Work History

A work history is a detailed record of the jobs a person held over their lifetime, including employers, job titles, specific tasks, locations, and dates. In asbestos cases, it is used to reconstruct when, where, and how a person may have been exposed to asbestos. A careful work history often reaches back decades, because asbestos diseases can take thirty to fifty years to appear.

Significance in Asbestos Context

For a patient, the work history is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle in connecting a disease to its cause. Because mesothelioma and asbestosis develop long after exposure, your legal team and medical experts use the work history to identify which jobs, products, and companies put you in contact with asbestos. Details matter: not just "shipyard worker," but which trades you worked near, what products you handled, and whether the work was dusty. Family members are often key, since a spouse or child may remember jobs, employers, or stories the patient can no longer recall. This same history also supports "take-home" exposure claims, where fibers were carried home on work clothes.

Example Sentence

Building a detailed work history revealed that he had spent two summers as a teenager insulating pipes, an exposure no one had remembered until his sister described it.

Related Terms

Occupational Exposure, Exposure Reconstruction, Take-Home Exposure, Product Identification, Latency Period, Interrogatories

Notes

• Write down every job you can recall, even short-term or teenage jobs, with employers, dates, and specific tasks.
• Ask family members to help fill gaps, since they often remember jobs and details you may forget.
• Gather Social Security earnings records, union records, and W-2s, which can confirm employers and dates.