Finally, don't forget the huge role played by incompetence in all of this. I know, IBM is a big company, has lots of money and presents itself as a company made of über-technocrats who do everything for the best of reasons. But if you've dealt with the insides of any piece of technology, or any company of any kind (including technology companies), you'll know that this is not the case. Most software and hardware products barely work -- they are layers of quick fixes and sloppy compromises, barely held together by occasional bits of competence. The companies are the same way.
I could go on, but the point is that no matter how good a company's intentions are, and no matter how much it spends on safety (IBM has its own fire department and hazmat team), it will still look like Keystone Cops if you study its track record in detail. Which means that in court, it'll lose most of the time. Which means it'll do anything to avoid going to court, including settling most claims out of court, lobbying against tougher laws and avoiding too much analysis of its track record.
Your article never addresses the basic problem with any of this -- chip fabrication is unskilled labor, and can be done anywhere in the world. The best you can hope for is to export this, along with all the other dirty work of the American economy. Is that what we want?
-- Michael Goodfellow, IBM Research employee, 1981 to 1989
I'm a network engineer. I spent three years working for a semiconductor manufacturer in the valley. One of the things it had was training on the processes, chemicals, etc., involved as part of its safety program. Also, there were lots of engineers there who liked to talk about the whole semiconductor business and technology arena. That's my familiarity level.
As an aside, one of my responsibilities was the change-out of dumb terminals and terminal servers in the fab. These things only reliably lasted a year or two in the fabrication environment due to corrosion -- that tells you something.
My interest and undergraduate training were in energy production. So when I have the opportunity to let people know that "clean" energy production is a very relative term, I take it.
-- Richard Dunn
Your brilliant article on toxic waste and worker exposure to toxic materials of all sorts was, sadly, all too familiar. I live in Connecticut, a state that used to be one of the main manufacturing centers of the country -- and home to firms that routinely forced workers to use deadly materials in daily work.
From radium painted onto clock dials with bristle brushes that workers moistened with their tongues (nice cancer effect) to hat makers driven mad by brain destruction from inhaling corrosive mercury compounds, Connecticut has, or used to have, it all. Streams ran multicolored rainbows of toxic electroplating chemical wastes in Hartford, where Royal and Underwood made their typewriters and Colt made guns. We don't even notice when Ensign-Bickford Co. loses the occasional mixing shed. After all, it makes the world's most powerful explosives and such things do happen.
One of my uncles lies resting in a company-funded grave in Collinsville, a victim of inhaling dust from grinding wheels as he sharpened axes (without any dust mask, of course). Beryllium doesn't kill off people as much as it used to, nor do metal dusts cause cancer in machine shop workers. Most of the manufacturing industry has gone down South or to foreign countries where the same toxic conditions exist. The primary polluter is our own MDC, the water company that supplies the Capitol Region. Overflow lines dump millions of gallons of raw sewage into the rivers, because money from federal cleanup funds never did get spent to fix treatment plants and expand their capabilities. Wethersfield, my hometown, had a flood of sewage -- some 11 million gallons -- a few years ago.
Nobody wants to notice such things. It is not in the best interests of businesses, which still control our government and our political parties. But MDC itself did have warnings applied to the pavement around all storm drains -- letting us know that the water empties into our river, the river that MDC is primary polluter of. Scratch the soil near any stream in my state and you'll find contaminated soil, a reminder of the thousands of water-powered mills and factories that once operated here. Everywhere. The problem simply cannot be solved -- it is far too widespread. So have fun covering the latest, greatest problems, but always remember, Connecticut was first!
-- Nils Dahl
In all of these scare stories, I often see the quote that clean-room garments are designed to protect the sensitive substrates as they are processed into chips or disk drives. They keep human contaminants from destroying the product. They were never designed to protect skin from chemical exposure and anyone who thinks they do or should is woefully, perhaps fatally, misinformed and has no business working in a semiconductor fabrication plant or writing about one.
When working around hazardous chemicals, employees are supposed to wear the proper protective clothing (rubber gloves, aprons, respirators, etc.) depending on the operation at hand. If operators' garments are being fouled by chemicals such that their clothes underneath the suits or their skin comes into contact with the chemical, that's a big problem and the fault of management at all levels -- but not the fault of the clean-room suit. And having bottled gases in industry is nothing new. Handled properly, by trained personnel, they do not just blow up or leak. I'm curious if the author ever looked into any of the root causes and corrective actions that were implemented as a result of the more extreme examples he cites.
Next page: "Articles like yours do nothing but scare people"