Crafting America’s Favorite Countertops Is Killing Workers

0:00At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC. Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work.

0:47It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans. This is Robert Smith from Business History. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're a small business owner. And like every small business owner, you started with a dream to do what you love and watch it grow.

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2:08Josh Idelson is a senior reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek, covering labor. Some people feel the artificial quartz doesn't chip as much, easier to keep clean, that it is more customizable. You can make it whatever color you want. Josh says another important difference between natural and artificial stone is what it's made out of. Artificial stone contains a lot more of something called crystalline silica. There are hundreds of workers who have sued manufacturers alleging that that product caused them to get this horrible disease, silicosis. On one side of these hundreds of lawsuits are the people who work in artificial stone fabrication shops.

2:57Where these products are being grinded and cut and customized. On the other side of the lawsuits are companies involved in the rest of the artificial stone supply chain. Retailers that sell artificial stone post-fabrication, like Costco, Home Depot, IKEA, and Lowe's, and producers of artificial stone, like a company called Cambria, the largest domestic producer. Cambria is facing over 600 lawsuits about this issue. Cambria's lawyer, in testimony before Congress, talked about the possibility of Cambria being sued out of existence. Lawsuits aren't the only potential threat to Cambria's business.

3:43California regulators are also looking to crack down on artificial stone fabrication. But in Washington, the industry has some powerful allies, members of Congress who are trying to insulate companies like Cambria and put a stop to lawsuits like these. There are two very different paths being considered now in the United States. A ban on fabricating the product or a ban on the lawsuits against the product.

4:14I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, how artificial stone countertops became the center of a heated political debate, and what's at stake for the companies and workers at the center of it.

4:33And Cambria is so easy to maintain. It never needs polishing or sealing. This is an ad from the artificial stone producer Cambria, presenting their artificial stone countertops as homey, welcoming. Like this kitchen, it's warm, inviting. It's the heart of the home. That's why I love Cambria natural quartz countertops. In its finished form, as a countertop or sink, artificial stone is just as safe as the natural stuff. Cambria has said that its product is even safer, more hygienic. But the process of turning the product into a countertop is another story. It's somewhat like the way that you would turn a potato into a Pringle in that you're taking stone quarried from mines, pulverize it, combine it with other ingredients like resins, take the air out of it, compress it, and cook it in an oven and create these slabs that are then sent off to fabrication shops, which are generally separate businesses.

5:43It's there, at the fabrication shops, where workers grind, polish, and cut those slabs down into countertops. And that's where workers can be exposed to risks. Respirable crystalline silica is released by cutting into or grinding things like stones. Artificial quartz has way more crystalline silica in it than a product like marble. Marble is up to around 5 % crystalline silica. Artificial stone can be around 93 % crystalline silica. Wow. So when workers are working with these slabs, they're breathing in these kinds of particulates, these RCS particles, and that is what causes this disease called silicosis?

6:37Yes. These are tiny particles, less than a tenth of the width of a human hair. Mucus is no match for them. And as they accumulate in your lungs in large numbers, those particles cause lungs to get inflamed, to scar, to shrink, to harden. And eventually, in large enough numbers, particles of respirable crystalline silica cause your lungs to fail. Sounds like a horrible disease. It is a horrible disease. I talked to a doctor who said she wishes her patients with silicosis only had lung cancer. Because lung cancer, at least, you can cut out. And this is incurable. That's right. Silicosis isn't new.

7:30In fact, Josh says it's existed for millennia. There are signs of silicosis in bodies of mummies that have been studied and in the writings of Hippocrates. So silicosis has been a known killer at large for thousands of years. Part of what's different about the wave of artificial stone silicosis is how young some of the people getting it are, like Tyler Jordan. Tyler Jordan is a 32-year-old father of three who currently lives in Missouri. I used to work in a granite fab shop owned by my parents in Loveland, Colorado. Tyler Jordan started working full-time in his dad's fabrication shop after he graduated from high school in 2012.

8:23I love that job. I work there in hopes of one day taking over that business. Starting in the early 2010s, artificial quartz was becoming a bigger and bigger part of his work. And it became the majority of his work. The first stone that we ever did was bright blue, which isn't really a color that granite comes in. Tyler, like workers I talk to all over the country, said that representatives of the manufacturers said to treat artificial stone like natural stone. The differences that we were told were all pros. Like it's stronger, it's less porous, it won't stain. Tyler and other workers say they were not told when they started working with artificial courts that it was any more dangerous.

9:18When did he start feeling unwell? What were some of the symptoms he started experiencing? In 2022, when Tyler was still 27, his wife Caitlin started waking up in Tyler's sweat. I had lost weight. I started waking up with pain, back pain, chest pain, and just everything was sore and tight. He went to the doctor finally after pain in his back was so intense that it made him fall down. I went to the pulmonologist and he found fluid outside my lungs. And they drained a pint of fluid from around my lungs and then more tests and more just blood work just trying to find cancer, which they couldn't find because there was no cancer.

10:15A doctor originally thought Tyler must not have silicosis because he was not some minor late in his career. He was a guy in his 20s. And then finally I got a lung biopsy. A specialist concluded that silicosis came from the artificial courts that he was working with. The silicosis kind of spiraled into a lot of other illnesses, autoimmune disease and kidney failure. Tyler's dream was to take over his dad's business. He ended up instead getting his dad's kidney. He has to keep distance from his kids when they get colds because he's immunocompromised. jobs he can think of that he would want to do are out of the question because of potential exposures.

11:09With me having a stop work, we were priced out of Colorado and had to move here to Missouri. He's living a circumscribed life. You mentioned that Tyler's doctor didn't think that he had silicosis in part because he was in his 20s. And this is a disease often associated with minors in their 60s and 70s. But recently, you've reported that the profile of who is getting silicosis is shifting to be more like people like Tyler. Say more about who is getting silicosis now. Thousands of cases have been identified around the world of artificial stone silicosis. In California, which has tracked this more systematically than other U.S.

11:57states, hundreds of cases have been found with a median age of diagnosis in the 40s. And dozens of those workers have died at a median age in their 50s. And as more of these cases are piling up, how have workers like Tyler responded? Hundreds of workers, including Tyler, have brought lawsuits against the manufacturers of these artificial stone slabs, arguing that they were selling a needlessly toxic product and misrepresenting what its risks were. After the break, how the artificial stone industry is responding and how its cases are playing out in the courts and in Congress.

12:50At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones, member SIPC.

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15:06Tyler Jordan is one of hundreds of workers at U.S. fabrication shops who've sued quartz producers like Cambria. There are numerous defendants in these lawsuits, including retailers that sell the product, distributors that are middlemen, and manufacturers that make this product. The defendants in these lawsuits have denied wrongdoing. The manufacturers have argued that they were upfront about the risks of working with a product that has silica in it. And they have argued, as Cambria puts it, that the issue is the process, not the product. So Tyler and his wife brought a lawsuit against 20 of these companies, including Cambria, which is the largest domestic producer of artificial stone.

16:00Josh, what stood out to you about the trial? The manufacturers of the artificial quartz pushed in this trial to put the blame on Tyler's parents as the owner of the business where he worked. They were quite colorful in making the case to the jury, comparing Tyler's parents to dangerous drivers who had him metaphorically in the backseat of their car and got him injured. I think that that's not true. I know my dad ran a clean, safe shop. The main thing was OSHA. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, regulates the amount of silica workers can be exposed to in industries like fabrication.

16:53Employers are supposed to determine if workers are being exposed to silica concentrations above what OSHA considers its action level, and to ensure the amount of silica does not go over OSHA's permissible exposure limit, which is double that action level. Tyler and his parents say they worked hard to be safe and to avoid excessive exposure to dust. Tyler's father described a phalanx of fans that were used, expensive cutting machinery to reduce the amount that workers would be breathing in dust from the stone. Cambria argued that Tyler's parents did not follow OSHA safety rules, including failing to do air monitoring for more than a decade.

17:50Tyler's parents say they didn't do air monitoring because when OSHA itself had tested their error in 2011, it had found the levels of crystalline silica to be below the threshold. Over and over, Cambria has said that the track record of its own fabrication shops, the in-house ones it controls, show the product can be fabricated safely. That argument is undermined by the documents we've reviewed that show in Cambria's own fabrication shops, not all of the time, but frequently levels above the OSHA action level have been found. And how did the jury respond ultimately? The jury put significant blame on Tyler's parents, the owners of the business where he worked.

18:54They found that Tyler's employer was 63 % responsible. They found Cambria was 32 % to blame. And Hyundai L &C, another manufacturer whose products he worked with, 3%. They assigned 2 % of the blame to Tyler himself. In other words, the jury found Cambria was about a third at fault for what happened to Tyler, which puts Cambria on the hook to pay for around a third of the damages, which with interest adds up to around$7.7 million. dollars. Cambria has asked the judge to overturn the verdict in Tyler's case. Meanwhile, the company is facing over 600 similar lawsuits. It's settled several of the cases, and three of them have gone to a jury verdict so far.

19:56In two of these cases, including Tyler's, Cambria was found partially at fault. The company did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment. Defendants in other cases include retailers like Home Depot, which responded to Bloomberg's inquiries with a statement saying it wants everyone in its supply chain to be safe and expects fabricators, quote, to comply with applicable laws and regulations. In testimony before Congress, Cambria's top lawyer described the risk of a nuclear verdict. In other words, the company being sued out of existence. She argues that it's unfair for Cambria to be put in the position of having to defend itself individually in each of these cases when the real issue, in Cambria's view, is these sketchy fabrication shops not protecting their workers.

20:49Two Republican members of Congress from California, Tom McClintock and Daryl Issa, are pushing for a bill that would protect companies like Cambria from lawsuits like Tyler's, lawsuits against manufacturers over injuries sustained by workers at third-party businesses. And Canberra is lobbying Congress in favor of this legislation. Conservative members of Congress are arguing that what's going on here is California in particular failing to crack down on sweatshops, exploiting illegal labor. and that Democrats are aligning themselves with these fabrication sweatshops, in their view, in part out of ire at Donald Trump.

21:34Because Marty Davis, the CEO of Cambria, is an ally of the president, someone who has encouraged his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, has donated money, has lent money to help launch Truth Social. Davis was asked in 2022 about the efforts to overturn the election and said, quote, I gave information or input to what I thought they needed to do to investigate, unquote. Meanwhile, at the state level in California, regulators are pushing a different approach. They're trying to ban the product's fabrication to protect workers. Cal OSHA staff, after studying the issue, concluded that the fabrication of this product is toxic.

22:22They pointed to hazards from additional ingredients like the resins that are in the artificial quartz to the smaller size of the particles that are released that allow them to more easily penetrate deeply into the lungs. And they pointed to the much higher amount of crystalline silica that is in the artificial courts. California wouldn't be the first. Australia has banned artificial stone since 2024, after Queensland found that close to one in five of the state's fabrication workers had silicosis. On the other hand, if the U.S. Congress immunizes manufacturers from litigation by all of these sick workers, That is something that could encourage companies to continue making this artificial quartz product.

23:15And where do both of these efforts stand today? California OSHA is moving towards a vote on an emergency regulation banning the use of this product. In Congress, there was a party line vote by the Judiciary Committee where the Republican majority voted to advance this ban on artificial stone lawsuits against manufacturers. And so the question is whether the Speaker of the House takes up the bill and what might happen from there. Well, I want to end this conversation on Tyler Jordan. And what does life look like for him now? And what are his hopes for the future? He has tried to adjust to a stay-at-home dad role.

24:06So right now, it's just kind of living the best I can until things get worse again. My dad's kidney that I have won't last forever. that at some point my body will redirect it and be successful in rejecting it so it'll fail. He takes a little comfort in the idea that his case and bringing attention to his case could help make a difference and prevent ordeals for other people. And his parents, do they still work with artificial stone? Yes. Tyler's dad has said at trial and has said to me he still uses artificial stone because it's what customers want. So they don't have much of a choice. I know if they stopped working with it right now, they'd go out of business.

25:00This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. The show is hosted by me, David Gura, and Juan Ha. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox, Jeff Grokot, Patty Hirsch, Emma Munger, Naomi Ng, Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Ugiura, Julia Weaver, Yong Yong, and Taka Yasuzawa. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamster-Boer. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. If you liked this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show.

25:41Thanks for listening. We'll be back on Monday.

26:04strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones, member SIPC. This is Robert Smith from Business History. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're a small business owner. And like every small business owner, you started with a dream to do what you love and watch it grow. What you probably didn't dream about? Keeping up with cyber threats. That's where MasterCard can help with access to tools that help identify cyber threats to better protect your business.

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