IBM Cleared in San Jose Cancer Liability Suit

kbeech writes "A jury In San Jose returned a unanimous verdict in favor of IBM in a case where plaintiffs claimed the company kept medical information on their condition from them." Slashdot hasn't covered this well, but evidence in the lawsuit has suggested that employees were heavily exposed to chemicals and that IBM was aware that their employees got cancer at higher rates than the general population.

Comments

My IBM experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work at IBM Essex VT facility in the Fab doing robotic maintenance. The truth of the matter is that we were exposed to all kinds of horrible chemicals. For instance I one started coughing up blood because a machine had exploded (literally) and there was a cloud of pure HLC in the core. Could I have sued IBM because of this. absolutely NOT!!!!

The thing that gets them off the hook is that their procedure for dealing with any chemicals is all OSHA approved and the equipment to comply is available. The problem is that it is not possible to do your job when in all the gear. If I am supposed to don a SCBA unit, chemical gloves and chemical suit ever time we detected a small TCS leak in a machine I would never get my job done. Also it is a real pain the ass to try and fix small precision robotics while wearing all that shit.

How can you sue a company because you refuse to comply with safety procedures. You can't. The catch 22 is IBM knows you won't follow procedure and doesn't expect you to. They expect you to get the job done fast and right. If you can't do that because you follow procedure to a T you WILL be fired. (at least in IBM Essex)

That's my rant. IBM sucks. They are both the best employer (in terms of pay and benefits) and the worst employer (in terms of actually caring about their employees) I have ever worked for.

AC AKA Low Pressure ASM EPI tech.

Re:Conundrum

[DavidBrown]

You will be interested to know that your view is the traditional view of the legal system. The appellate court opinions that I read while in law school concerning this subject were chock full of grandiose statements about the freedom of labor, and that if an employee wanted his employer to pay for his injuries then the employee could negotiate this right for himself as part of the labor contract. This, while perfectly sound on a libertarian/ancapper level, will not work in practice, because no employer would provide this "benefit" when there were plenty of workers out there who would take the job despite the risks. Workplace injuries therefore resulted in disabled workers with no money and no means of receiving compensation for their injuries and lost income.

The result of the courts' failure (rightfully or wrongfully, you decide) to deal with this issue is the worker's compensation insurance system created by the state legislatures. Ordinarily, an injured worker has only one recourse - a worker's comp. claim.

The IBM workers' case, however, was for "fraudulent concealment". The theory of their claim is that IBM knew of the risks and either negligently or intentionally failed to inform their workers of these risks. If the claim is true, then IBM would rightfully be liable - and I don't think that this would violate the precepts of ancappers - it's one thing to agree to accept certain risks associated with employment, but when the employer conceals these risks, the worker's acceptance is uninformed and is, from a legal standpoint, more or less void.

Apparently some key evidence (the IBM "mortality file") was deemed inadmissible. As an attorney, I am curious as to why this evidence was not admitted, and whether or not the plaintiffs will appeal because of it.