A stone countertop fabricator wears a mask to help protect against airborne particles which can contribute to silicosis at a shop in Sun Valley, Calif.
Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times
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Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times
An epidemic of a deadly lung disease among hundreds of workers who cut kitchen and bathroom countertops has regulators on opposite sides of the country considering two drastically different responses this week.
In a California hearing on Thursday, workplace safety regulators will be discussing a proposed ban on cutting so-called quartz or engineered stone, a popular choice for countertops. That’s because this material creates an unusual amount of lung-damaging silica dust when it gets cut or polished, far more than natural granite or marble.
Meanwhile in Washington, Republicans on a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee convened a hearing to discuss a bill that would instead ban workers’ ability to bring lawsuits against the companies that manufacture and sell the raw slabs of this engineered material.
“They’ve got it backwards. It’s not the lawsuits that should be banned, it’s the stone slabs that should be banned, because they are deadly and they cannot be fabricated safely,” says Raphael Metzger, an attorney in California who represents numerous countertop workers and says hundreds of lawsuits are ongoing.
But Minnesota-based Cambria, the main manufacturer of the engineered quartz slabs in the United States, says that in addition to producing the raw slabs that it sells to distributors and countertop fabricators, it also runs a few of its own fabrication shops that cut slabs to order while controlling the dust with ventilation and wet cutting techniques.
“This demonstrates that quartz can be fabricated safely,” said Rebecca Shult, the chief legal officer of Cambria in the Wednesday hearing on Capitol Hill. “Our workers are protected.”
She pointed the finger at countertop businesses that cut raw slabs on the cheap without the necessary protections. “It’s outrageous that these American sweatshops are not being shut down,” she said.
While Cambria is facing around 400 lawsuits from workers with lung disease who were employed in other companies, she said, “Cambria has no control over these third party businesses and their dangerous conditions. We don’t own them and we don’t operate them…The wrong parties are being sued.”
Workers’ advocates don’t buy that stance.
“In my years in occupational health, I have never seen an industry say, ‘We sell a dangerous product but we have no responsibility for it once it leaves our factory, and rather than protect workers downstream, we are the ones who need protection from lawsuits,’ ” says David Michaels, an epidemiologist with George Washington University and a former director of OSHA, the federal workplace safety agency.
“Not enough lungs”
The countertop industry is in a crisis that’s been growing quickly in recent years.
Nearly 500 workers who manufacture kitchen countertops by cutting slabs of natural and artificial stone have fallen ill since 2019 with a serious and irreversible lung disease in California alone. There, more than 50 have needed lung transplants, and 27 workers have died. Most are Hispanic men in their 40’s or 30’s, or even younger.
“We fear the numbers will only continue to climb,” said Alice Berliner, director of the Office of Worker Health & Safety for Los Angeles County Department of Public Health in a December public meeting. “Each number is a partner, a friend, a parent, a child, or a sibling. These are human lives, not just numbers.”
Additional workers have gotten sick in other states, including Texas, New York, Colorado, and Washington. Massachusetts just found their first case, in a Hispanic man in his 40s who, for the past 14 years, had worked for stone countertop fabrication and installation companies.
One sickened worker, Leobardo Segura Meza, told a workplace safety board in California in 2023 that he worried there were “not enough lungs” for all the transplants that would be needed in this industry, which employs about 100,000 people nationwide.
Despite the recent passage of stricter workplace standards in California, Berliner said her team’s visits to small and medium-sized countertop fabrication shops show that compliance with the rules remains low.
She said that over the last six months, while visiting more than a hundred fabrication shops, the safety officials did not observe any workers wearing the appropriate level of respiratory protection during high-risk cutting and polishing tasks.
And even though cutting the slabs without using a stream of water to damp down the dust can be extremely dangerous, she said that her office estimates that “at least 25% of shops continue to dry-cut stone.”
Similarities with Australia
The steady rise in serious cases of lung disease has prompted the Western Occupational & Environmental Medical Association (WOEMA), a group of workplace health experts in 7 Western states, to petition California’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board to simply ban the cutting of engineered stone with high amounts of silica.
“The material itself is even more dangerous than we thought,” says Robert Blink, a doctor in California who specializes in work-related medical problems and who is a former WOEMA president. He says the number of new serious illnesses and deaths is “impossible to tolerate.”
Even in shops that have put dust controls in place, he says, researchers have measured unsafe levels of silica.
He says there’s an estimated 4,000 countertop workers in California, which means so far, about 12% have developed serious illnesses. “As time goes on, and these cases continue to be identified, the number is approaching the Australia numbers,” he says, noting that after a similar crisis began in Australian countertop workers, that country banned engineered stone completely.
Such a ban is “likely to be the most effective strategy for the primary prevention of silicosis, as it does not rely on controls implemented by individual employers and workers,” according to one report.
Cambria’s Shult disputes that, saying the quartz product isn’t the problem—the problem is unsafe cutting processes. “We have no interest in selling to unsafe shops,” she told lawmakers, saying the company was trying to work with regulators to promote worker safety.
The effect of lawsuits
During Wednesday’s congressional hearing, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., questioned why Congress would effectively grant a kind of legal immunity to the makers and suppliers of a fashionable countertop material.
He noted that the CEO of Cambria, Marty Davis, is a Republican donor, and said the apparent goal of the proposed legislation “was to give a handout to a millionaire friend of none other than Donald Trump” while countertop workers “struggle to make ends meet, struggle to stay alive, actually.”
Gary Talwar, vice president of Natural Stone Resources, a family-owned stone distribution company in Anaheim, California, told lawmakers that his company is facing dozens of lawsuits, despite being a distributor that does not cut, grind, or polish stone. He says distributors are increasingly being named in lawsuits for injuries tied to cutting engineered stone.
“We’re just being hammered,” he told lawmakers. “Over the past week I’ve spoken with friends and colleagues across the industry. Many of them have been named in 50 and up to 100 different lawsuits. Several have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars just trying to defend themselves, while paying higher insurance premium renewals or not even being offered a renewal at all.”
“My hope is that we can refocus accountability where it belongs,” he says, “on workplace safety, OSHA compliance, and the parties who control fabrication practices.”
Michaels, the former OSHA director, says there simply aren’t enough workplace inspectors to go to thousands of countertop fabrication shops and make sure that they are following the rules, and OSHA is facing funding cuts.
He hopes this proposed legislation to ban the workers’ lawsuits never comes to a vote in Congress.
“This legislation is a death sentence for workers in this industry,” says Michaels. “If there is no obligation of these manufacturers and distributors to ensure that the downstream users of their products are safe, we will continue to see more and more cases of silicosis, more and more lung transplant cases, more and more deaths.”
