Becoming a Non-Person in a Company Town

By Bruce Anderson – Anderson Valley Advertiser, July 26, 1989

Treva VandenBosch used to be able to walk to work from her immaculate little house just north of the huge Georgia-Pacific mill in Fort Bragg. Treva had eight years in at the mill when fear for her safety led her out the gate for the last time. On the gate near­est her neighborhood a large sign says, “Think. Help Promote Safety.” Treva thought, helped promote safety, and has been hounded ever since. When a container filled with the dangerous contaminant PCB explodes in your work area, you don’t have to think too long about the wisdom of retreat. Van­denBosch was not on the job the day of the rupture. She didn’t learn of it until she returned to her job beneath the faulty capacitor the Monday following the Saturday accident.

“Saturday, February 11, it went,” she recalls. “I went to work straight in the stuff the following Monday. It wasn’t roped off or anything. All that was there was a garbage bag taped under the thing to catch leaks. I didn’t understand why the bag was there.” Her suspicions aroused, VandenBosch climbed up for a look at the small warning sign stuck beneath the depleted capacitor. The sign told her she was looking directly at a mechanism whose liq­uid contents, if freed, posed a direct and immediate threat to the well-being of anybody exposed to it. Yet people had been slop­ping around in the stuff for two days. Clean-up materials had been burned in the company’s power plant. The Saturday of the rupture a worker took a face full of PCBs. That poor guy is still on the job. Georgia-Pacific, in all its manifesta­tions—workers scared for their jobs, the company nurse, the union, the mill’s safety crew, and of course, the plant manager insisted nothing of conse­quence had happened. The drum beat of lies contin­ued for nearly a week.

But VandenBosch hit the 800 number as in­structed by the warning label at her first opportunity. She had to call twice before she raised someone at Fed. OSHA, the Office of Safety and Health Ad­ministration, whose duty it is to protect workers from unsafe work conditions. As her stubborn in­sistence on answers got around the mill, Vanden­Bosch began to become a nonperson. “People I’ve worked with for years stopped talking to me.”

Georgia-Pacific employs more than six hundred workers at the mill in jobs that begin at seven dollars an hour and range up to eighteen for old timers. These workers are caught between a powerful na­tional corporation and its captive union and a local political structure that is absolutely supine at the feet of corporate management. Fort Bragg is logs, fish, and tourists, usually in that order at least so long as the logs last. People who buck Georgia-Pacific can be made outcasts real fast. That’s exactly what hap­pened to Treva VandenBosch, with the ostracism being helped along, unwittingly it seems, from people she thought were her friends.

The official representatives of Georgia-Pacific treated Vanden­Bosch as if she were a malingerer. They made her refusal to work in the PCB-soaked area sound as if she was, as one of them came right out and said, “Faking it. We’re all gonna die of some kinds cancer anyway,” (Ron Atkinson) said.

VandenBosch, much less fatalistic and certainly not resigned to a slow, painful death at the hands of her employer, went to see Georgia McClusky, now a nurse practitioner for Dr. Berenson of Mendocino, but a medical professional VandenBosch had known and trusted for years before she’d gone to work with Berenson.

“I was ranting and raving, telling Georgia what had happened and how scared I was that I’d been poi­soned by this stuff. She told me, ‘Well, what do you expect? You’re playing hardball.”

McClusky, after listening to VandenBosch’s graphic descrip­tions of her fear of having worked in cancer-causing chemicals for two days, advised Treva to get a divorce. A nonplussed Vanden-Bosch remembers, “It was as if I was there for family problems instead of what had happened at the mill!”

G-P’s nurse had referred VandenBosch to the medical help of her choice, which was McClusky. Ordinarily such a referral sets in motion a work­men’s compensation claim. At Dr. Berenson’s Men­docino office, at the conclusion of her session with nurse practitioner McClusky, McClusky asked Treva to pay for the visit downstairs. Even if the larger claim is determined not to be the responsibility of workmen’s compensation, initial doctor’s con­sulta­tions are. VandenBosch’s distress increased. Treva was find­ing herself in arguments for the basics of assistance wherever and to whomever she turned.

VandenBosch was slightly encouraged by a visit she insisted upon with one of Georgia-Pacific’s vice presidents, a Mr. Mobley, who’d flown into town to investigate the PCB spill and its after­math himself. The incident had by now been revealed in the press as not a harmless venting of mineral oil as the com­pany had told its workers, a transparently silly lie spread with loyal fervor by union representative Don Nelson, but the real item. An excee­dingly dan­gerous chemical had spilled onto a worker, into his open mouth in fact, and on into a mill work area known as “the hog” where men and women contin­ued to work in the hazardous chemical brew which had been only sloppily and informally cleaned up. The immediate vicinity of the spill hadn’t even been cordoned off until four days later.

On a second visit to Nurse McClusky at Dr. Berenson’s of­fice, VandenBosch again described her anxieties to the nurse. “I can’t quit crying. I’m scared,” she told the nurse. Astonishingly, the nurse wrote a report that said Treva VandenBosch was not worried about PCB contamination—exactly the op­posite of what Treva had told her. “I’d been off a week by then. I was like a zombie. I couldn’t sleep. I was a wreck.”

Treva went on back to work. “Nobody would talk to me. One guy said I was just trying to shut the mill down. People were call­ing me late at night and hanging up. I couldn’t stand it any­more. I quit.”

At one meeting organized by union chief Don Nelson with the union’s San Francisco lawyer, John Smith, Treva demanded “that the bosses be prose­cuted for purposefully and knowingly exposing us to chemicals.” Nothing came of the meeting. Nelson was just going through the motions of concern. Af­ter having de­fended the company line that only min­eral oil had escaped the capacitor, he now was mak­ing gestures suitable to a chemical spill. But they were only gestures.

There are at least two investigations of plant safety at the G-P mill still underway. These are being conducted by the State At­torney General’s Office and Fed OSHA. Treva VandenBosch, still terrified her life has been shortened, finally got some work­man’s comp. She’s shunned by most of her fellows, her former workmates. They need those jobs bad enough to risk their lives to keep them.