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Manufacturers brace for trial's ripple effect
San Jose, Calif. - With the start of trial over whether chemicals used at an IBM plant here caused cancers among manufacturing employees, the electronics industry is just starting to see the tip of the tip of a very large legal iceberg headed its way.
Last week, attorneys representing two former employees at IBM Corp.'s pc-board- and disk-drive-manufacturing facility on Cottle Road here began the first trial in what looms as a very long list of personal-injury and wrongful-death lawsuits. More than 255 such claims, grouped into 36 cases, have been filed against IBM alone, in California, New York and Minnesota. Industry observers believe the trend could one day affect other long-time electronics manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Texas Instruments. Ongoing coverage can be found on EETimes.com.
Indeed, plaintiffs' attorney Richard Alexander says he is trying to set a legal precedent with this case that would hold IBM liable for knowingly exposing workers to carcinogenic chemicals and toxins that cause birth defects and for withholding from employees information about the health risks.
In the first two suits, which are being tried together in the Superior Court of California, Santa Clara County, former employees Alida Hernandez, 73, and Jim Moore, 66, claim such exposure resulted in Hernandez's contracting breast cancer and Moore's contracting non-Hodgkins lymphoma. The two seek unspecified damages.
The case in essence builds on the foundation of personal-injury and wrongful-death suits brought by smokers against tobacco companies and, before that, by workers exposed to asbestos. (Coincidentally, IBM has employed as its defense counsel a law firm that has defended tobacco companies: Jones Day, of Cleveland).
But the case in San Jose shines a spotlight on a dark issue that many companies would like to keep hidden below the highly buffed marketing gleam of Silicon Valley. Ted Smith, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, asserts that the industry has delayed conducting needed epidemiological tests on the chemicals used in electronics manufacturing and has failed to take seriously the potential threat to workers of low levels of exposure to mixtures of these agents (see www.svtc.org/hightech_prod/inventory.htm).
"They need to do the same level of epidemiological studies other industries have been doing for years. They need to do...