Misrepresentation and Omission
Scranton misinterprets and ignores documents that would call into question the industry’s own integrity. This is revealed in his discussion of the “Secrecy Agreement” that the American producers of vinyl chloride signed with their European counterparts. Rather than look at the extensive collection of internal industry documents that show the industry sought to mislead the federal government, he focuses on peripheral issues.
Briefly, in the fall of 1972, the European chemical company representatives informed American industry representatives that animal studies were showing that new cancers were developing among animals exposed to half the levels of VCM that the companies were recommending as safe for workers. The industry documents detail how the MCA member companies planned for a meeting in which they could appear to be forthcoming but would actually deny to government officials the information the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) had requested. [30] When the industry could not get the Europeans to release them from their “Secrecy Agreement” it had the choice of meeting their obligation to the United States government or abiding by their loyalty to their European counterparts. Our point is simply that the industry, understanding its obligation to inform the government, still chose not to tell the government. The discussion within the industry about this matter is instructive: it shows awareness within the industry that it should have let the government know; it shows how members agreed to collectively refuse to tell the government what they knew; and it shows that not a single company was willing to break with the industry as a whole to reveal the secret information to the government.
Yet, Scranton would have us believe that the internal discussions were a sign of the good faith of the industry. He argues that the industry had an obligation NOT to inform the government of its findings until its scientists had proven that vinyl chloride monomer was a carcinogen and that the moral qualms of industry representatives and internal discussions of their obligation to tell was as, or more, important than their decision to keep silent and to deceive. Scranton would also have us believe that one of our sins was “to diminish the firms’” [i.e. the vinyl industry’s] “open and cooperative” working relationship with the government. It is disingenuous to lead readers to believe that hiding information from the government is evidence of an “open and cooperative” relationship. On page 27, Scranton belabors our sentence, “Viola suggested, on the basis of his research, that a safer TLV would be 100 ppm, for he found that the ‘danger of a toxic action of the monomer….” His objection is that we used the word “suggested” saying instead that we should have used the word, “opinion.” Further, Scranton says that we misrepresent the exchange by claiming that Viola’s suggestion was based upon his own research. While Scranton attempts to obfuscate the situation by arguing about whether a “suggestion” is different from an “opinion” and whether Viola was there for any other reason than to make suggestions based upon something other than his research, we think it is clear that Viola traveled from Europe to the MCA headquarters to give the MCA the benefit of his expertise based on his research.
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