23 ms·

Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis

307 points by 04rob 3y ago

jackvalentine 3y ago
Even if the factory is operated safely these countertops often require adjustment on-site to fit properly… typically done dry with an angle grinder or similar.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  Why does it need adjustment? In Norway you buy it from, amongst others, IKEA cut to exactly the dimensions you specify.
  - jackvalentine 3y ago
    Things happen when renovating kitchens and measurement isn’t as precise as it should be.
iancmceachern 3y ago
They just made the wrong choice in architecting their process'. They had different priorities then. Engineered stone is created, it's not like natural stone, we don't have to cut it. They also have the choice to cast it, net shape. They just need to redo their whole schema, they need to reconfigure their process to customize the engineered stone before its solidified, not after.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  > They just need to redo their whole schema, they need to reconfigure their process to customize the engineered stone before its solidified, not after. That's not viable. They are cut only after the actual physical space has been built (carpentry mainly) because measurements have to be taken then since nothing is perfectly true/plumb/square. Today the turnaround is about a week for the material to be cut and then installed. Sending it off to the manufacturer to create to spec would not only add several weeks to the process but significant expense. Stone (both natural and engineered) can be cut safely. These shops just haven't been. Proper respirators, ventilation, and wetting will create a safe space to work in.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    Fixing this, either by the way I suggest, or the way you suggest (Proper respirators, ventilation, and wetting will create a safe space to work in.) both add cost. I think that's the problem, we're unwilling collectively as a society to pay the cost.
Ericson2314 3y ago
In the US the two separate building codes, two separate construction industries. This feels like a symptom of that.
1letterunixname 3y ago
A lot of tradespeople refuse or ignore PPE. It's mostly macho men, the kind who don't go to the doctor, and smoke and believe it won't cause them cancer. Another fact: scant few men who work outside wear sunscreen. There were multiple generations of these kind of people on my mom's side of the family, and they inevitably died prematurely of preventable conditions. A modern example: I've seen gravestone engravers completely covered in stone dust while wearing only a thin handkerchief; no hearing, eye, or proper lung protection. Sure they should know the risks but you can't force people to not smoke tobacco or use proper PPE.
- 1-more 3y ago
  During the peak of covid, the NY Times made a video showing hospital workers loading dead bodies into the refrigerated trucks that served as expanded morgues for Brooklyn Hospital Center (by Fort Greene). Online skeptics pointed out that it must be crisis actors, for one of the workers was wearing his mask below his nose. Only thing I could think of was "have you never been to a jobsite?" I got called a pussy for wanting eye protection from the guy welding 15 feet from me.
  - 1letterunixname 3y ago
    Always look out for #1 because it is unlikely no one else will. If that means steel-toed shoes, a jock cup, thick gloves, shooting glasses, amplifying mickey mouse muffs, sunscreen, bottled water, and a P100 respirator, so be it. Safety regs are written in blood. And it only takes an instant or a culture of disregard to lead to later cancer, permanent disfigurement, or death. There are no old bold pilots or construction workers.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
scrps 3y ago
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(21)00452-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
pavlov 3y ago
For me, the essential summary of the comments was this one: “All this thanks to synthetic stone - important note for countertops owners, if you want to make sure you don't support the product”
- CharlesW 3y ago
  It's not quite that simple, since people working with natural stone get silicosis too. Natural stone may be up to 50% silica.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Yes, but not really. There are piles of industry around the world that deal with silica and don't have workers dying left and right. There are also piles of industries that do have workers dying left and right. The difference is not in the danger of the materials. The difference is supplying safety equipment and having a culture that demands the use of it. Regulations work.
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    > Regulations work. When enforced.
- dang 3y ago
  (This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37646198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37646198 but I've moved it because we merged the threads.)
Verdex 3y ago
Omon Ra [1] is probably the most important book I've ever read. The wikipedia page suggested to me that it would be a surreal alternate history comedy about the Russian space program. There was however no comedy ... or at least nothing that was comedic to me. The point, at least as I interpreted it, was that society is very good at building callous machines that throw away human lives for no reason and then the same society turns and pats itself on the back for the incredible virtue it has in allowing those people to "heroically" destroy themselves. These countertops might not even outlive the people they're killing at a young age. In the past 15 years, I've talked to people who have gone from needing granite counter tops, to quartz, to the next trendy fashion. If a countertop killed me, then I would hope that it would last a century, but the truth is that it might not last a decade simply due to being unfashionable. And somehow I doubt its replacement is going to be any safer to cut. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omon_Ra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omon_Ra
- mike_ivanov 3y ago
  Of my favourite books. Thank you for the reminder to read it again :-) To those who didn't read it - it is a rather short novel, uncannily funny, scary, and most of all - revealing of how human societies actually work. This is one of the earlier Pelevin's works, so the style is still illustrious. Some jokes might not be immediately transparent as they are contextualized in the late USSR. Correction: it is scary in the cthonic/transcendent sense, not that it is spooky (it's not at all).
- xwdv 3y ago
  I see the same thing happen even in software. A developer here died 2 years ago, now 2 years later his contributions to the code base have finally been completely erased and replaced.
  - k0k0 3y ago
    His code contributions led to his demise? If not, I think you missed the point.
    - 3y ago
quacked 3y ago
One of the frustrating things about modernity as a westerner is that I don't feel the need for the standard of living that all of these incredible-but-dangerous advances in modern science and technology have granted us. I don't need faux-stone counters cut by Central Americans, I don't to eat as varied a diet as is available, I don't need to travel anywhere over 45 mph or internationally, I don't need A/C on 95% of summer days, I don't need all of the plastic packaging that stuff is delivered in (although I often need or want the stuff it delivers). I am completely ready to live in a slowed-down, less-commodified, lower-capital environment, so I save money and am quite comfortable, but what can I do about everyone else? I'm not going to move the needle in greater society with my own choices. In the ideological camp with me are the "degrowthers", who seem to be more common in Europe than in the US, but they all seem to be pitching borderless, stateless surveillance communism that relies on the same ultra high-speed high-tech plastic-based international-shipping constructs we have now, except with "green" energy instead of regular energy.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  I want to trade all the fancy shit I don't need for a ten hour work week and more time to do what I want, but annoyingly we've made artificial scarcities of essentials like housing, and codified forty hour weeks as the norm, making this hard. You're right that it's more common in Europe. When I go back to the US life feels so insanely gluttonous. Driving a studio apartment three miles to get a coffee is lunacy
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > Driving a studio apartment three miles to get a coffee is lunacy It sure is. I have a cheap drip coffee maker that I drink from all day, at a cost of a few cents a cup. Dirt cheap.
    - mfitton 3y ago
      A few cents a cup?! Where do you buy your coffee? I buy coffee at about 12 bucks a pound. A pound makes about ten carafes of 4 cups (tbh, I use the term cup loosely, because a mug for me is more like 1.5 to 2 actual measuring cups) each. I get to more like 30 to 40 cents a cup. It seems like there might be potential for major cost savings.
bjnewman85 3y ago
the incurable disease in the title is greed in the hearts of others that values the lives of these people less than the shiny things they make for rich people
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  There's a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that I find insightful: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. ..."
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Unless you consider 30-40% of the US to be rich this isn't about the rich. Although it is nice how you foist the blame onto the rich instead of all of society.
- tempsy 3y ago
  quartz countertops are popular because they are cheaper than other types of countertops while looking expensive. this is like the Shein of counters. wealthy people probably use natural stone.
  - Kirby64 3y ago
    Quartz countertops are more expensive than natural granite. They're only cheaper than something like Marble. Quartz is also strictly a better material: it's not as porous as granite, much much harder than marble (marble can be scratched so easily), and can be made into almost any color or pattern. Super rich folks may prefer natural stone, but not because it's a better material... it may be preferred because it's a worse material in many cases. The cost and fragility is part of the allure by itself.
    - tempsy 3y ago
      it's more stain resistant but it's an unnatural engineered material.
omginternets 3y ago
Why did I read this as “cantaloupes” 5 times in a row? Am I alone?
- sgt 3y ago
  I think you're alone. That said, cantaloupes are delicious. Go to the store and get a few, cut the cantaloupes and live to see another day.
  - omginternets 3y ago
    For real. Thank god!
stephen_g 3y ago
We have this problem in Australia too. I am glad at least that people are starting to wake up to the silicosis risk though, because you can also release silica dust cutting or drilling through bricks, cutting or polishing concrete etc. and you often see tradies take almost no precautions...
- jcampbell1 3y ago
  The only precaution required is to use wet cutting and grinding. A wet process works better in every way except it uses more water. There is tons of decisions about factory equipment where there is a trade off between safety and the environment. Factory managers often joke about how various scrubbing equipment has OSHA on one side, and the EPA on the other. It is critical that the culture prioritizes safety above all else.
goalieca 3y ago
> Pale dust rose around them as they worked. Many went without masks. Some had water spurting from their machines, but others had nothing to tamp down the powder rising in the air. Safety regulations need to be put in place with the cheapest being a good quality respirator.
- nickff 3y ago
  Many workers resist using safety equipment, even when it is provided to them, and they are shown how to use it. This is common for fall protection too. Safety regulations requiring provision of equipment may not get the job done. For all we know, safety equipment was available.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    I tell a worker that I expect them to do N amount of work per hour or be fired. They need the money to pay their families for basic life necessities. N is the amount they can do if working at peak efficiency for that hour. I picked that number by design. Wearing a mask is uncomfortable and causes excess sweating which makes them 5% less efficient. If they weak a mask they output 0.95*N and I will thus fire them. They are free to weak a mask and I am not firing them for wearing a mask. Then when they die I blame them for not wearing a mask.
    - parineum 3y ago
      In reality, the cost of hiring/firing an employee would offset any gain one might hope for in hiring an unsafe worker. Plus, this isn't the type of industry that's measuring productivity by percentage points.
    - nickff 3y ago
      Have you ever worked or managed in a situation like this? It's usually not as easy as you seem to think. I have worked in these situations and know managers who have this kind of issue. The managers worry, and try to get people to comply, but it's tough when only a minority comply, especially because one has to enforce so many different requirements.
jcampbell1 3y ago
The push to switch to dry cutting was a “green” innovation. This is a California problem created by California thinking.
- CBLT 3y ago
  Could you link me a source for this? I can't find one when I search.
WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago
Some interesting things about silicosis are... 1) The ancient Greeks and Romans knew about the hazards of breathing dust, and knew that stone workers were particularly at risk. 2) The name Silicosis was coined in 1870 by Achille Visconti who was studying lung disease in hard-rock miners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicosis 3) Silicosis can be entirely avoided by cutting stone (and silicon bearing ceramic materials) with a "wet cut"... literally just add water! So, this danger has been known to stone workers for 2 millennia, protection is cheap, effective and readily available, and yet people are still falling prey to it. I have personally witnessed professional counter top installers working in obviously unsafe ways, who have actively & energetically refused face masks, water dust collection, and vacuum dust collection (which is far less effective). This is an article about human frailty, not about some new threat. It is an important point that human callousness towards the well being of others seems to be self emergent. Clearly the people at the top of the stone cutting industry in LA are not investing in training their new young workers in proper technique. How can this be addressed? I don't know. It seems Adam Smith and Karl Marx have both failed to leave us useful guidance on the subject.
- abakker 3y ago
  Wearing a full face respirator with p99 or other equivalent cartridges and using an Air Quality monitor to evaluate safe working conditions really help. PPI is VERY important, and so many people ignore it. Edit: changed wording to agree with you.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
    Do you mean PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) instead of PPI? I'm pretty sure proton pump inhibitors aren't relevant here, and they're the most health-related expansion of the acronym I could find.
    - abakker 3y ago
      Sorry, yes, PPE was what I meant. Fat fingered that one entirely. I doubt Omeprazole can do much for silicosis. /s
asdefghyk 3y ago
From Google "......Silicosis is the oldest known occupational lung disease. Ancient Greeks were familiar with lung disease in quarry workers (Hippocrates) and the fact that ..... " Amazing this issue has not been addressed - starting with education - maythis material needs to be banned ????
ike2792 3y ago
I worked in a countertop factory around 25 years ago and every single tool/station used wet cutting. Why on earth would workers be doing this work without water?
- orangepurple 3y ago
  You can always find someone willing to do it cheaper, though to their credit they seem to use water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhhlcOix4TQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhhlcOix4TQ More fun stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I0IAwOIwXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I0IAwOIwXo
francisofascii 3y ago
Looks to be the same disease as "black lung". (common with coal miners)
- haldujai 3y ago
  They are both types of fibrotic pneumoconiosis (inhalational lung diseases) which also includes other entities such as asbestosis, berylliosis and talcosis. Not the same disease per se as there are slight differences but coal workers pneumoconiosis and silicosis are very similar given that they have a very similar inhalational dust profile.
SoftTalker 3y ago
Weird this is happening in California of all places, the most regulated state in the country when it comes to potentially hazardous materials and workplace and consumer safety?
- smeyer 3y ago
  Do the same characteristics that make it the most regulated state also make it the state most likely to notice these hazards before other states do? If so, it wouldn't be very weird.
  - mcguire 3y ago
    My initial thought was, "Why wouldn't this be showing up everywhere?" Then, I thought "Oh, yeah." Poking around on the CDC site, it seems like the most recent data they have up is from 2014.
- femiagbabiaka 3y ago
  Well sure. There is no regulation with 100% compliance, and some regulation that inspires non-compliance. Safety regulations in the trades are taken as a joke in general. An example I heard back in the day: How many OSHA inspectors does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but it takes him three days to do it.
- loandbehold 3y ago
  The problem is mostly with unlicensed contractors, usually undocumented immigrants. It's very easy to start countertop installation business. Buy some tools, list yourself at thumbtack and you are ready to go. You can always find work by underbidding guys with license. These guys often don't even have bank accounts and work for cash.
corndoge 3y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but does a respirator not solve this problem? The article and many comments here seem to blame people wanting cheap countertops as either part or all of the issue, but if it's safe to cut them with a respirator or wet saw, the focus should be on making companies give their workers respirators/wet saws and enforce their use.
- loa_in_ 3y ago
  But who is going to make the dangers known to potential and currently employed workers? Companies can sieve through people until they find someone desperate enough or oblivious to the danger and they could not even be aware they're throwing their lives away. And the respirators are going to be in a locker that you have to sign off on each time you want to use them and to do that you have to ask your superior who would try to put you down verbally. I witnessed this model myself while working intermittently at a refuse processing plant that services a pretty big city. The work entailed manually sorting through garbage on a conveyor belt and cutting open any sealed trash bags, taking any plastic, metal, paper and rot out of it manually and into the chutes.
- jcampbell1 3y ago
  According to a California advisory, respirators should only be used as a last resort. https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/dosh_publications/Engineered-stone-counters.pdf https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/dosh_publications/Engineered-sto... In New Jersey which also has lots of stone cutting, doesn’t allow dry cutting and has entirely different advice. https://www.nj.gov/health/workplacehealthandsafety/documents/occupational-health-surveillance/dry_cutting.pdf https://www.nj.gov/health/workplacehealthandsafety/documents...
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    There's not as much difference as you say. The NJ page says > New Jersey law (N.J.S.A. 34:5-182) requires that employers provide workers with full-face air-purifying respirators when engineering controls cannot be used. Use of respirators should be part of a complete respiratory protection program. While the CA page says Respirators should only be used: • As a last resort for protection when local exhaust ventilation or water controls are not feasible or do not adequately control employee airborne exposures. • Where exposures exceed the permissible exposure limit (50 μg/m3, 8-hour TWA) while installing or implementing feasible engineering and work practice controls. • When the employee is in a regulated area. I.e., both say that other measures must be applied first.
saveferris 3y ago
And it's not like it hasnt been known for a long time how dangerous silica can be. I worked in a chemical manufacturing plant as an engineering intern in the 80s, at a plant that made marine coatings. One of the products contained silica as an ingredient. The precautions that went into the production of that product were crazy, workers entering the area had to wear what amounted to space suits with full respirators. I vividly recall putting these suits on any time we had to do any work in that production area.
noobermin 3y ago
Just a comment, but pulmonary fibrosis is terrible. People don't know that often damage to your lungs cannot be reversed. I survived two major lung infections and over a year later still have issues climbing lots of stairs or steep hills that were easy before. I mean I dont have fibrosis (that would be an immediate death sentence) but it's crazy how scaring and damage in the lungs just happens and that part of your lung is just useless now. It's just with fibrosis, the scarring never ends and subsumes both your lungs and thus you die. People have an attitude (somewhat helpful) that you can always get will yourself to recovery or "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and all that, but severe damage to your lungs really has no treatment. Essentially your body just adapts to the reduced function by being more efficient or by changes in behavior (like walking slower). That lung capacity is lost for good.
nikolay 3y ago
I have a friend in this business and his workers always wear N95 masks and his machines are sprayed with water to greatly reduce the dust particles in the air. If workers refuse to wear masks, then whose fault is this?! If employers do not provide the PPE necessary of this job, then they should be sued and put in jail! My friend was buying 3M N95 masks before COVID-19 at extremely low prices in small quantities - somewhere between $.50 and $.70 a piece. So, everybody can calculate the "savings" those cruel employers do - a lot less than $50/mo/employee! There are so many Latino workers in Southern California who do not wear PPE for a variety of reasons. For example, all those leaf blowers not only breathe in gas for hours, but they also inhale dust and mold! And nobody seems to care about them! My city of Irvine for years was pretending they want to enforce the switch to electrical leaf blowers as based on numerous studies, 2-stroke engines pollute the air of California a lot more than all cars together, but have done nothing! If I don't run and close all my windows, my house gets filled with gas for literally minutes and then it's really hard to get rid of those toxic fumes! This madness should stop! The same applies to many other workers! There's the law, but nobody seems to care to enforce it!
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  > If workers refuse to wear masks, then whose fault is this?! It doesn't matter whose fault it is; it remains the employers responsibility to ensure that it does not happen, if necessary by dismissing the worker concerned.
  - nikolay 3y ago
    Just saw today a worker in a cloud of soil dust with a machine that, I guess, breaks the hardened soil - right next to a busy road. Anyway, next article would be about these workers getting Candida auris. Anyway, do you expect their employer to watch them all the time when they work? If they have passed instruction and cannot be supervised all the time, then it's employees fault.
    - kwhitefoot 3y ago
      Of course the employee is at fault but the employer also has a responsibility to ensure that such employees do not repeat such behaviour. I expect employers to be aware of how well their employees do the job and to take appropriate action when the behaviour fails to meet the relevant standards.
1024core 3y ago
Isn't this exactly what OSHA was established for?
kwhitefoot 3y ago
That's a major failure of government. We have quartz composite worktops in Europe too. I'm pretty sure that people aren't getting silicosis from them here. You can buy them in IKEA https://www.ikea.com/no/no/p/kasker-spesialtilpasset-benkeplate-hvit-marmormonstret-kvarts-10428394/ https://www.ikea.com/no/no/p/kasker-spesialtilpasset-benkepl...
dmbche 3y ago
"Nearly half of the workers suffering silicosis in the UCLA and UCSF study said their workplaces were using water to control dust. Roughly a quarter said they always had respiratory protection. Fazio said studies have found that in many shops, dust is so thick in the air that respirators cannot filter out a sufficient amount. Metzger argued that the kind of sophisticated and costly measures that would be needed to reliably protect workers cutting engineered stone are not economically plausible in an industry where immigrant workers typically labor in small shops and are often paid in cash. Engineered stone "is too dangerous to be used safely," he said. "If there’s any industrial product that should be banned, this is the product."" All this thanks to synthetic stone - important note for countertops owners, if you want to make sure you don't support the product
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  We have these worktops in Europe too, without the health problems as far as I can tell. It seems that the US either lacks suitable health and safety legislation or fails to enforce it.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >dust is so thick in the air that respirators cannot filter out a sufficient amount This is not a technology problem, this is an 1880s "Safety devices are too expensive problem" along with paid under the table workers problem. All kinds of other industries manufacture 'dangerous' products with regulations that protect the workers. Housing and agriculture are both industries that do not and fight ever further for anti-regulations to protect the workers even less.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - aaomidi 3y ago
      Removing the availability of cheap labor by providing more worker rights, and less/no criminalization of undocumented immigrants alongside an h1b reform would do wonders for the general health of this society.
jimbob45 3y ago
Many went without masks. Some had water spurting from their machines, but others had nothing to tamp down the powder rising in the air. Does OSHA not require masks in these cases?
- wcunning 3y ago
  Definitely an OSHA requirement, but there's no guarantee that 1) management supports the necessary supplies, checks, reminders, actions, etc or 2) workers want to wear the respirators/masks in general. On top of that, inspectors may be instructed (depending on inspection management, training, etc) that the water based dust suppression is good enough. Even if they want to see masks, management and workers may only implement them during inspections. Adherence to rules is necessary for rules to do anything anywere, ever.
  - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
    Even though there are whistle-blower protection laws, they aren't good enough. No-one should fear risking their job when they stand up for their own health. Management on the other hand should enforce masks as a means to avoid liability.
    - Gibbon1 3y ago
      What should happen is if someone sees it they call 911 and the cops show up. Followed by the county permit inspector. And then the owner gets arrested and the job site shut down for 6-12 months. Seriously that's what happened at friends workplace when an electrician got fried working on a live 440 volt panel. Don't see why a counter top shop should be treated any different.
- Zigurd 3y ago
  A key insight into things like this is that many regulations are like speed limits: loosely enforced. Sometimes because it is too hard to inspect every shop handling dangerous materials. In cases like these you have to ban the dangerous material, or essentially kill the market for the products that use it. BTW, I'm not sure how solid granite, soapstone, marble, etc. would be any better. Maybe my 30 year old totally fake Corian is back in style. But for the microplastics from scrubbing it?
victorbstan 3y ago
A lot of workers don’t wear protective gear. By choice. Nobody to blame but themselves.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  A lot of these guys don't really know the dangers. Seriously, don't underestimate ignorance.
- killjoywashere 3y ago
  I have had things cut for me and I find myself begging the workers to wear ear pro, eye pro, air pro, and they invariably smile, nod, and work without it. Even if I point out the protective gear sitting near the work area. I too was young once. Now I wear the kit.
- barrkel 3y ago
  This is both a collective action problem (people not using the right gear will be faster and cheaper than those with, meaning bad behavior outcompetes good) and an information asymmetry problem - workers are usually not fully aware of the problems they're creating for themselves.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Also people don't think they care. In high school one kid told me 'I don't want anyone to wipe my butt when i'm old, so I'm going to commit suicide at 50, therefore my smoking isn't going to harm me'. He is now approaching 50, I wonder if he still thinks that, but I haven't seen him since.
- b112 3y ago
  The company is to blame. It's law to wear protective gear in many legal jurisdictions, and that 100% means the company is liable, if it does not actively enforce, and create a "culture of safety".
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Exactly. In general companies don't like OSHA hanging around. They'd rather run fast and lose even if it costs a finger or two. Enforcement of the law is how get compliance.
thadk 3y ago
According to this podcast, Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge, used his economist-oriented federal government department to delay and block legislated regulation related to protection for silicosis during the Obama administration. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id1651876897?i=1000613645578 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id...
- imtringued 3y ago
  I don't know why but "economists" are pretty bad at their job.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Jeez - Sunstein has such great work in legal scholarship, but I guess power corrupts? Even more surprising to me was Sunstein and his wife Samantha Power attending Henry Kissinger's birthday party after Power previously published a book basically pinning 150,000 deaths in Cambodia directly on him. They knew this guy is basically a war criminal and still went to celebrate his birthday.
  - usrnm 3y ago
    The US has no war criminals, because no court in the world would dare to prosecute Americans for war crimes, the ICC tried once, didn't end well for them. So relax, Kissinger is one of the good guys.
    - elzbardico 3y ago
      One strange thing the older among us are pretty sure to notice is how in average the tech industry worker moved from a quasi-hippie political point of view towards boot-licking default. In the old slashdot times, such a comment would probably have +5 insightful badge attached, here in HN in 2023, it is downvoted to hell.
      - whimsicalism 3y ago
        e: oh i misunderstood what you were saying, keeping my original comment for posterity I think this is poe’s law in action :) I did not read the reply as earnest.
linsomniac 3y ago
~5 years ago I had a quartz countertop installed. For the final install, the workers were out in the front yard making some final cuts. My 10yo son comes out to see what's going on, looks at the giant cloud of dust, says "Silicosis ain't no joke" and goes back inside. I've taught him well.
jader201 3y ago
Not long ago, we had our countertop replaced (from quartz to granite). They ended up having to make a cut in it while it was sitting in our kitchen. Our home was in a cloud of dust for several hours, and when the dust finally settled a day later, every surface imaginable was covered in dust. I’m pretty sure none of them wore masks when doing this. I honestly didn’t think to wear a mask either (since they weren’t and never really even warned us how bad it would be), but fortunately we were behind closed doors most of the time the particles were in the air. Fortunately it was a granite countertop and not quartz. But I still can’t imagine that stuff is good to breathe on a recurring basis, and it still amazes me that they were fairly casual about the whole thing. My guess is the industry just isn’t educating workers about the risks.
- jiveturkey 3y ago
  surprised they cut it dry. i just had to add 2 holes to my granite countertop. used a “well” guide that also has water in it. it’s meant to keep the cutting edge cool but also there was no dust to speak of
- nemo44x 3y ago
  Don't worry about it. You were exposed to a very small amount a single time. It's the repeated exposure day after day that kills people. Saying that, yeah it's not nice. But the single exposure to dust isn't going to hurt you.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  > My guess is the industry just isn’t educating workers about the risks. The problem is not lack of education but lack of enforcement of regulations.
- mabbo 3y ago
  > My guess is the industry just isn’t educating workers about the risks. My guess is that the companies that did were undercut by the ones that didn't.
- gpderetta 3y ago
  > Fortunately it was a granite countertop and not quartz A relative of mine died of silicosis after having worked for years in the granite industry. Granite is probably as bad without adequate protection.
dml2135 3y ago
Not surprised. Back in my artist days, the studio I rented was in a building with a countertop business on the first floor. The extent of their safety measures were blowing the dust out into the back alley. Most workers rarely, if ever wore masks, and the inside of the shop was absolutely covered in dust. The dust would make it up to me on the second floor, everything in my studio would accumulate a thin layer just a week or so after cleaning. Wasn’t great but the rent was cheap, until it wasn’t
- albert_e 3y ago
  > everything in my studio would accumulate a thin layer just a week or so after cleaning I wish I ONLY had to clean the surfaces once a week. In my country and city unfortunately -- even though I dont live near a major road or construction site -- dust is everywhere. Within 24 hours or less of wiping clean, you can see a visible layer of dust on any horizontal surface in home.
  - will5421 3y ago
    Do you know what dust this is? Is it natural? May I ask what country you’re in?
    - albert_e 3y ago
      Bangalore India dust is everywhere ..haven't learnt to classify it into types :)
mabbo 3y ago
What I find interesting when comparing the US the Canada on topics like these is that in Canada, there is self-interest in demanding workers be protected. Like beyond the fact that it's a good thing you do. Because we have a public health care system, funded by taxes, having a large number of young men out of the work force (not paying taxes) and using the health care system effectively means my taxes, everyone's taxes, are higher. There's incentives for our government to protect workers from risks that will cost a fortune to fix. In America, there's only the "because it's the right thing to do" reason, which is never enough for anyone to actually do anything.
- bushbaba 3y ago
  America offers Medicare so we still bear the cost. Just only if they live long enough to receive the retirement benefits. Yeah one heck of a perverse incentive.
  - cj 3y ago
    Medicare for the elderly, but we also have Medicaid for people in poverty (< $15k/yr income for a single person w/o a family) which covers most basic medical/dental/ vision needs and is taxpayer funded. Someone taken out of the workforce may qualify for that if they don’t already qualify for disability insurance or similar payments (although I’m not 100% clear if those are funded via private disability insurance or public programs)
    - cma 3y ago
      Not in all states if you have no dependents.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Medicaid is not at all comparable to Medicare. First, Medicare pays a lot more to healthcare providers than Medicaid. Medicare pays more for more medications than Medicaid, and has fewer prior authorization requirements for those medicines. Fewer providers will accept Medicaid, and people using Medicaid will receive less or worse healthcare than those in Medicare. Second, Medicaid is administered by each state, and there is a lot of variability on how easy the state makes it so people can actually get healthcare. Lots of states straight up refuse money simply to punish people of a certain socioeconomic class because it happens to win votes. Bottom line, Medicaid is so leaders can claim they are helping poor people get healthcare AND keep taxes low. Medicare is for actually delivering healthcare to people because that contingent makes up a huge proportion of votes. And yes, even Medicare is not delivering all healthcare, as it has multiple tiers to deliver differing amounts of healthcare to different socioeconomic classes.
Kirby64 3y ago
This seems largely similar to worker protections for welding... the proper protection is essentially heavy shop ventilation and full respirators (which, good ones cost something like $1500). I suspect the problem is that welding related disease/problems show up quite quickly in most cases, and welding tends to be a higher paid industry. More room for margin on PPE and workers have higher demands.
- michaelt 3y ago
  Also might help that welders have a culture of PPE use; ain't nobody welding without a mask, gloves and sensible clothes.
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    I’ve known plenty of welders that are happy to weld with less than adequate safety equipment. The “safety squint” is still a thing.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
charles_f 3y ago
Tangentially related, there's this copper mining museum in BC (1) in what used to be one of these corporate towns where you lived and died. They do a quick demo of the equipments they used back in the day, in a pre cut hole. Even with your hands on your hears it's painful, teeth chattering - and they don't even really hit the rock. People working in there weren't wearing any sort of hearing protection and became deaf within months. And after introducing pressured air driven equipment, they were all dying in a few years from silicosis. Until someone added water spraying to precipitate the dust into mud (wherein their issue became to fiddle caked in mud all day long in the dark, which I guess is an improvement over certain death). Which happened years later. Thinking about the kind of life they had terrorizes me. I don't get how, for the longest time, people were fine with that. I mean no judgement on the workers, they probably didn't have a choice - but the people sending them in probably saw them as kettle. Makes you think about the sort of progress in worker protection that was made since then. But also this kind of story reveals how people are still ready to profiteer from such deadly practices, if given the opportunity. 1: https://www.britanniaminemuseum.ca/ https://www.britanniaminemuseum.ca/
- ttfkam 3y ago
  > Thinking about the kind of life they had terrorizes me. I don't get how, for the longest time, people were fine with that. A non-trivial number of these mine workers were arrested on trumped up charges like "vagrancy" for not having a job or "trespassing" for walking along a railroad. They would often be sold to companies as convict lease (cheap) labor. Essentially slave labor long after the Civil War since the 13th Amendment has the slavery loophole where it's allowed as long as you're convicted of a crime. This disproportionately affected freed slaves in the South but was an issue for everyone everywhere since it introduced a profit motive to manufactured charges and inflated sentences. The extent that it predominantly affected Black folks and poor white folks had a lot to do with public sentiment not doing anything about it for a very long time. To a not-small-enough extent, the same conditions exist today where labor can be coerced for little to no pay among the prison population, many of whom have been threatened with obscenely long sentences being shortened by accepting plea deals even when innocent or with extenuating circumstances. For-profit prisons often make the situation worse by further incentivizing incarceration on a larger scale.
xyst 3y ago
yet another example of exploitation of people just trying to make a living. No regulations or minimal enforcement means companies/contractors do the job as cheaply as possible. Undercutting companies that actually care about the safety of their workers.
shrubble 3y ago
Wouldn't a wet-cut system where you flow water over the area the blade is hitting, pretty much cut dust in the air by 99% or more? Water is pretty cheap and available ...
- jackvalentine 3y ago
  Yes, and I’ve known plumbers who have to make cuts in stone countertops to install taps etc to create a ‘dam’ out of putty to flow water in to the cutting site while doing it. The solutions exist, the problem is making people invest in them and stick to it.
Simulacra 3y ago
How does this compare to asbestos?
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
This is why we have trades unions. I just am astounded, horrified. The answer to abusive management is simply rebalance power. The answer to abusive markets is pay more (Edit: better supply chain ledgers) Just horrified re supply chains - the simple way to stop sales of any product is a shelf market like this: "The product X was manufactured by the small child who last month was mutilates by a factory accident. Nice picture. our product has the following verified supply chain. but it's more expensive. your choice of course"
unnouinceput 3y ago
The original article is: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-24/silicosis-countertop-workers-engineered-stone https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-24/silicosi... Yahoo news is something I avoid like the plague.
qwerty_clicks 3y ago
We all live worse lives due to deregulation pressures.
londons_explore 3y ago
I suspect that stone dust generally will be found to be similarly harmful to asbestos. Asbestos is apparently worse because of the sharp edges of the particles, but if I put any angle grinder dust under the microscope I see plenty of sharp bits too. I think the actually harmful thing is that the dust is 'fresh' rather than being the result of years of chemical weathering which tends to smooth off the sharpest pointiest bits at nanometer scale.
- jaclaz 3y ago
  Yes, they are essentially the same: https://medlineplus.gov/interstitiallungdiseases.html https://medlineplus.gov/interstitiallungdiseases.html
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    I already commented above but no, they aren't - silicosos is similar to one of the several possible diseases asbestos can give you, asbestosis, but mesothelioma is the real horror outcome from asbestos exposure which I don't believe silica has any kind of similar connected disease.
    - jaclaz 3y ago
      Yes, maybe I expressed myself improperly, mesothelioma (often originated from asbestos) is slow (like 20 to 40 years from exposure): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesothelioma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesothelioma the workers in the article are young and are dying from the effects of "plainer" silicosis (which is similar to asbestosis).
- stephen_g 3y ago
  The effects of stone dust are pretty well understood - silicosis is deadly and similarly harmful as asbestosis, and both raise the risk of lung cancer, but I don't believe there is anything like mesothelioma related to quartz dust which is the real horror of asbestos.
mbostleman 3y ago
Having been involved in commercial construction in the late 90s, OSHA had a lot of regulation and focus on masons - especially cutting concrete block. It’s surprising that 25 years later that understanding of the problem didn’t translate to the other trades.
throw9away6 3y ago
The people who installed my counters used no safety equipment. They used consumer grade power tools while spraying them down with water and took no safety precautions. I was actually worried about what would happen if they injured themselves and if my insurance would get sued. They were all Asian and did not speak English it seemed like a super shady operation.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
Why isn’t countertop cutting automated? Seems relatively straightforward for a robot as far as physical tasks go.

307 points by 04rob 3y ago

Even if the factory is operated safely these countertops often require adjustment on-site to fit properly… typically done dry with an angle grinder or similar.

kwhitefoot 3y ago
Why does it need adjustment? In Norway you buy it from, amongst others, IKEA cut to exactly the dimensions you specify.
- jackvalentine 3y ago
  Things happen when renovating kitchens and measurement isn’t as precise as it should be.

iancmceachern 3y ago

They just made the wrong choice in architecting their process'. They had different priorities then. Engineered stone is created, it's not like natural stone, we don't have to cut it. They also have the choice to cast it, net shape. They just need to redo their whole schema, they need to reconfigure their process to customize the engineered stone before its solidified, not after.

nemo44x 3y ago
> They just need to redo their whole schema, they need to reconfigure their process to customize the engineered stone before its solidified, not after. That's not viable. They are cut only after the actual physical space has been built (carpentry mainly) because measurements have to be taken then since nothing is perfectly true/plumb/square. Today the turnaround is about a week for the material to be cut and then installed. Sending it off to the manufacturer to create to spec would not only add several weeks to the process but significant expense. Stone (both natural and engineered) can be cut safely. These shops just haven't been. Proper respirators, ventilation, and wetting will create a safe space to work in.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  Fixing this, either by the way I suggest, or the way you suggest (Proper respirators, ventilation, and wetting will create a safe space to work in.) both add cost. I think that's the problem, we're unwilling collectively as a society to pay the cost.

Ericson2314 3y ago

In the US the two separate building codes, two separate construction industries. This feels like a symptom of that.

1letterunixname 3y ago

A lot of tradespeople refuse or ignore PPE. It's mostly macho men, the kind who don't go to the doctor, and smoke and believe it won't cause them cancer. Another fact: scant few men who work outside wear sunscreen. There were multiple generations of these kind of people on my mom's side of the family, and they inevitably died prematurely of preventable conditions. A modern example: I've seen gravestone engravers completely covered in stone dust while wearing only a thin handkerchief; no hearing, eye, or proper lung protection. Sure they should know the risks but you can't force people to not smoke tobacco or use proper PPE.

1-more 3y ago
During the peak of covid, the NY Times made a video showing hospital workers loading dead bodies into the refrigerated trucks that served as expanded morgues for Brooklyn Hospital Center (by Fort Greene). Online skeptics pointed out that it must be crisis actors, for one of the workers was wearing his mask below his nose. Only thing I could think of was "have you never been to a jobsite?" I got called a pussy for wanting eye protection from the guy welding 15 feet from me.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Always look out for #1 because it is unlikely no one else will. If that means steel-toed shoes, a jock cup, thick gloves, shooting glasses, amplifying mickey mouse muffs, sunscreen, bottled water, and a P100 respirator, so be it. Safety regs are written in blood. And it only takes an instant or a culture of disregard to lead to later cancer, permanent disfigurement, or death. There are no old bold pilots or construction workers.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

scrps 3y ago

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(21)00452-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

pavlov 3y ago

For me, the essential summary of the comments was this one: “All this thanks to synthetic stone - important note for countertops owners, if you want to make sure you don't support the product”

CharlesW 3y ago
It's not quite that simple, since people working with natural stone get silicosis too. Natural stone may be up to 50% silica.
pixl97 3y ago
Yes, but not really. There are piles of industry around the world that deal with silica and don't have workers dying left and right. There are also piles of industries that do have workers dying left and right. The difference is not in the danger of the materials. The difference is supplying safety equipment and having a culture that demands the use of it. Regulations work.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  > Regulations work. When enforced.
dang 3y ago
(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37646198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37646198 but I've moved it because we merged the threads.)

Verdex 3y ago

Omon Ra [1] is probably the most important book I've ever read. The wikipedia page suggested to me that it would be a surreal alternate history comedy about the Russian space program. There was however no comedy ... or at least nothing that was comedic to me. The point, at least as I interpreted it, was that society is very good at building callous machines that throw away human lives for no reason and then the same society turns and pats itself on the back for the incredible virtue it has in allowing those people to "heroically" destroy themselves. These countertops might not even outlive the people they're killing at a young age. In the past 15 years, I've talked to people who have gone from needing granite counter tops, to quartz, to the next trendy fashion. If a countertop killed me, then I would hope that it would last a century, but the truth is that it might not last a decade simply due to being unfashionable. And somehow I doubt its replacement is going to be any safer to cut. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omon_Ra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omon_Ra

mike_ivanov 3y ago
Of my favourite books. Thank you for the reminder to read it again :-) To those who didn't read it - it is a rather short novel, uncannily funny, scary, and most of all - revealing of how human societies actually work. This is one of the earlier Pelevin's works, so the style is still illustrious. Some jokes might not be immediately transparent as they are contextualized in the late USSR. Correction: it is scary in the cthonic/transcendent sense, not that it is spooky (it's not at all).
xwdv 3y ago
I see the same thing happen even in software. A developer here died 2 years ago, now 2 years later his contributions to the code base have finally been completely erased and replaced.
- k0k0 3y ago
  His code contributions led to his demise? If not, I think you missed the point.
  - 3y ago

quacked 3y ago

One of the frustrating things about modernity as a westerner is that I don't feel the need for the standard of living that all of these incredible-but-dangerous advances in modern science and technology have granted us. I don't need faux-stone counters cut by Central Americans, I don't to eat as varied a diet as is available, I don't need to travel anywhere over 45 mph or internationally, I don't need A/C on 95% of summer days, I don't need all of the plastic packaging that stuff is delivered in (although I often need or want the stuff it delivers). I am completely ready to live in a slowed-down, less-commodified, lower-capital environment, so I save money and am quite comfortable, but what can I do about everyone else? I'm not going to move the needle in greater society with my own choices. In the ideological camp with me are the "degrowthers", who seem to be more common in Europe than in the US, but they all seem to be pitching borderless, stateless surveillance communism that relies on the same ultra high-speed high-tech plastic-based international-shipping constructs we have now, except with "green" energy instead of regular energy.

CalRobert 3y ago
I want to trade all the fancy shit I don't need for a ten hour work week and more time to do what I want, but annoyingly we've made artificial scarcities of essentials like housing, and codified forty hour weeks as the norm, making this hard. You're right that it's more common in Europe. When I go back to the US life feels so insanely gluttonous. Driving a studio apartment three miles to get a coffee is lunacy
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > Driving a studio apartment three miles to get a coffee is lunacy It sure is. I have a cheap drip coffee maker that I drink from all day, at a cost of a few cents a cup. Dirt cheap.
  - mfitton 3y ago
    A few cents a cup?! Where do you buy your coffee? I buy coffee at about 12 bucks a pound. A pound makes about ten carafes of 4 cups (tbh, I use the term cup loosely, because a mug for me is more like 1.5 to 2 actual measuring cups) each. I get to more like 30 to 40 cents a cup. It seems like there might be potential for major cost savings.

bjnewman85 3y ago

the incurable disease in the title is greed in the hearts of others that values the lives of these people less than the shiny things they make for rich people

CoastalCoder 3y ago
There's a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that I find insightful: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. ..."
marcinzm 3y ago
Unless you consider 30-40% of the US to be rich this isn't about the rich. Although it is nice how you foist the blame onto the rich instead of all of society.
tempsy 3y ago
quartz countertops are popular because they are cheaper than other types of countertops while looking expensive. this is like the Shein of counters. wealthy people probably use natural stone.
- Kirby64 3y ago
  Quartz countertops are more expensive than natural granite. They're only cheaper than something like Marble. Quartz is also strictly a better material: it's not as porous as granite, much much harder than marble (marble can be scratched so easily), and can be made into almost any color or pattern. Super rich folks may prefer natural stone, but not because it's a better material... it may be preferred because it's a worse material in many cases. The cost and fragility is part of the allure by itself.
  - tempsy 3y ago
    it's more stain resistant but it's an unnatural engineered material.

omginternets 3y ago

Why did I read this as “cantaloupes” 5 times in a row? Am I alone?

sgt 3y ago
I think you're alone. That said, cantaloupes are delicious. Go to the store and get a few, cut the cantaloupes and live to see another day.
- omginternets 3y ago
  For real. Thank god!

stephen_g 3y ago

We have this problem in Australia too. I am glad at least that people are starting to wake up to the silicosis risk though, because you can also release silica dust cutting or drilling through bricks, cutting or polishing concrete etc. and you often see tradies take almost no precautions...

jcampbell1 3y ago
The only precaution required is to use wet cutting and grinding. A wet process works better in every way except it uses more water. There is tons of decisions about factory equipment where there is a trade off between safety and the environment. Factory managers often joke about how various scrubbing equipment has OSHA on one side, and the EPA on the other. It is critical that the culture prioritizes safety above all else.

goalieca 3y ago

> Pale dust rose around them as they worked. Many went without masks. Some had water spurting from their machines, but others had nothing to tamp down the powder rising in the air. Safety regulations need to be put in place with the cheapest being a good quality respirator.

nickff 3y ago
Many workers resist using safety equipment, even when it is provided to them, and they are shown how to use it. This is common for fall protection too. Safety regulations requiring provision of equipment may not get the job done. For all we know, safety equipment was available.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  I tell a worker that I expect them to do N amount of work per hour or be fired. They need the money to pay their families for basic life necessities. N is the amount they can do if working at peak efficiency for that hour. I picked that number by design. Wearing a mask is uncomfortable and causes excess sweating which makes them 5% less efficient. If they weak a mask they output 0.95*N and I will thus fire them. They are free to weak a mask and I am not firing them for wearing a mask. Then when they die I blame them for not wearing a mask.
  - parineum 3y ago
    In reality, the cost of hiring/firing an employee would offset any gain one might hope for in hiring an unsafe worker. Plus, this isn't the type of industry that's measuring productivity by percentage points.
  - nickff 3y ago
    Have you ever worked or managed in a situation like this? It's usually not as easy as you seem to think. I have worked in these situations and know managers who have this kind of issue. The managers worry, and try to get people to comply, but it's tough when only a minority comply, especially because one has to enforce so many different requirements.

jcampbell1 3y ago

The push to switch to dry cutting was a “green” innovation. This is a California problem created by California thinking.

CBLT 3y ago
Could you link me a source for this? I can't find one when I search.

WhatsTheBigIdea 3y ago

Some interesting things about silicosis are... 1) The ancient Greeks and Romans knew about the hazards of breathing dust, and knew that stone workers were particularly at risk. 2) The name Silicosis was coined in 1870 by Achille Visconti who was studying lung disease in hard-rock miners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicosis 3) Silicosis can be entirely avoided by cutting stone (and silicon bearing ceramic materials) with a "wet cut"... literally just add water! So, this danger has been known to stone workers for 2 millennia, protection is cheap, effective and readily available, and yet people are still falling prey to it. I have personally witnessed professional counter top installers working in obviously unsafe ways, who have actively & energetically refused face masks, water dust collection, and vacuum dust collection (which is far less effective). This is an article about human frailty, not about some new threat. It is an important point that human callousness towards the well being of others seems to be self emergent. Clearly the people at the top of the stone cutting industry in LA are not investing in training their new young workers in proper technique. How can this be addressed? I don't know. It seems Adam Smith and Karl Marx have both failed to leave us useful guidance on the subject.

abakker 3y ago
Wearing a full face respirator with p99 or other equivalent cartridges and using an Air Quality monitor to evaluate safe working conditions really help. PPI is VERY important, and so many people ignore it. Edit: changed wording to agree with you.
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
  Do you mean PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) instead of PPI? I'm pretty sure proton pump inhibitors aren't relevant here, and they're the most health-related expansion of the acronym I could find.
  - abakker 3y ago
    Sorry, yes, PPE was what I meant. Fat fingered that one entirely. I doubt Omeprazole can do much for silicosis. /s

asdefghyk 3y ago

From Google "......Silicosis is the oldest known occupational lung disease. Ancient Greeks were familiar with lung disease in quarry workers (Hippocrates) and the fact that ..... " Amazing this issue has not been addressed - starting with education - maythis material needs to be banned ????

ike2792 3y ago

I worked in a countertop factory around 25 years ago and every single tool/station used wet cutting. Why on earth would workers be doing this work without water?

orangepurple 3y ago
You can always find someone willing to do it cheaper, though to their credit they seem to use water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhhlcOix4TQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhhlcOix4TQ More fun stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I0IAwOIwXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I0IAwOIwXo

francisofascii 3y ago

Looks to be the same disease as "black lung". (common with coal miners)

haldujai 3y ago
They are both types of fibrotic pneumoconiosis (inhalational lung diseases) which also includes other entities such as asbestosis, berylliosis and talcosis. Not the same disease per se as there are slight differences but coal workers pneumoconiosis and silicosis are very similar given that they have a very similar inhalational dust profile.

SoftTalker 3y ago

Weird this is happening in California of all places, the most regulated state in the country when it comes to potentially hazardous materials and workplace and consumer safety?

smeyer 3y ago
Do the same characteristics that make it the most regulated state also make it the state most likely to notice these hazards before other states do? If so, it wouldn't be very weird.
- mcguire 3y ago
  My initial thought was, "Why wouldn't this be showing up everywhere?" Then, I thought "Oh, yeah." Poking around on the CDC site, it seems like the most recent data they have up is from 2014.
femiagbabiaka 3y ago
Well sure. There is no regulation with 100% compliance, and some regulation that inspires non-compliance. Safety regulations in the trades are taken as a joke in general. An example I heard back in the day: How many OSHA inspectors does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but it takes him three days to do it.
loandbehold 3y ago
The problem is mostly with unlicensed contractors, usually undocumented immigrants. It's very easy to start countertop installation business. Buy some tools, list yourself at thumbtack and you are ready to go. You can always find work by underbidding guys with license. These guys often don't even have bank accounts and work for cash.

corndoge 3y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does a respirator not solve this problem? The article and many comments here seem to blame people wanting cheap countertops as either part or all of the issue, but if it's safe to cut them with a respirator or wet saw, the focus should be on making companies give their workers respirators/wet saws and enforce their use.

loa_in_ 3y ago
But who is going to make the dangers known to potential and currently employed workers? Companies can sieve through people until they find someone desperate enough or oblivious to the danger and they could not even be aware they're throwing their lives away. And the respirators are going to be in a locker that you have to sign off on each time you want to use them and to do that you have to ask your superior who would try to put you down verbally. I witnessed this model myself while working intermittently at a refuse processing plant that services a pretty big city. The work entailed manually sorting through garbage on a conveyor belt and cutting open any sealed trash bags, taking any plastic, metal, paper and rot out of it manually and into the chutes.
jcampbell1 3y ago
According to a California advisory, respirators should only be used as a last resort. https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/dosh_publications/Engineered-stone-counters.pdf https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/dosh_publications/Engineered-sto... In New Jersey which also has lots of stone cutting, doesn’t allow dry cutting and has entirely different advice. https://www.nj.gov/health/workplacehealthandsafety/documents/occupational-health-surveillance/dry_cutting.pdf https://www.nj.gov/health/workplacehealthandsafety/documents...
- cryptonector 3y ago
  There's not as much difference as you say. The NJ page says > New Jersey law (N.J.S.A. 34:5-182) requires that employers provide workers with full-face air-purifying respirators when engineering controls cannot be used. Use of respirators should be part of a complete respiratory protection program. While the CA page says Respirators should only be used: • As a last resort for protection when local exhaust ventilation or water controls are not feasible or do not adequately control employee airborne exposures. • Where exposures exceed the permissible exposure limit (50 μg/m3, 8-hour TWA) while installing or implementing feasible engineering and work practice controls. • When the employee is in a regulated area. I.e., both say that other measures must be applied first.

saveferris 3y ago

And it's not like it hasnt been known for a long time how dangerous silica can be. I worked in a chemical manufacturing plant as an engineering intern in the 80s, at a plant that made marine coatings. One of the products contained silica as an ingredient. The precautions that went into the production of that product were crazy, workers entering the area had to wear what amounted to space suits with full respirators. I vividly recall putting these suits on any time we had to do any work in that production area.

noobermin 3y ago

Just a comment, but pulmonary fibrosis is terrible. People don't know that often damage to your lungs cannot be reversed. I survived two major lung infections and over a year later still have issues climbing lots of stairs or steep hills that were easy before. I mean I dont have fibrosis (that would be an immediate death sentence) but it's crazy how scaring and damage in the lungs just happens and that part of your lung is just useless now. It's just with fibrosis, the scarring never ends and subsumes both your lungs and thus you die. People have an attitude (somewhat helpful) that you can always get will yourself to recovery or "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and all that, but severe damage to your lungs really has no treatment. Essentially your body just adapts to the reduced function by being more efficient or by changes in behavior (like walking slower). That lung capacity is lost for good.

nikolay 3y ago

I have a friend in this business and his workers always wear N95 masks and his machines are sprayed with water to greatly reduce the dust particles in the air. If workers refuse to wear masks, then whose fault is this?! If employers do not provide the PPE necessary of this job, then they should be sued and put in jail! My friend was buying 3M N95 masks before COVID-19 at extremely low prices in small quantities - somewhere between $.50 and $.70 a piece. So, everybody can calculate the "savings" those cruel employers do - a lot less than $50/mo/employee! There are so many Latino workers in Southern California who do not wear PPE for a variety of reasons. For example, all those leaf blowers not only breathe in gas for hours, but they also inhale dust and mold! And nobody seems to care about them! My city of Irvine for years was pretending they want to enforce the switch to electrical leaf blowers as based on numerous studies, 2-stroke engines pollute the air of California a lot more than all cars together, but have done nothing! If I don't run and close all my windows, my house gets filled with gas for literally minutes and then it's really hard to get rid of those toxic fumes! This madness should stop! The same applies to many other workers! There's the law, but nobody seems to care to enforce it!

kwhitefoot 3y ago
> If workers refuse to wear masks, then whose fault is this?! It doesn't matter whose fault it is; it remains the employers responsibility to ensure that it does not happen, if necessary by dismissing the worker concerned.
- nikolay 3y ago
  Just saw today a worker in a cloud of soil dust with a machine that, I guess, breaks the hardened soil - right next to a busy road. Anyway, next article would be about these workers getting Candida auris. Anyway, do you expect their employer to watch them all the time when they work? If they have passed instruction and cannot be supervised all the time, then it's employees fault.
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    Of course the employee is at fault but the employer also has a responsibility to ensure that such employees do not repeat such behaviour. I expect employers to be aware of how well their employees do the job and to take appropriate action when the behaviour fails to meet the relevant standards.

1024core 3y ago

Isn't this exactly what OSHA was established for?

kwhitefoot 3y ago

That's a major failure of government. We have quartz composite worktops in Europe too. I'm pretty sure that people aren't getting silicosis from them here. You can buy them in IKEA https://www.ikea.com/no/no/p/kasker-spesialtilpasset-benkeplate-hvit-marmormonstret-kvarts-10428394/ https://www.ikea.com/no/no/p/kasker-spesialtilpasset-benkepl...

dmbche 3y ago

"Nearly half of the workers suffering silicosis in the UCLA and UCSF study said their workplaces were using water to control dust. Roughly a quarter said they always had respiratory protection. Fazio said studies have found that in many shops, dust is so thick in the air that respirators cannot filter out a sufficient amount. Metzger argued that the kind of sophisticated and costly measures that would be needed to reliably protect workers cutting engineered stone are not economically plausible in an industry where immigrant workers typically labor in small shops and are often paid in cash. Engineered stone "is too dangerous to be used safely," he said. "If there’s any industrial product that should be banned, this is the product."" All this thanks to synthetic stone - important note for countertops owners, if you want to make sure you don't support the product

kwhitefoot 3y ago
We have these worktops in Europe too, without the health problems as far as I can tell. It seems that the US either lacks suitable health and safety legislation or fails to enforce it.
pixl97 3y ago
>dust is so thick in the air that respirators cannot filter out a sufficient amount This is not a technology problem, this is an 1880s "Safety devices are too expensive problem" along with paid under the table workers problem. All kinds of other industries manufacture 'dangerous' products with regulations that protect the workers. Housing and agriculture are both industries that do not and fight ever further for anti-regulations to protect the workers even less.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    Removing the availability of cheap labor by providing more worker rights, and less/no criminalization of undocumented immigrants alongside an h1b reform would do wonders for the general health of this society.

jimbob45 3y ago

Many went without masks. Some had water spurting from their machines, but others had nothing to tamp down the powder rising in the air. Does OSHA not require masks in these cases?

wcunning 3y ago
Definitely an OSHA requirement, but there's no guarantee that 1) management supports the necessary supplies, checks, reminders, actions, etc or 2) workers want to wear the respirators/masks in general. On top of that, inspectors may be instructed (depending on inspection management, training, etc) that the water based dust suppression is good enough. Even if they want to see masks, management and workers may only implement them during inspections. Adherence to rules is necessary for rules to do anything anywere, ever.
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  Even though there are whistle-blower protection laws, they aren't good enough. No-one should fear risking their job when they stand up for their own health. Management on the other hand should enforce masks as a means to avoid liability.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    What should happen is if someone sees it they call 911 and the cops show up. Followed by the county permit inspector. And then the owner gets arrested and the job site shut down for 6-12 months. Seriously that's what happened at friends workplace when an electrician got fried working on a live 440 volt panel. Don't see why a counter top shop should be treated any different.
Zigurd 3y ago
A key insight into things like this is that many regulations are like speed limits: loosely enforced. Sometimes because it is too hard to inspect every shop handling dangerous materials. In cases like these you have to ban the dangerous material, or essentially kill the market for the products that use it. BTW, I'm not sure how solid granite, soapstone, marble, etc. would be any better. Maybe my 30 year old totally fake Corian is back in style. But for the microplastics from scrubbing it?

victorbstan 3y ago

A lot of workers don’t wear protective gear. By choice. Nobody to blame but themselves.

nemo44x 3y ago
A lot of these guys don't really know the dangers. Seriously, don't underestimate ignorance.
killjoywashere 3y ago
I have had things cut for me and I find myself begging the workers to wear ear pro, eye pro, air pro, and they invariably smile, nod, and work without it. Even if I point out the protective gear sitting near the work area. I too was young once. Now I wear the kit.
barrkel 3y ago
This is both a collective action problem (people not using the right gear will be faster and cheaper than those with, meaning bad behavior outcompetes good) and an information asymmetry problem - workers are usually not fully aware of the problems they're creating for themselves.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Also people don't think they care. In high school one kid told me 'I don't want anyone to wipe my butt when i'm old, so I'm going to commit suicide at 50, therefore my smoking isn't going to harm me'. He is now approaching 50, I wonder if he still thinks that, but I haven't seen him since.
b112 3y ago
The company is to blame. It's law to wear protective gear in many legal jurisdictions, and that 100% means the company is liable, if it does not actively enforce, and create a "culture of safety".
- pixl97 3y ago
  Exactly. In general companies don't like OSHA hanging around. They'd rather run fast and lose even if it costs a finger or two. Enforcement of the law is how get compliance.

thadk 3y ago

According to this podcast, Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge, used his economist-oriented federal government department to delay and block legislated regulation related to protection for silicosis during the Obama administration. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id1651876897?i=1000613645578 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id...

imtringued 3y ago
I don't know why but "economists" are pretty bad at their job.
whimsicalism 3y ago
Jeez - Sunstein has such great work in legal scholarship, but I guess power corrupts? Even more surprising to me was Sunstein and his wife Samantha Power attending Henry Kissinger's birthday party after Power previously published a book basically pinning 150,000 deaths in Cambodia directly on him. They knew this guy is basically a war criminal and still went to celebrate his birthday.
- usrnm 3y ago
  The US has no war criminals, because no court in the world would dare to prosecute Americans for war crimes, the ICC tried once, didn't end well for them. So relax, Kissinger is one of the good guys.
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    One strange thing the older among us are pretty sure to notice is how in average the tech industry worker moved from a quasi-hippie political point of view towards boot-licking default. In the old slashdot times, such a comment would probably have +5 insightful badge attached, here in HN in 2023, it is downvoted to hell.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      e: oh i misunderstood what you were saying, keeping my original comment for posterity I think this is poe’s law in action :) I did not read the reply as earnest.

linsomniac 3y ago

~5 years ago I had a quartz countertop installed. For the final install, the workers were out in the front yard making some final cuts. My 10yo son comes out to see what's going on, looks at the giant cloud of dust, says "Silicosis ain't no joke" and goes back inside. I've taught him well.

jader201 3y ago

Not long ago, we had our countertop replaced (from quartz to granite). They ended up having to make a cut in it while it was sitting in our kitchen. Our home was in a cloud of dust for several hours, and when the dust finally settled a day later, every surface imaginable was covered in dust. I’m pretty sure none of them wore masks when doing this. I honestly didn’t think to wear a mask either (since they weren’t and never really even warned us how bad it would be), but fortunately we were behind closed doors most of the time the particles were in the air. Fortunately it was a granite countertop and not quartz. But I still can’t imagine that stuff is good to breathe on a recurring basis, and it still amazes me that they were fairly casual about the whole thing. My guess is the industry just isn’t educating workers about the risks.

jiveturkey 3y ago
surprised they cut it dry. i just had to add 2 holes to my granite countertop. used a “well” guide that also has water in it. it’s meant to keep the cutting edge cool but also there was no dust to speak of
nemo44x 3y ago
Don't worry about it. You were exposed to a very small amount a single time. It's the repeated exposure day after day that kills people. Saying that, yeah it's not nice. But the single exposure to dust isn't going to hurt you.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
> My guess is the industry just isn’t educating workers about the risks. The problem is not lack of education but lack of enforcement of regulations.
mabbo 3y ago
> My guess is the industry just isn’t educating workers about the risks. My guess is that the companies that did were undercut by the ones that didn't.
gpderetta 3y ago
> Fortunately it was a granite countertop and not quartz A relative of mine died of silicosis after having worked for years in the granite industry. Granite is probably as bad without adequate protection.

dml2135 3y ago

Not surprised. Back in my artist days, the studio I rented was in a building with a countertop business on the first floor. The extent of their safety measures were blowing the dust out into the back alley. Most workers rarely, if ever wore masks, and the inside of the shop was absolutely covered in dust. The dust would make it up to me on the second floor, everything in my studio would accumulate a thin layer just a week or so after cleaning. Wasn’t great but the rent was cheap, until it wasn’t

albert_e 3y ago
> everything in my studio would accumulate a thin layer just a week or so after cleaning I wish I ONLY had to clean the surfaces once a week. In my country and city unfortunately -- even though I dont live near a major road or construction site -- dust is everywhere. Within 24 hours or less of wiping clean, you can see a visible layer of dust on any horizontal surface in home.
- will5421 3y ago
  Do you know what dust this is? Is it natural? May I ask what country you’re in?
  - albert_e 3y ago
    Bangalore India dust is everywhere ..haven't learnt to classify it into types :)

mabbo 3y ago

What I find interesting when comparing the US the Canada on topics like these is that in Canada, there is self-interest in demanding workers be protected. Like beyond the fact that it's a good thing you do. Because we have a public health care system, funded by taxes, having a large number of young men out of the work force (not paying taxes) and using the health care system effectively means my taxes, everyone's taxes, are higher. There's incentives for our government to protect workers from risks that will cost a fortune to fix. In America, there's only the "because it's the right thing to do" reason, which is never enough for anyone to actually do anything.

bushbaba 3y ago
America offers Medicare so we still bear the cost. Just only if they live long enough to receive the retirement benefits. Yeah one heck of a perverse incentive.
- cj 3y ago
  Medicare for the elderly, but we also have Medicaid for people in poverty (< $15k/yr income for a single person w/o a family) which covers most basic medical/dental/ vision needs and is taxpayer funded. Someone taken out of the workforce may qualify for that if they don’t already qualify for disability insurance or similar payments (although I’m not 100% clear if those are funded via private disability insurance or public programs)
  - cma 3y ago
    Not in all states if you have no dependents.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Medicaid is not at all comparable to Medicare. First, Medicare pays a lot more to healthcare providers than Medicaid. Medicare pays more for more medications than Medicaid, and has fewer prior authorization requirements for those medicines. Fewer providers will accept Medicaid, and people using Medicaid will receive less or worse healthcare than those in Medicare. Second, Medicaid is administered by each state, and there is a lot of variability on how easy the state makes it so people can actually get healthcare. Lots of states straight up refuse money simply to punish people of a certain socioeconomic class because it happens to win votes. Bottom line, Medicaid is so leaders can claim they are helping poor people get healthcare AND keep taxes low. Medicare is for actually delivering healthcare to people because that contingent makes up a huge proportion of votes. And yes, even Medicare is not delivering all healthcare, as it has multiple tiers to deliver differing amounts of healthcare to different socioeconomic classes.

Kirby64 3y ago

This seems largely similar to worker protections for welding... the proper protection is essentially heavy shop ventilation and full respirators (which, good ones cost something like $1500). I suspect the problem is that welding related disease/problems show up quite quickly in most cases, and welding tends to be a higher paid industry. More room for margin on PPE and workers have higher demands.

michaelt 3y ago
Also might help that welders have a culture of PPE use; ain't nobody welding without a mask, gloves and sensible clothes.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  I’ve known plenty of welders that are happy to weld with less than adequate safety equipment. The “safety squint” is still a thing.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

charles_f 3y ago

Tangentially related, there's this copper mining museum in BC (1) in what used to be one of these corporate towns where you lived and died. They do a quick demo of the equipments they used back in the day, in a pre cut hole. Even with your hands on your hears it's painful, teeth chattering - and they don't even really hit the rock. People working in there weren't wearing any sort of hearing protection and became deaf within months. And after introducing pressured air driven equipment, they were all dying in a few years from silicosis. Until someone added water spraying to precipitate the dust into mud (wherein their issue became to fiddle caked in mud all day long in the dark, which I guess is an improvement over certain death). Which happened years later. Thinking about the kind of life they had terrorizes me. I don't get how, for the longest time, people were fine with that. I mean no judgement on the workers, they probably didn't have a choice - but the people sending them in probably saw them as kettle. Makes you think about the sort of progress in worker protection that was made since then. But also this kind of story reveals how people are still ready to profiteer from such deadly practices, if given the opportunity. 1: https://www.britanniaminemuseum.ca/ https://www.britanniaminemuseum.ca/

ttfkam 3y ago
> Thinking about the kind of life they had terrorizes me. I don't get how, for the longest time, people were fine with that. A non-trivial number of these mine workers were arrested on trumped up charges like "vagrancy" for not having a job or "trespassing" for walking along a railroad. They would often be sold to companies as convict lease (cheap) labor. Essentially slave labor long after the Civil War since the 13th Amendment has the slavery loophole where it's allowed as long as you're convicted of a crime. This disproportionately affected freed slaves in the South but was an issue for everyone everywhere since it introduced a profit motive to manufactured charges and inflated sentences. The extent that it predominantly affected Black folks and poor white folks had a lot to do with public sentiment not doing anything about it for a very long time. To a not-small-enough extent, the same conditions exist today where labor can be coerced for little to no pay among the prison population, many of whom have been threatened with obscenely long sentences being shortened by accepting plea deals even when innocent or with extenuating circumstances. For-profit prisons often make the situation worse by further incentivizing incarceration on a larger scale.

xyst 3y ago

yet another example of exploitation of people just trying to make a living. No regulations or minimal enforcement means companies/contractors do the job as cheaply as possible. Undercutting companies that actually care about the safety of their workers.

shrubble 3y ago

Wouldn't a wet-cut system where you flow water over the area the blade is hitting, pretty much cut dust in the air by 99% or more? Water is pretty cheap and available ...

jackvalentine 3y ago
Yes, and I’ve known plumbers who have to make cuts in stone countertops to install taps etc to create a ‘dam’ out of putty to flow water in to the cutting site while doing it. The solutions exist, the problem is making people invest in them and stick to it.

Simulacra 3y ago

How does this compare to asbestos?

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

This is why we have trades unions. I just am astounded, horrified. The answer to abusive management is simply rebalance power. The answer to abusive markets is pay more (Edit: better supply chain ledgers) Just horrified re supply chains - the simple way to stop sales of any product is a shelf market like this: "The product X was manufactured by the small child who last month was mutilates by a factory accident. Nice picture. our product has the following verified supply chain. but it's more expensive. your choice of course"

unnouinceput 3y ago

The original article is: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-24/silicosis-countertop-workers-engineered-stone https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-24/silicosi... Yahoo news is something I avoid like the plague.

qwerty_clicks 3y ago

We all live worse lives due to deregulation pressures.

londons_explore 3y ago

I suspect that stone dust generally will be found to be similarly harmful to asbestos. Asbestos is apparently worse because of the sharp edges of the particles, but if I put any angle grinder dust under the microscope I see plenty of sharp bits too. I think the actually harmful thing is that the dust is 'fresh' rather than being the result of years of chemical weathering which tends to smooth off the sharpest pointiest bits at nanometer scale.

jaclaz 3y ago
Yes, they are essentially the same: https://medlineplus.gov/interstitiallungdiseases.html https://medlineplus.gov/interstitiallungdiseases.html
- stephen_g 3y ago
  I already commented above but no, they aren't - silicosos is similar to one of the several possible diseases asbestos can give you, asbestosis, but mesothelioma is the real horror outcome from asbestos exposure which I don't believe silica has any kind of similar connected disease.
  - jaclaz 3y ago
    Yes, maybe I expressed myself improperly, mesothelioma (often originated from asbestos) is slow (like 20 to 40 years from exposure): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesothelioma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesothelioma the workers in the article are young and are dying from the effects of "plainer" silicosis (which is similar to asbestosis).
stephen_g 3y ago
The effects of stone dust are pretty well understood - silicosis is deadly and similarly harmful as asbestosis, and both raise the risk of lung cancer, but I don't believe there is anything like mesothelioma related to quartz dust which is the real horror of asbestos.

mbostleman 3y ago

Having been involved in commercial construction in the late 90s, OSHA had a lot of regulation and focus on masons - especially cutting concrete block. It’s surprising that 25 years later that understanding of the problem didn’t translate to the other trades.

throw9away6 3y ago

The people who installed my counters used no safety equipment. They used consumer grade power tools while spraying them down with water and took no safety precautions. I was actually worried about what would happen if they injured themselves and if my insurance would get sued. They were all Asian and did not speak English it seemed like a super shady operation.

pfannkuchen 3y ago

Why isn’t countertop cutting automated? Seems relatively straightforward for a robot as far as physical tasks go.