) of 35 fibers per c.c. was being revised to an interim 12, and would probably fall to 6 and then 2. Meeting the stricter standards at the Marshville textile plant would cost about $1,000,000.

April 15, 1970. The chairman expected the standard to fall to 5 fibers in 1970, with Dr. Selikoff recommending 2. All fiber bags shipped in the United States and Canada now carried a caution label, but labels on overseas shipments "had aroused customer opposition and had not been accomplished so far." He told the board that J-M was defending a number of asbestos lawsuits and that "any one of these suits might trigger publicity about asbestos/health related hazards," and pointed to workmen's compensation claims, most from "extensive mass filings at the Manville Plant."

January 26 and February 23, 1972. The board was given J-M's testimony at the EPA hearings in New York. At a special meeting, Jobe said the company used six fibers per c.c. as its standard, that present health problems came from exposures of 30 years ago, and that a two-fiber standard would force small users out of business. The board thought J-M should help make sure "the tragic economic impact of the adoption of these standards would not be overlooked," and suggested contacting congressmen from asbestos districts.

June 28, 1972. The chairman said J-M "could live with" OSHA's new five-fiber standard; whether it could meet two fibers after four years had not been determined. He described a Wall Street Journal article as so distorted that "for the first time J-M wrote to the paper" for a retraction. Jobe said the labeling rules first proposed with the OSHA regulations "were extremely bad" and "fortunately had been withdrawn."

Beside the chronology

The lawyers' chronology summarizes these meetings closely, but its 1970 entry leaves out the overseas labels, and a footnote credits Manville with labeling "immediately" after 1964 while the federal government "waited until July 1972." A J-M lawyer had written in January 1972 that without the 1964 labels the company's position in pending suits "would be all but indefensible" (Parker to Jobe, 1972).