It took me a moment before I realized what she meant.

*

In our town, Labor Day is marked by the placement of American flags all around the town, a patriotic gesture provided by the local Rotary Club. It’s a nice nod to all the workers out there — the people who stock our grocery shelves, the workers who pave our streets, the teachers who guide our children, the doctors and nurses who tend to our health. All those working people who make the American engine run.

It’s been over a decade now since I left my career as an environmental scientist. It almost hurts to write that down. I remember feeling panicked when I hit the 5-year mark — like I had fallen from the train and would never find my way back in. You can infer from that how I’ve been feeling about it lately.

Sure, I’m a writer now, and sometimes I even earn a little money. But most of the work I do — writing, volunteering, caregiving — is work exchanged in the gift economy, which is not to say that it’s unimportant or unfulfilling work, but rather un-accounted, or at least un-celebrated.

So I’ve been missing my old career. I miss the science, the urgency. I miss the intellectual and political stimulation. I miss the people I used to serve.

Sometimes, when I’m away from my children and allow my mind to wander the pastures of what might-have-been, I question the decision I made years ago to leave my career and stay at home to raise them. I had tried my hand at being a working mother, but found it too burdensome in the context of my husband’s demanding cardiology career. The ultra-marathon days, the call. That mother-fucking pager. I didn’t want to hire it out, so instead I gave my employer notice.

When I told some of the people whose wells I’d been monitoring for the state that I was leaving my job, they asked, “Who will make sure our water is safe?”

I told them that someone else would fill that role. But I couldn’t tell them that because our regulations reflect our cultural value of profit over health, that even if someone is doing the work of monitoring their wells, things can (and sometimes do) slip through the cracks.

*

I miss my former work enough that I’ve been following the environmental stories of my newly adopted state. For the past year or so, I’ve been obsessing about perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in drinking water wells in the southwestern corner of Vermont, caused by the former activities of Teflon-related industry. I have written about this before.

I think a lot about the people impacted by this issue: the families now struggling in the face of an uncertain future, the parents laboring to cook their family meals with bottled water. These are exactly the kind of people I used to serve.

Back in the late 19th Century, when manufacturing laborers were gathering strength to organize and fight for worker protections against unsafe working conditions —and back when the federal Labor Day holiday was first officially sanctioned— this area of Vermont was a hub of industrial activity. The Walloomsac and Hoosic Rivers provided ample hydropower to run dozens of factories and textile mills, several of which were known to have used child labor.

In 1910, photographer and sociologist Lewis Hine documented these practices in the factories of Bennington and Pownal, Vermont:

Now, over a century later, children of the same ages as those who worked in the mills are laboring to metabolize PFOA from their bodies. Mothers have unknowingly nourished their babies with the chemicals from their spouse’s or neighbor’s former employer.

*

Happy Labor Day, she said. As in, Happy Anniversary of the day you delivered this child safely into the world. Who will he or she become? What will he or she do for a living?

*

What little we do know about the health impacts of unregulated chemicals like PFOA we owe completely to the industrial workers of the past — men and women who have been acutely and chronically exposed to toxins over the duration of their careers. Occupational exposures provide the very foundation of our epidemiological knowledge of toxic substances in the marketplace, from coal miners to the Radium Girls to the more recent cases of DuPont workers injured from the manufacturing of Teflon.

Consider the story of Sue Bailey, a former DuPont worker at the Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia — who was repeatedly exposed to PFOA while pregnant and then delivered a baby boy with severe facial deformities.

Upon her return to work, Sue discovered a company memo in the women’s locker room, which cited a study that had been conducted by 3M (the company that supplied PFOA to DuPont for the manufacturing of its Teflon product), detailing the occurrence of eye deformities in the offspring of lab rats who were fed PFOA during gestation.

Sue confronted the Washington Works facility’s medical doctor and asked if her exposure to PFOA had caused her son’s condition. The doctor denied any causation, but within a year, the company prohibited any women of child-bearing age to work around PFOA, per the expert opinion of DuPont’s chief medical director.

Sue continued to work for DuPont until her son, Bucky, was five years old. He would undergo dozens of surgeries to address his medical problems, and Sue needed the income to cover the expense. She didn’t file a lawsuit against DuPont at the time, because she couldn’t find an attorney who was willing to take her case. Everyone was afraid to confront one of the region’s most important employers.

*

According to the United States Department of Labor, Labor Day “…is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.”

I interpret that concept broadly, the well-being of our country.

*

To this day, DuPont denies any connection between Sue Bailey’s prenatal PFOA exposure and her son’s facial abnormalities. And just like the United States Radium Company did with the Radium Girls, DuPont has spent decades and millions of dollars downplaying the toxicity of the key ingredient in its market centerpiece.

It should come as no surprise then, that Michael Dourson —founder of the consulting firm that DuPont hired to evaluate the toxicity of PFOA, and a DuPont-paid expert witness in the first of 3,500 lawsuits brought against the company for PFOA-related injury — has been nominated by Donald Trump to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical safety office.

Indeed the very same division charged with determining federal drinking water standards for PFOA and other emerging contaminants. The standards that are supposed to protect us and our children, the workers of the future generation.

*

 Happy Labor Day, she said. It took me a moment to realize what she meant.

*

Ready yourselves, fellow mothers. The work has just begun.

Photo & Art credits:

Cover Image: The New Yorker, cover by Art Spiegelman, May 11, 1998

Vermont Child Laborers: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress

Photo of Newborn Bucky Bailey: Bailey Family, from Delaware Online, “C8 Suspected in Birth Defects: One Woman’s Story”

Photo of Masked Bucky Bailey: Bailey Family, from Delaware Online, “C8 Suspected in Birth Defects: One Woman’s Story”

Photo of Bucky Bailey & News Article: Maddie McGarvey for The Intercept/Investigative Fund

The post Labor Day appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

My search uncovered a standard array of petroleum spills from leaky underground storage tanks throughout the town, including a somewhat significant one at a gas station adjacent to my daughter’s school. Luckily, the flow of ground water appears to move away from the school’s building footprint; although the contamination appears to have migrated offsite through the utility corridor, and was bad enough at one point to have warranted concerns about vapor intrusion at neighboring properties. The state is still working on that.

I also learned about soil and ground water contamination beneath the former Standard Register facility, now occupied by Connor Homes, and how the Subway on Court Street used to be a dry cleaner. Yes, indeed a dry cleaner that had an historic release of chlorinated solvents. When the problem was discovered some 20 years ago, plumes of tetrachloroethylene (PCE) and its carcinogenic degradation products had already migrated offsite, spreading beneath the neighboring residential properties and heading toward the daycare center located immediately behind.

I remember feeling a jolt as I read through the site records, as one of the owners of the offending dry cleaner bore the same last name as mine, and perhaps even more jarring because I have friends whose young children are currently enrolled at that daycare.  But I also recall feeling grateful —as I often did when I worked in the regulatory field— for the foundation of regulations that enable problems such as these to be addressed. The investigation report I read indicated that contaminated soils had been removed, that indoor air monitoring had been conducted for the daycare and neighboring homes years ago, that exposure pathways for sensitive receptors had been evaluated — in short, that the problem hadn’t been ignored.

If you are a parent of school-aged children like I am, you have no doubt encountered the locked doors and sign-in sheets at the front office of your child’s school. You may have submitted to the required background check before serving as a classroom volunteer, and have most likely provided documentation for your child’s receipt of the required vaccinations to attend their public school. These are just a few of the many protective layers that have been put into place to guard the health and safety of our kids, and many of them —like the heightened security and locked entrances, for instance— probably a reactionary procedure born from some tragic, preventable event.

It’s easy to forget the origins of such protective measures, especially when the threat is no longer visible. Easy for parents to forgo vaccinations for their children without the shadow of an iron lung looming overhead, because the regulations that were put into place have successfully kept our exposures at bay. But the threat is still present, and cracks in the armor of those protective measures invite the risk to come back in, as reminded by the few cases of whooping cough that cropped up at our school this year.

Having worked in the public sector, I am fully aware of the inefficiencies that plague the regulatory sphere. Improvements can always be made, I agree, but regulations are often there for a reason, their very purpose a storied affair. What would have happened, I wonder, if there were no rules? If the dry cleaner hadn’t been required to investigate and remediate its mess, if nobody even knew? What would the kids of the Mary Johnson Child Center be breathing into their lungs while they napped on mats along the floor?

I guess that’s why I’m so disgusted by the efforts of Trump and his supporters to usher in Cabinet members who seem so committed to the unraveling of protective regulations — everything from economic and education policies to environmental protection. It’s as if they’ve conveniently forgotten the critical events that have shaped the policies of the agencies for which they’ve been tapped to represent. And though it’s been nearly 30 years since Love Canal and the resulting Superfund legislation, it’s been less than a year since the lead-contamination tragedy in Flint, Michigan, and only 5 months since the PFOA crisis for the citizens of Hoosick Falls, NY.

If providing safe drinking water to our children isn’t a fundamental American value, then I don’t know what is.

Or maybe that’s just it. Maybe this incoming administration is just a timeline marker for the seismic shift of American values from a commitment to the preservation of health and human rights to something a little more… green.

Look, American industries have been complaining about regulation since the first regulations were ever passed. Cut the red tape, they say now, so we can be competitive with China.

Like this?

Or this?

That used to be us. I thought we already decided that wasn’t acceptable for our future generations. And remember child labor?

 Even that had to be regulated away.

But now I’m beginning to wonder if it ever really went away. Because the truth is, the burden we’re currently placing on the backs of our future generations might be the most brazen form of child labor that there is.

Photo credits:

Flint boy: npr.org

China air pollution: journal-neo.org

China water pollution: demilked.com

Addie Card, anemic little spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill: Lewis Hine

There is no Planet B: Inhabit.com

The post If There Were No Rules appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.