The Cigarette, page 29
Figure 6.3 Takeshi Hirayama, John Banzhaf, and Rita Addison, president of Massachusetts GASP, at a World Health Organization (WHO) meeting in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1983. (University of California, San Francisco Library)
The Hirayama study was itself an unintended testament to the tobacco regime of government price supports and subsidies. The cigarettes that Japanese husbands smoked were, by the time of the study’s inception in 1965, increasingly filled with American flue-cured tobacco. The tobacco arrived in Japan by way of Tobacco Associates and the Food for Peace program, a vehicle for the disposal of American surplus commodities and the engineering of foreign consumption patterns. By the late 1970s, Japan was one of the most important export markets for American flue-cured leaf.93 The raw leaf that state-supported tobacco producers had sold to Japan—with the underwriting of the U.S. government—was reintroduced to the United States as epidemiological science.
At the 1987 World Conference on Smoking and Health held in Tokyo, Donna Shimp shared space on the program with Takeshi Hirayama and James Repace; William Weis was absent, though he had presented a paper on “The Smoke Free Workplace: Cost and Health Consequences” at the previous global gathering of anti-tobacco activists in Winnipeg. On a dais in Tokyo, Shimp confidently predicted that the “sheer economics” of the case against tobacco—in terms of the costs of smokers and the liability issues raised for employers—would ultimately eliminate the “pulmonary rape” of passive smoking. Nonsmoking activists had constructed a case against tobacco that was animated by the questions of efficiency as much as questions of rights and responsibilities.94 “Pulmonary rape” was a violation of the nonsmoker, but it was also a theft from the employer, the risk-pool, and the taxpayer.
The Workingman’s Friend
As the business case against tobacco hewed closely to cost and efficiency arguments, the case for tobacco’s continued presence in the workplace initially came from sources that had always questioned the supremacy of the market’s logic: labor unions. This must have been bittersweet for Donna Shimp, who retained a belief in the importance of organized labor as buffering the individual worker from the whims of her employer. As she wrote to a fellow employee as her trial was unfolding in 1975, “I feel the only way we are going to gain recognition of the real health hazard of ‘second hand smoke’ is through collective action.”95 But action to clear the air at work put the nonsmokers’ movement on a collision course with the closest thing the postwar labor movement had to a sacred cow: collective bargaining. The nonsmokers’ movement arrived at work just as a range of new forces—feminism, the Quality of Work Life movement, the rise of public sector unions, the occupational health movement—complicated labor’s traditionally male-dominated, seniority-centered, bread-and-butter prerogatives.96
On procedural, political, and policy grounds, union leadership and nonsmoker advocates were at odds. From the perspective of organized labor, Shimp established a dangerous precedent: it substituted a judge’s decision for a provision of the collective-bargaining agreement. Indeed, Donna Shimp fought both her employer and her union, the CWA, when she sued New Jersey Bell. The managerial arguments proffered by tobacco’s foes could hardly be expected to resonate with unions that sought to represent all workers, not just those that were cheapest for a company to employ.
Indeed, labor’s initial hostility toward just workplace smoking restrictions encapsulated broader labor attitudes toward occupational health. Beginning with Samuel Gompers, labor leadership had worried that attempts to ameliorate—or at least catalog—occupational health would allow management to screen out sick, unacceptable workers. These concerns intensified in the 1970s with the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act—a result of union pressure, but also a tool of managerial control. For example, when OSHA issued standards on vinyl chloride in 1974, it mandated the removal of high-risk workers without guaranteeing status or seniority.97 And, under the Nixon and Ford administrations, the agency’s rulemaking denied workers access to their own medical records.98 Complicating matters further was the fact that the workers and unions most invested in occupational health exposures—the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, representing plastic, rubber, and asbestos workers—faced special legal peril and personal surveillance should smoking become subject to managerial control.
Workplace smoking underscored worker autonomy and privacy, and the power of organized labor to control shop floor conditions. Smoking was valuable to employees precisely because it was not productive: the smoke break was a routine enjoyed either in solitude or in fellowship, affording absolutely no economic benefit to the company. The cigarette was, in a sense, a symbol of labor’s postwar power.99 The plants that symbolized America’s industrial might were forced to abandon their prewar scruples about smoking on the job. “Smoke-ins” and strikes in protest of smoking bans at Chevrolet and Ford plants in Flint, Dearborn, and Detroit forced automakers and autoworkers to negotiate new smoking rules. After 1945, workers were increasingly able to smoke during break times and in a wide variety of locations—washrooms, lobbies, lunchrooms, and assembly lines.100 With decades of advertising imagery connecting smoking to sweated, industrial production, the tobacco industry exploited the association between management and smoking restrictions. While R. J. Reynolds fought unionization at its own cigarette manufacturing facilities, the tobacco industry posed as a friend to the workingman. It mattered not that even most union members were no longer smokers, or that most workplaces no longer resembled the humming assembly line of a General Motors facility.
The workplace-smoking issue embodied the contradictions of organized labor within an increasingly diverse workplace. Majoritarianism was not pitted against the individual rights of nonsmokers, as was true in struggles for African-American or women’s rights. Rather, unions sought to protect the prerogatives of a minority of their members as a way of asserting their own primacy in representation. Not all labor unions fought for smoking. Indeed, organized flight attendants spearheaded the passage of the first successful federal workplace-smoking law: a 1988 smoking ban on domestic flights of fewer than two hours duration.101 But the position of union leaders and the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO was consistent: steadfast opposition to employer-imposed smoking restrictions without prior bargaining—regardless of the popularity of such a policy among workers.
This was not how Donna Shimp imagined the nonsmokers’ movement would unfold. Labor was actually at the center of EIA’s first proposed activities because she hoped recognition of tobacco smoke “as an occupational health hazard” would spur an accord between safety-concerned unions and cost-concerned management. Shimp routinely mentioned her membership in the CWA, proudly referring to her service as the steward of her local. Donna Shimp’s relationship with the CWA illustrated the difficulties presented by the workplace-smoking issue. The steward at her office in Bridgeton refused to offer her assistance in initiating a grievance procedure. When Shimp turned to the sympathetic vice-president of her local to represent her in a grievance proceeding, the president of the local intervened to stop it. In July 1975, Shimp had a face-to-face meeting with the president, who, between puffs, informed her that her grievance would only be heard upon court order.
But the attitudes of union leadership eventually changed. After her trial, Shimp maintained a friendly correspondence with CWA president Glenn Watts, who wrote the foreword to a pamphlet on “smoke-free work areas” that EIA produced for labor unions. “Our union not only acts to protect the health of non-smoking members,” Watts wrote. “We also seek to educate them about their right to a smoke-free environment.”102 But as battles over workplace smoking unfolded, unions avoided committing themselves on either side of the debate. “We have purposely tried not to develop union policies [on smoking],” the health and safety director of the CWA told the Bureau of National Affairs in 1986, distancing himself from Watts’s comments of the previous decade.103
Within the nonsmokers’ movement, Shimp functioned as a liaison to the world of organized labor—a world unfamiliar to the middle-class, white-collar constituency of GASP. She had a decades-long relationship with the American Lung Association and the National Safety Council, helping those organizations to target organized labor. Her advice to such groups was always the same: enlist the support of organized labor in crafting policy so that collective-bargaining agreements limit rather than permit smoking. She traversed the United States and spoke internationally on how unions could embrace smoking bans as part of a broader commitment to workplace “health rights.”104 EIA authored models for bargaining, policy suggestions, educational literature, and blueprints for cessation and addiction workshops.105 Despite the praise Shimp heaped upon the union officials who represented nonsmoking workers at grievance hearings, it was impossible for nonsmoking advocates not to applaud management for initiating smoking bans even when they subverted collective-bargaining agreements. Nowhere was the tension between nonsmokers’ rights and unionism on greater display than in EIA’s support for Johns-Manville’s smoking ban.
In 1976, Johns-Manville (J-M) adopted a strict smoking ban at several of its asbestos-processing facilities. It did so not out of concern for nonsmokers but out of a desire to mitigate its liability exposure. The asbestos giant was facing an unprecedented number of tort claims brought by employees who had developed lung cancer, mesothelioma, and asbestosis as a result of their employment. This legal spectacle unfolded amid a popular fascination with the unseen hazards of work. Titles of cheap, mass market paperbacks attested to the popular preoccupation with hazards of the job: Muscle and Blood, Expendable Americans, Work Is Dangerous to Your Health.106
In what one legal scholar has termed “the heaviest onslaught of cases experienced in tort system,” by the time J-M filed for bankruptcy in 1982, there were 16,500 lawsuits pending against it, and another 130,000 claims collected for filing. Lawyers for the asbestos plaintiffs would later apply the insights—and the hefty payouts—of toxic tort litigation to tobacco suits over the following decade.107 But in the late 1970s, J-M was grappling with how to respond to research that demonstrated terrifying synergistic effects between asbestos inhalation and cigarette smoking. Asbestos workers who smoked had a ninety-fold greater risk of dying of lung cancer than people who neither smoked nor worked around asbestos.108 To limit the corporation’s liability for these excess deaths, J-M implemented a smoking ban.
Asbestos workers unions greeted the Johns-Manville policy with contempt. Not only did J-M subvert collective-bargaining procedures in unilaterally imposing the ban, but the ban itself implied that workers were themselves responsible for their own toxic exposures. The smoking ban, unions asserted, absolved employers from engaging in broader cleanup efforts, while also shielding them from fully compensating sickened workers who brought suit. While management gurus praised bans for limiting risk exposure, advocates for workers exposed to a variety of toxins condemned bans for the very same reasons. The International Association of Machinists, which represented asbestos workers at plants in Dallas and Boston, sued the company over its smoking ban. While the arbitrator in the Boston case upheld the company’s decision, the Dallas ban was declared invalid. J-M then filed suit precisely on the grounds that nonsmokers’ rights advocates like Shimp were trying to fortify: that common law supported an employer’s efforts to eliminate threats to worker health. In 1980, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the arbitrator’s decision: the Dallas ban was invalid.109 The integrity of the collective-bargaining process prevailed over management’s overtures to workplace safety.
The victory was a sad index of labor’s crimped power in an era of plant closures, liability management, and awareness of the latency period of disease.110 The International Association of Machinists’ defense of the integrity of collective bargaining was also a defense of a worker’s prerogative to expose himself to risks—with the bleak prospect of the union’s assistance in organizing a class action against offending corporations later on. However, courts were simultaneously holding smoking workers partially accountable for diseases they contracted on the job. In 1981, the North Carolina Supreme Court partially reversed a disability award to a worker at Burlington Industries, a textile plant in North Carolina. The court found that her debilitating byssinosis, a lung disease caused by the inhalation of cotton dust, was exacerbated by her smoking habit. Her disability compensation was therefore reduced by half. 111
The reversals suffered by private sector industrial unions in the 1970s may have negatively predisposed them toward any policies that could divide workers or be perceived as capitulating to management. Blue-collar workers were both more likely to smoke than white-collar workers and more likely to suffer multiple toxic exposures while on the job.112 “Our concern is that smoking is going to be used by employers to try to reduce just workers’ compensation awards,” said the director of the Chemical Workers Union’s cancer control taskforce in 1986.113 Workers in industrial and chemical sectors guarded the collective-bargaining agreement and rejected the insinuation that their cigarette consumption should detract one cent from the responsibility companies bore in exposing them to harmful substances at work. This latter concern was enough to drive Susan Daum, author of Work Is Dangerous to Your Health, to resign from EIA’s board in protest of what she saw as the organization’s management-centered focus.114 “I believe that this strategy can only lead to disciplinary actions by companies against specific workers,” Daum warned. “I remain available to help on specific projects which do not put extra weapons against the workers in the hands of the companies.”115
The drive to maintain the appearance of solidarity and hold management accountable caused labor to shrink from the workplace-smoking issue. The AFL-CIO roundly rejected the 1985 Surgeon General’s Report on Cancer and Chronic Lung Disease in the Workplace, which concluded that workplace smoking represented the greatest cause of death and disability for the vast majority of American workers. The health and safety director of the Service Employees International Union accused the report of blaming the victim and letting employers off the hook—an assertion that surgeon general C. Everett Koop regarded as a “misinterpretation.”116 Some of leadership’s rejection of the workplace smoking issue was grounded in organized labor’s mistrust of the Reagan administration, which it alleged placed “greater stress on the effects of smoking [relative to industrial hazards] than scientific evidence would permit.”117 Labor’s well-founded hostility toward the Reagan administration colored its reading of occupational health science.
At its 1986 Executive Council meeting, the AFL-CIO expressed its opposition to both legislative and employer-imposed smoking restrictions. Its rationale was a familiar one: bargaining should be the vehicle for workplace policy, “worked out voluntarily in individual workplace between labor and management and in a manner that protects the interests and rights of all workers.”118 The last clause was also central to how unions conceived of workplace smoking. In an era in which unions were grappling with how best to protect worker health, they were loath to focus attention on smoking when it could distract from—and maybe even exonerate—industrial exposures while placing the blame for sickness on the shoulders of smokers themselves. “You’re damned if you support it and damned if you oppose,” said one official at the AFL-CIO’s Public Employee Department.119 In light of labor’s economically and politically weakened status in the 1980s, it is not surprising that leadership did not embrace an issue that threatened to divide membership, weakened bargaining agreements, raised privacy concerns for workers, and undercut labor’s attempts to hold business accountable for occupational exposures.
Tobacco workers led labor’s fight against smoking restrictions. Structurally, the International Confectionery, Bakers, and Tobacco Workers Union (CBT) was well-positioned to reach the “grass tops” of the labor movement—the leadership of other unions, labor-aligned groups, and the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO. Tobacco workers, like tobacco farmers, had a clear economic interest in maintaining the ubiquity of the cigarette. Since the 1960s, the union had been outspoken against federal or state regulation of cigarettes, citing the loss of jobs that would result from the “zealotry” of tobacco “Prohibitionists.” At the AFL-CIO’s 1979 annual convention, CBT submitted a resolution to the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council, which included the union’s president. The resolution, calling for an end to the “ongoing demagogic, anti-smoking campaign,” was formally adopted by the Executive Council in 1980.120 The resolution passed only through the hands of leadership and was not put to a vote among the rank and file—who, though they smoked more than white-collar workers, were still majority nonsmoker. This ensured that the fissures that existed within local unions and among individual workers would be kept out of the spotlight. The duty to fairly represent all workers pushed union leadership into the position of ignoring the workplace smoking issue. On a grander scale, that commitment to solidarity (or silence) over nonsmoking majoritarianism helped to ensure that a resolution introduced by a member of the Executive Council would be adopted.
The cigarette manufacturers well understood the structural and political imperatives governing labor’s position on smoking. And the industry also realized that the decentralized nature of local unions gave it grassroots credibility with city councils and state legislatures—venues where the industry was weaker relative to Congress. Not only could unions publicly oppose legislation that would adversely affect the industry, but they could also monitor legislative and worksite proposals that bubbled up far from the Tobacco Institute’s offices on K Street. By forging an alliance with unions over workplace smoking, the tobacco companies put forth a positive, and not just obstructionist, message about air quality. The Tobacco Institute’s vice-president explained that in framing the debate around “the broader issue of indoor air quality,” the tobacco industry could “assume a role in the search for answers.”121 This strategic objective dovetailed with organized labor’s concern that a singular focus on tobacco smoke as a workplace exposure would forestall employer commitment to broader worksite cleanup.
