Chanting “James Hardie knew, pay the victims now,” a rally of around 5,000 in Sydney wound its way through city streets to protest outside the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting. Bernie Banton, a vice president of the Asbestos Diseases Foundation of Australia (ADFA), who suffers from mesothelioma, a rapidly-growing malignant lung tumor, told the marchers, “We’re here to let Hardies know we are not going away. We are going to fight until we get justice for victims and their families.”

The same day, about 15,000 people marched in Melbourne, with protests also taking place in Brisbane, Adelaide, and Hobart.

Speaking at a Militant Labor Forum in Sydney on September 29, Barry Robson, a retired Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) official who is the president of ADFA, outlined the long history of the fight for fair compensation for the victims of asbestos diseases and their families.

“Cases are going to grow and grow,” in coming years, he said. “That is why the fund needs to be topped up.” Focusing on the dockworkers’ experience, Robson said that the MUA had a policy of sending a union representative to every asbestos-related funeral of a dockworker—“about one a month” in recent times. Along with the metalworkers and construction workers unions, the MUA played a key role in setting up ADFA, he said.

Asbestos is a fibrous mineral widely used for decades in the manufacture of building, fireproofing, and insulation materials, and brakes, among other products. It causes a range of diseases, often many years after exposure to its fibers. Asbestosis is “like breathing wet cement,” Robson said, while mesothelioma can kill someone within months of the first symptoms.

Around the world, about 100,000 people die every year from these diseases. A leading Australian asbestos disease statistician has estimated that 27,000 people have died so far in Australia from asbestos-related diseases, with another 27,000 expected to die by 2020.

Hardie manufactured asbestos until 1987, becoming one of the “blue chip” companies in Australia in the process. Some 3,000 people have sued Hardie for compensation to date. The trust fund set up by the corporation to cover compensation payments is expected to be exhausted in two to three years if more funds are not allocated to it.

“Fibro” wall cladding made from asbestos was widely used as a building material after World War II, due to a shortage of other materials and a shortage of building tradespeople during the war, Robson said at the forum. In the early 1950s, half the houses built in New South Wales were made of “fibro.” While two small asbestos mines operated in Australia, most of the asbestos used was imported from Canada.

Robson worked on the docks in Sydney for 37 years, the last eight as a full-time official of the MUA’s Sydney branch. While containerization and a sharp drop in imports had ended direct handling of asbestos by waterside workers after 1975, in earlier decades bags of asbestos were unloaded manually with wharfies (dockworkers) getting covered in dust and fibers, he said. Direct exposure continued when the material was shipped in on large pallets with the bags often shifting and splitting open. Asbestos would go right through the cargo holds and across the docks “like snow,” Robson explained, with wharfies demanding “dirt money” if conditions got too dusty. Some workers got suspended for up to three days if they refused to work in these conditions, he said.

In the late 1990s, in the course of fighting for compensation for a wharfie dying of mesothelioma, the union uncovered a letter written by a port authority doctor in the 1950s saying, according to Robson, that “we don’t want the union to find out” about the dangers of asbestos.

Following an inquiry established by the New South Wales state government into the asset-stripping that was aimed at limiting the company’s legal liability to compensation claims, Hardie bosses announced that they would meet future payments “voluntarily.” The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has announced that it is to investigate whether Hardie executives lied to the share market about its coverage for asbestos liabilities.

Ivan McMurray, a 63-year-old refractory bricklayer who is dying of asbestosis after handling Hardie products for two decades, is one of many speaking out in support of a ban on Hardie products. “I don’t want to see them get away with it,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald September 23, adding that the government inquiry had left too much “squirming room” for the company. Some 50 construction union members walked off the job on an unsafe housing demolition site after McMurray had addressed them, the Herald reported.  
 
 
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