Brown Lung

History of the Affliction

One of the earliest mentions of the affliction in the United States is an article published in 1940 in the trade journal Textile World. Other studies using different findings and methodologies were done in the 1940s. Following another British study, a rash of research was done in America from the 1950s through the 1980s. Brown Lung was not recognized as an official occupational hazard in the United States until 1977. At that time, only two American victims had won settlements from the lung disease.

As the harvest and ginning of cotton became more mechanized, the amount of contaminants in the cotton bales increased and Brown Lung became more prevalent. In 1981, estimates based on government and labor union studies indicated at least 20 percent of American textile mill workers had byssinosis from breathing in microscopic particles of leaves and stems coming from processing bales of raw cotton fiber.

Brown Lung was one of the health hazards which inspired the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) of 1970. This act allows the U.S. government to set standards to protect workers from substances that are toxic. Bureau of Labor statistics cited in the 1970 hearings showed almost 400,000 cases of occupational disease. It was in the 1970s that the name Brown Lung was coined. Credit for the phrase is given to Ralph Nader, who wrote a 1971 article which focused national attention.

Although state workers' compensation systems began in 1911, they did little to help victims of occupational diseases such as byssinosis. Even though the system was supposed to be no-fault, 90 percent of occupational lung-disease claims were contested well into the 1980s, and those that were won by the victims often took more than a year to settle. Part of the difficulty was that the burden of proof of disease was on the plaintiff to show she had contracted [Page 113]the disease through her occupation. In the late 1970s, only about one-tenth of the (eventually) successful accident claims under workers' compensation was contested by employers. However, employers contested three-fifths of disease claims in general, and nine-tenths of the dust claims in particular during this same time period. These contested claims presented special difficulties for the claimants: Procedural points were especially hardfought by both sides because so many of these points were setting precedents that would either help one side or the other in the next case. Moreover, the workplace had usually changed a great deal since the employee left, sometimes a period of years before. Access to these work sites was not always readily available, and sometimes there were indications of retribution against witnesses providing testimony for the plaintiff.

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