David Covey

The warning printed on that label scared Martinez.

Nancy lost her baby in the spring, but that miscarriage early in her pregnancy could have had a dozen causes. Then Kim lost the baby she was carrying. And then so did another young woman. It took a while for the separate events to coalesce into a suspicion: the unborn babies of these women, who all worked at the Accurate Products plant above Rose Canyon, were dying because they were slowly, insidiously being poisoned.

Accurate Products plant

David Covey

Like any good mystery story, this one has plenty of would-be detectives: union leaders, several interested medical doctors, officials from the state agency in charge of enforcing safe working conditions. They soon confirmed the truth of at least one of the women worker’s suspicions. In fact, at least six Accurate Products employees became pregnant in 1979 — and five of the six pregnancies ended in trouble or disaster.

Workers take blocks of rubber “stock” and press them into flat sheets, adding chemicals in the process.

David Covey

But what was the culprit? Exposure to certain chemicals at the plant? Or something else? Unfortunately, there remains another mystery: why nothing has changed at the factory a full year after the frightening information began to circulate. Women, some of whom are pregnant, continue to toil in rooms containing dusty chemicals known to cause birth defects.

Clockwise from top: Heifetz, Capehart, Martinez, Heller, Despres

David Covey

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. This story must begin at Accurate Products. To get there you take Morena Boulevard north from Balboa Avenue along the eastern edge of Interstate 5. You drive past the little warehouses and the Price Club and Solar until the road bends east and becomes Jutland Drive. At the top of the hill is the Accurate Products plant, a clean, modem looking facility guarded by the flags of the United States and of the Lear-Siegler Corporation, the people who own Accurate. The structure could pass for an office building, but in reality it is a rubber factory. Here the workers take blocks of rubber “stock” and press them into flat sheets, adding various chemicals in the process. The sheets are then cut into differing widths, to be molded into grommets and bumpers and gaskets. Women recall turning out everything over the years from rubber insets for eyelash curlers to cane tips to brake shoes for trucks.

Traditionally, the transportation industry has bought most of the products. Some say that’s why business at the plant is so slow these days; the recession and the decline in American auto sales have choked off demand for the many components made of rubber and plastic. Today only about seventy employees are working, compared to the good times (not so long ago), when the number had swollen to more than 200. Turnover has always been high (as many as two-thirds of the employees quit in an average year), and most of those employees are young women, the majority earning $4.58 to $4.88 an hour. “The women take the job because they get a little more than they would get washing dishes in a restaurant,” according to one of the rare veteran workers, who says she hasn’t quit because “I’m getting $5.10 an hour and any place else I’d get $4.60 or $4.80.”

It’s not too difficult to understand why they quit with such regularity. The inside of the plant doesn’t look much grimmer than the average factory — walls of corrugated iron, dirty concrete floors. But even on the breeziest day, the acrid stink of molten rubber is everywhere. On stuffy, busier days, the workers compare the factory interior to a foundry; they say the temperature climbs till it feels like more than a hundred degrees, and the fumes make one’s head reel.

The plant is divided roughly into two major work areas. Most of the molding, extruding, and packing takes place in one huge main room. There’s a secondary area where the chemicals added to the molten rubber are mixed and most of the rubber is milled. Great cardboard vats of powdery white chemicals cram this area, along with anonymous brown paper bags of dusty substances covering the floor. According to one long-time mill-room worker, “Everything is just stagnant on a hot day. All these chemicals are just floating in the air. Sometimes you can’t even see the Banbury operator when he’s like maybe a hundred yards away or more. You can hardly see him through this mist, this cloud. ... It gets pretty heavy in there.’’ Of course, workers complain everywhere. But public records show that the complaints about safety hazards at the Accurate Products plant have been deemed valid on numerous occasions — at least in the judgment of the California State Division of Occupational Safety and Health — Cal-OSHA. That agency has a local “compliance office’’ in Kearny Mesa which maintains records for only the three most recent years. But even in that time period, OSHA inspectors checked the rubber factory for safety violations at least nine times, and OSHA authorities from another branch — industrial hygiene — also made several visits (however, most of those records are kept in Santa Ana). Inspections by both branches over the years have yielded citations for dozens of different alleged violations, ranging from faulty electrical wiring to hazardous machinery. (According to one source, the plant received twenty-six citations after the first OSHA inspections in 1973.)

Furthermore, the specific question of chemical hazards has surfaced several times. A former machinists union employee named John Clay, who was the union’s business agent at Accurate Products from 1975 through 1978, remembers filing complaints with OSHA about the chemicals on at least three different occasions. “Once they took samples of every chemical in the place,” he claims. He says the state agency reported the chemicals safe, but Clay adds, “I have an abiding contempt for OSHA. They went through the motions, but I don’t trust them to have told me the truth.” The question arose in another forum — an article which appeared in the San Diego Newsline in August of 1978, and in which the writer, an industrial hygiene student named Mike Doering, listed some of the illnesses associated with chemicals in use at the plant and reported that the company apparently had no program training workers how to handle them safely. That article caused a small flurry of concern at Accurate, but once again the issue soon receded — until one day in the spring of 1979.

Eleanor Martinez doesn’t remember exactly how she noticed the label on the container of ethylene thiourea (ETU), one of the many ingredients used in the processing of the rubber. “I think the men brought it to my attention,” she says. The warning printed on that label scared Martinez, a “stock preparation” worker with eight years of seniority and who was serving as the plant’s chief union shop steward (an elected position) at that time. “May cause cancer or birth defects,” the label warned. “Women of child-bearing potential should not be exposed to this chemical.” Since young women were coming into contact with the powder every day, Martinez brought the warning to the attention of the union’s current liaison to the plant, a young man named Ken Capehart. Martinez recalls that Capehart took no action. “I think he was really afraid to go with it,” she says. The former chief shop steward says she asked the company for some “data sheets” on the chemical known as ETU (printed information which explains health hazards associated with it), but she doesn’t remember the management ever supplying her with any.

So Martinez says she once again urged Capehart to take action, this time just before an OSHA hygiene officer named Len Breen was due to visit the plantin response to a separate complaint about machines suspected of causing tendonitis. “I told Capehart, They’re coming in. File it,’ ” Martinez says. “But he said he couldn’t do it; he’d have to file a separate one.” This response Martinez found strange. “I can understand if they’re there, you don’t want to throw a bunch of stuff at them. But this was important to us.” Thus, she says, when Breen visited, she herself asked him to include a complaint that workers were not receiving proper training in use of the chemicals, and she says Breen complied. Capehart failed to show up at the plant that day.

Ken Capehart boasts a meteoric rise in machinists union politics during the last few years. He started working at NASSCO four years ago as a pipefitter trainee, and today he earns about $24,000 a year, and $375 in expense money every month, as a union business agent, a full-time job which gives him responsibility for the enforcement of the union contracts in a number of different shops, including Accurate Products. He recounts events differently from Martinez. According to Capehart, after Martinez informed him of the ETU label warning in the spring of 1979, he filed a complaint with Cal-OSHA within days. He says on April 17 a Cal-OSHA officer inspected the plant, and on April 18 that man requested assistance from the Cal-OSHA hygiene unit.

Cal-OSHA’s records confirm that a safety officer went out to the plant on April 17. But the report of that inspection doesn’t mention the ETU and says that the officer found the plant to be “in compliance.” The first question about ETU use which appears in the local OSHA files comes at the end of June, when Breen, the agency’s occupational hygiene investigator, visited Accurate Products. The report doesn’t say who asked Breen to look at the chemicals; OSHA says that information is confidential. In any case, Tom Monji, the senior industrial hygiene engineer in OSHA’s Santa Ana office, says that no citations were issued immediately after Breen's visit. Instead, the hygiene inspector called for further investigation — primarily into the tendonitis problem.

So at the end of August last year, a nurse named Joyce Simonowitz, from the Los Angeles office of Cal-OSHA, trekked out to the rubber factory. Her main objective was to question the workers about tendonitis, but she recalls having a note from Breen about possible problems with pregnancies as a result of chemical exposure. The nurse says during that August visit she asked the plant nurse and Eleanor Martinez if they remembered any abnormal births among plant workers. They said no. But the question apparently jogged some memories, and within days the vague talk among the workers about miscarriages and hysterectomies jelled.

Another employee, a woman named Nancy Despres, finally decided to take action. Last October 4 she filed yet another complaint, this time focusing solely on the safety of all the chemicals in use at the plant, including their possible effects on pregnancy. It was this complaint (six months after the first awareness of the ETU warning) that finally stirred OSHA to unusual action, nurse Simonowitz confirms. That action would take the form of a special Cal-OSHA health survey, to be conducted by Simonowitz and a second OSHA nurse.

Simonowitz sounds genuinely regretful when she talks about that survey's limitations. She didn't question male workers about reproductive difficulties, nor did she ask women about hysterectomies, nor did her questions attempt to pinpoint chemicals that had been used by women who had health problems. “There was a feeling that speed was necessary,’’ she recalls, so “things were kind of hastily put together.’’ She stresses that her objectives were limited. “Sometimes women will be talking among themselves and they ’ll think there’s a problem, but when you get down to looking at the records and the numbers, it doesn’t turn out that way.” The nurse’s intent was to determine if health problems at the plant were in fact unusual. Although the survey turned into a long, drawn-out process, Simonowitz says the results finally showed that the situation “was almost exactly as the women had reported.’’ .. Simonowitz and the other OSHA nurse began the survey by returning to the plant on October 15 and 16 and interviewing as many workers as possible. Later, Simonowitz tried to supplement those interviews by calling Accurate Products workers on the phone in the evenings. She says she had completed the bulk of the questioning by January, although two meetings at the union hall were held (the most recent one in February) in an attempt to catch those who had been missed. The first conclusions from research were disturbing indeed.

The OSHA nurses finally managed to interview fifty-six female Accurate Products employees. Eight others refused to be interviewed, and thirty-eight could not be reached. Among the fifty-six women, the nurses found eleven pregnancies, most of them recent. But only three of those concluded in a normal delivery; among the. others, one woman had a therapeutic abortion after experiencing spotting, one delivered a child with birth defects, and the other six ended in miscarriage. Most alarming was the summary for 1979, when six of the pregnancies occurred. Only one of them concluded in the delivery of an apparently normal child.

By the time Simonowitz had reached these preliminary conclusions, another detective had entered the mystery — Dr. Gerald (Buzz) Chemoff, a specialist in birth defects from UCSD. Chemoff runs a special service out of University Hospital designed to counsel women who believe their unborn children may have been exposed to teratogens, agents which might cause birth defects. He first became interested in the Accurate Products plant last fall, when a pregnant worker there, worried about her unborn baby, called the Teratogen Registry. One of his first questions to the concerned worker was whether the machinists union or Cal-OSHA were investigating the workplace. That’s how he learned about the survey Simonowitz was conducting. As the fall wore into winter, Chernoff continued calling Simonowitz, urging her to provide him with results so that he could counsel the worried mother-to-be. “We were pushing it,” he says flatly. “Cal-OSHA doesn't do things unless they’re pushed against the wall.”

By the middle of February, Simonowitz was suggesting that OSHA might hire the doctor to conduct a further study which would attempt to fill in some of the blanks left by the OSHA survey. At just about that same time, momentum also began gathering on another front. Some of the women union members at Accurate Products had begun talking to a second medical doctor, Ruth Heifetz. A specialist in preventive medicine and community health, Heifetz over the years has increasingly concentrated on occupational health and safety; today she’s probably the leading authority on the subject in San Diego. So she naturally was interested in the questions regarding chemicals at the rubber factory. Even apart from the preliminary results of the Cal-OSHA study, she knew a certain wariness was justified, since statistics show that almost twenty-three out of every thousand production workers in California rubber and plastics factories suffer from an officially reported occupational disease, compared with a rate of five and a half per thousand among all workers.

Heifetz was immediately curious about just what chemicals were being used at Accurate Products, and she encouraged cooperative workers inside the plant to begin copying down the names of any suspicious chemicals. Often there were no labels, as the company commonly transfers chemicals td unmarked containers, and Heifetz say<*n some other cases the substances were identified only by code. “For example. ‘Vancide 89’ is actually Captan. which is very similar to Thalidomide. . . . We had to spend a tremendous amount of time just breaking down those codes."

But by March the physician had compiled a sinister list of substances definitely being used at the factory and linked with various problems (Heifetz stresses that the list still may not be complete). Heading that list was the ETU, known to cause thyroid cancer and birth defects in rats, and suspected to increase the incidence of genetic mutations in animals. But the list also included such substances as Thiram, a chemical relative of antabuse (which causes violent vomiting when combined with alcohol) and which can definitely damage human livers, kidneys, and brains, and which has been shown to cause birth defects in at least two animal species; Carbamates, an animal carcinogen which, when heated, breaks down into ETU and releases toxic gases; Vancide 89, the Thalidomide-like compound; and several other suspected causers of cancer and birth defects. “It would certainly appear that these people are working with materials of some concern,” Heifetz says mildly.

Be that as it may. OSHA’s administrators still hadn’t taken any action. When asked why not, Tom Monji in Santa Ana is given to long pauses. “We can act if we know something positive or close to it,” he hems. “We can act positively. There’s just no question about that.” But he continues, “We are talking about a complex situation. . . . There’s just an enormous amount of things to consider. ... If there is a problem at one plant, there should be problems at other locations.”

Bearing a “partial analysis” of the survey data, Monji did finally make it down to San Diego April 9 to meet with the union members and the doctors, Heifetz and Chernoff. Heifetz remembers the bureaucrat as being distinctly uncomfortable. She says, “Cal-OSHA generally does not like to take on hot issues. At that meeting it was like they were handling a hot potato and were very glad to get rid of it,” an attitude which distressed her. Incomplete as the survey data was, Heifetz now judges, “I think there was sufficient evidence to go in and do something.” (Heifetz notes that the figure one usually hears for miscarriages among the general public is ten to fifteen percent, so the sixty-six percent miscarried pregnancies at Accurate Products is “a pretty sorry record,” she says.) However, for Cal-OSHA to do something clearly would have made waves, she believes. “So they were just sort of dropping it.”

Chernoff, the other doctor, saw things differently. He says he doesn't know what OSHA would have cited at that point. “Do you cite the fact that you’ve had spontaneous abortions (miscarriages) in six ladies?” He argues that the miscarriage rate among the general public is not a hard statistic; he says estimates vary from fifteen to fifty percent among recognized pregnancies. “No doubt that two-thirds (among the women at Accurate Products) is a very high figure. But I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying that because of these figures there is a causative factor. Not at all.” Chernoff says he and still another doctor from the Teratogen Registry met just before the big meeting on April 9 with Monji and Simonowitz from OSHA. Chernoff and his colleague recommended that a more detailed study be done under the auspices of the union. It was music to the OSHA bureaucrats’ ears.

By then, Chernoff and Heifetz had already discussed the idea for such a study with Eleanor Martinez and Nancy Des-pres. The two Accurate employees felt that the union would agree to pay the costs of printing and mailing a questionnaire if the doctors would volunteer their time and expertise to help prepare it. At the April 9 meeting Capehart, the business agent, also gave his blessing to the plan. Almost immediately, organizational meetings began.

In attendance at those meetings was the final serious detective in this mystery — a machinists union activist named Jim Heller. A break and shear operator by trade, Heller helped found a health and safety committee for the machinists union’s Local Lodge 389 (the local which includes Accurate Products) back in the days when he worked as chief shop steward at the San Diego Marine shipyard. (He was elected chairman of that health and safety committee this May.) But Heller also has a personal interest in events across town at Accurate Products. His estranged wife Rochelle worked there back in 1977, when she and Heller conceived a child. A little boy, it was bom in April of 1978 — but its appendix and intestines were dislocated and the latter were not attached to the walls of the infant’s stomach. Surgery corrected that problem, but Heller says his two-year-old son’s language and motor skills are developing a bit slowly. “He seems okay, but we don’t know.”

Understandably, Heller was avidly interested in the detailed questionnaire on the Accurate Products workers’ health.

The preliminary figures from OSHA had outraged him. as had the lack of any direct action to correct the situation. Today he says, “I think the facts are horrendous enough so that there should have been some immediate action. . . . My feelings are that someone should take that goddamn stuff out of there — period. Should we wait another six months ? There might have been another baby conceived there last night! I think there are enough facts now that someone should be mean and mad." Heller contends that OSHA should have done something, written additional citations or even gotten a court injunction against the rubber factory’s use of the suspect chemicals. “In my opinion, Cal-OSHA is the worst thing that has happened to safety in California,” he declares. Heller thinks overlaps between the jurisdiction of the state agency and its national counterpart (federal OSHA) cause confusion, and furthermore, the state safety enforcers lack the clout to confront big corporations.

But Heller directs even greater indignation at Capehart. “Had the union been doing what it should have done, Capehart would have launched air educational program as soon as the Cal-OSHA survey results became known.” He says Capehart could have pushed the timid state bureaucracy into taking action, or that Capehart could even have organized the workers to refuse to handle the ETU and other questionable material. “That union agent is very powerful if he wants to be, but Capehart has not only done nothing, he has done things to cover the situation up.” Heller points to Capehart’s reported reluctance to take action on the chemical questions last year, but he also mentions more recent events which are far more dramatic.

They began with a near-violent confrontation at the union hall on June 12, when the health and safety committee met to plan the questionnaire. Heller and others had been working extensively to revise the doctors’ rough draft mto a language and form designed to appeal to the union mem-

hers, revisions that Heller carried with him to the meeting. But at the door. Capehart and Ray Bryant, the elected head of all the machinists in San Diego and Imperial counties, barred Heller and a friend from entering. When Chernoff, the doctor, protested, Bryant answered that he had just appointed Capehart the head of health and safety matters for the district. Pressed by Nancy Despres, Bryant replied that his motives for shutting out Heller were political.

The political warfare dividing Heller and the Capehart/Bryant axis of the machinist’s union is long established and provides a telling glimpse into the internecine struggles of local union politics. Bryant was elected district president in 1977, and not long afterward, he became Ken Capehart s political godfather, appointing the relative newcomer to fill a vacancy in the post of chief shop steward at NASSCO. When the job of business agent for Local 389 was vacated unexpectedly. Bryant passed over a number of chief shop stewards (including Heller) to again tap Capehart (who was the youngest and least senior among them. Heller says). But union rules dictated that an election for that (appointed) job be held within ninety days, and Heller ran against Capehart for it.

It was a heated campaign, and when the votes finally showed Capehart to be the winner (273-191), Heller shouted foul. His attempted protest to the Department of Labor and the union’s international president pointed out that Capehart won because of the turnout in Local Lodge I960, a sleepy San Marcos organization only drawing on workers from Kearfott. an electronics assembly plant. Heller claimed that before the election, one could check back six months and find that the San Marcos lodge hadn't even been able to hold one meeting for lack of a quorum. The previous election for business agent had drawn eleven votes from Local Lodge I960, compared to 162 Kearfott workers who voted in the Heller-Cupehart race. He Her credited that lopsided turnout (ten to one against him, compared to Local Lodge 389, where Heller won by eighty-two votes) to the fact that Capehart was allowed to campaign inside the plant while Heller was not admitted. Furthermore, the poll booth was set up across the street from the plant, and giveaway prizes like a hair dryer and CB radio were used to lure the workers to participate. Finally, Heller cynically notes that a Bryant partisan carried the votes down to San Diego in an unlocked box. But the Department of Labor refused to hear Heller’s protest on the grounds that it had no jurisdiction over the election of business agents. Since then, Heller and Capehart have hated each other.

Knowledgeable observers weren't surprised by the lockout of Heller at the June 12 meeting, nor by the near-identical incident which occurred later that month. (When a shocked Ruth Heifetz implored Capehart to admit Heller, the business agent told her that the internal union workings were none of her business.) Heller, however, charges that the moves signified more than just bitterness between old rivals. Heller claims that Bryant and Capehart fettered the local lodge’s health and safety committee in order to blunt the current probe into Accurate Products. “I believe that the company went to Capehart and Bryant and said, if you guys pursue this, we’re going to close the doors.’ ” Heller accuses. “And politically, it would be death for him [Capehart] to lose Accurate Products now.” (He explains that Local Lodge 389. which Capehart represents, has lost three contracts over the past few years.)

Capehart .protests regretfully that he can’t discuss the decision to bar Heller from those meetings; union rules forbid public discussion of internal affairs, he says. But he adds, “We (Bryant and he) were trying to keep the politics out of it (by barring Heller].’’ To Heller’s accusation that he hasn’t been aggressive enough. Capehart points to his own version of the events last year (his claim that he filed a complaint about the ETU immediately). When Capehart is asked why he didn’t take more decisive action after hearing the results of the OSH A survey, he says. “I’m sure not going to second-guess OSH A. We’ve had a good relationship and I ’m not going to risk jeopardizing that relationship.” But he continues. Suppose he had pushed the agency to get an injunction? “What would they have based it on? That there were a number of miscarriages? The court certainly would have asked what had caused them.” And Capehart points out that the experts couldn’t answer with certainty. Looking at the options that he might have wielded as business agent, he asks, “Do you close down the plant? Then you have X amount of people out of work. And there may or may not be a problem at Accurate Products."

The medical doctors who worked with both men do say that Heller contributed extensively to the questionnaire preparation, while Capehart didn't. “I haven’t seen Capehart exert any initiative at all," declares Heifetz. “Ken was continually dragging his feet,” confirms Chernoff. But Chernoff thinks there are other plausible explanations for that inaction besides the murky politics. For example. Chernoff says Capehart was traveling a lot, and his wife was in the latter stages of a pregnancy. “I like both Jim Heller and Ken Capehart,” Chernoff says amiably. “I’m very disappointed that the two of them have been acting like such assholes.”

The squabbles between the two men didn't completely sabotage the health questionnaire, although the completed version of it wasn’t mailed out until July 14 and 15 due to a variety of delays in the final processing of the document, a task with which Capehart and the union’s secretary-treasurer were entrusted. And then the copies were mailed to just 304 past and present Accurate Products employees, only a fraction of all the plant’s total past and present workers. (Capehart explains that the union three or four years ago switched over from a computerized record system to a manual one, so the files on many of the past employees were lost, an (“error” the legality of which Heller questions.)

More of the political in-fighting did erupt at the machinists union district meeting in late June, when union members voted permission for Heller to get up and talk about the situation at Accurate Products. As soon as Heller mentioned the name of Ray Bryant (leading into a recount of how the local health and safety committee had been stifled). Bryant interrupted and contradicted Heller. “That was like a signal.” Heller recalls. Several people sprang to their feet, including one business agent who bellowed. “You whore, Heller! You whore!” When Heller supporters joined in the shouting, the gathering almost exploded into physical violence, and Bryant adjourned it summarily.

Word of that kind of hostility discourages Chemoff, but even metre depressing has been the union members’ response to the 304 questionnaires. As of a week ago. the doctors had received back only twenty-six of the completed papers.

Chernoff says gloomily that unless many more questionnaires come in, “it’s going to mean that probably Joyce Simonowitz’s information may turn out to be better than ours. What it says to me is that there are a few people who are very concerned who work at the plant, and there’s a vast majority who are not.” He adds that a surprisingly high response could change his mind, but for the moment, “my conclusion is that the problem is not as large as we have perceived it.” Chernoff explains that from his experience in other areas, such as pesticide plants, “there, you don’t need to go out and find the people to get them to answer questions. They’re knocking on your door.” He says Accurate Products employees are “aware that they ’re working with nasty chemicals. . . . And if the folks who are working there every day don’t perceive it as a problem. I think it’s pretty outrageous for folks like Ruth Heifetz and myself to go in and convince them.”

“I can understand why Dr. Chemoff would say that.” Heller says. He asserts that the physician isn't considering the psychological and political tensions that affect the union workers. “The union leadership has not been promoting the questionnaire.” Heller continues, mentioning that Capehart hasn't used his monthly column in the machinists union newsletter to encourage workers to fill out the questionnaire. And Heller says workers within the plant have told him that the current chief shop steward, Mary K. Owens (a Capehart ally), has actually been belittling the information-gathering effort. “She’s been saying that it’s basically political,” Heller contends. “And when your chief shop steward has been telling you that, it certainly creates an air of confusion.” (Eleanor Martinez has withdrawn from active union leadership in order to devote more time to her family, and Nancy Despres has quit working for Accurate Products because she was so concerned by the potential chemical hazards. Before she resigned. Despres had another miscarriage in May of a malformed embryo.) About the lack of response from past Accurate Products employees. Heller asks. “How do we know that the goddamned questionnaires were even sent out to them?” While he and the other people who worked on the questionnnaire wait for and worry about the returns, workers at Accurate Products continue to handle the dangerous chemicals without any safety training. Cal-OSHA did issue three citations to the Accurate Products management last fall, and two of them dealt with the lack of a training program in the use of respirators and the safe handling of chemicals The Accurate Products management appealed those citations, but subsequently settled before a hearing, agreeing to comply with OSHA’s demands. But Tom Monji. the OSHA administrator, says the programs haven’t yet been instituted to this day because “the resolution is still being finalized.”

Heller says if the questionnaires fail to net significant data, he’ll help mount his own version of a safety program. “We will gather all the information that we have and take it personally to the girls at Accurate Products and give it to them. And if that doesn’t do the trick, I don’t know what will.” He’s confident that knowledge of the chemical hazards will mobilize the workers; Heller remains convinced that those hazards exist.

Capehart also vows that he won’t give up on investigating the suspect chemicals. If the researchers can’t get the necessary data from the questionnaires, “I think we’re going to put our heads together to find some other way of gathering the data,” he says, although he admits he can’t imagine how at the moment.

One final source of possible aid may come from the government, says Joyce Simonowitz, the OSHA nurse. She now is writing a final report on the survey she conducted at the plant almost a year ago, and she says she will make several recommendations, among them that an in-depth study be done. That report will go to Richard Wade, the deputy chief of health for Cal-OSHA. The OSHA nurse doesn’t know what Wade will do, but says he has several options. W'hich alternative he’ll choose is but one of the questions that remain unanswered. There arc others: Are any of the dangerous chemicals in use at the plant spreading to houses located around it? Why hasn’t the company cared enough about the employees to offer even minimal training in the safe use of the chemicals? Why haven’t the workers responded to the questionnaire? Were those unborn babies poisoned? Will the children born to employees of Accurate Products be healthy?

Oh, yes. Here’s the word from the management of Accurate Products. Division president Jack Innis had no comment, and appeals for answers made to the rubber factory’s parent company, the Lear-Siegler Corporation in Santa Monica, were futile. But Jim Duvall, the Accurate Products vice-president in charge of operations, had this to say: “To hash over innuendo or to hash over allegations without substantive proof is a meaningless-type story. There arc no substantiated facts in this case that are relevant to the allegations.”