Vandiver Brown to the Portland Cement Association on Respirator Rules (1935)

A two-page letter of August 20, 1935, from Vandiver Brown, Johns-Manville's attorney, to A. J. R. Curtis of the Portland Cement Association in Chicago. Brown had been asked to draft rules on respirators for J-M's factories, where respirators were provided but there was "no uniform procedure" for telling workers they were available and required on dusty work, and he asks whether the cement industry had guidance he could use. The question, he writes, had "delicate aspects": employees had to be warned that dust was hazardous without alarming them.

What it shows

Brown also asks whether any employer had made failure to wear a respirator grounds for "instant dismissal." His suggestion of such a rule, he reports, had caused "some consternation" in J-M's Factory Department, which thought enforcing it would cost the company "very valuable men" and "seriously impede production." By 1935 the company's lawyer knew its factory dust was hazardous enough to require respirators, and the question being weighed was how much to tell the men.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

Letter from Vandiver Brown to A.J.R. Curtis (Portland Cement Association) dated 8/20/35. Asks assistance in developing regulations for use of respirators in factories. "You are, of course, aware that the question has some delicate aspects and that it becomes necessary to warn the employees that dust is hazardous and at the same time not alarm them or lead them to believe that every time they contract a cold the cause of it is the dust present in the air where they work."