Scranton charges that our “use of sources” is “incomplete and distorted.” (Scranton p.10). He indicts us for not doing a “thorough review” of the industry documents that were provided to the plaintiff's counsel. Again, we refer the reader to our 309 page timeline, the documents themselves and to our footnotes. We went through an immense array of the industry trade association documents and sampled the company-specific documents. As any historian knows the documentary trail of events that happened in the past is always incomplete, but we feel our research more than meets the standards for although review of more material is always possible, there is a point where additional data adds nothing to the narrative. When we first prepared our timeline (now over five years ago), we specifically requested that the defendants go over it to make additions or corrections. They have never done so, leaving us to believe that they believed it to be accurate. We will be posting the timeline on this website and will gladly consider any corrections to it.
Scranton chides us for not using V.K. Rowe’s testimony at the OSHA Fact-Finding Hearing on February 15, 1974 as evidence that industry had acted for many years to protect its workforce. It is not surprising that Rowe does make this assertion at the Hearing, given that the industry for which he works is under attack. But, there is no way for him to know whether the industry had, or had not, reformed its practices as there are no detailed studies of how much vinyl chloride workers were exposed to in the 1960s and early 1970s. In fact, in an internal industry survey of workers’ exposure to VCM they were forced to use vague categories of “high, medium or low” because precise monitoring and surveillance systems were lacking in virtually all the workplaces. There is simply no way for Scranton to know, as he asserts, that “exposure reductions in the U.S. and abroad took place through the 1960s into the mid-70s.”(Scranton, p11).In fact, throughout the early 1970s, the industry argues against lowering the exposure to 1 ppm by stating that such modification of their plants would be inordinately expensive and impossible to do. Yet, after such regulations were mandated by OSHA the industry quickly found a way to do it. [20]
Scranton seeks to place the best possible face on industry’s actions by using the term “non-disclosure agreement with European producers” to describe the U.S. industry’s agreement with the Europeans to keep information secret. In fact, two terms are used in the relevant industry documents to describe the contract between the American and European chemical companies: “Secrecy Agreement” and “Confidentiality Agreement.” Nowhere is the term “Non-disclosure agreement” used although we can understand why defendants’ lawyers might prefer such an innocuous term.
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