Praise for
Pain and Prejudice
A scientific treatise, a page-turner, an exposé. It’s hard to exaggerate the attractions of this extraordinary book. It makes the personal political and the political personal, drawing the reader along in the careful and scientific exploration of the sexism, biases, and silences of science. Pain and Prejudice should be required reading for all scientists.
— Pat Armstrong, Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Sociology, York University, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
How can scientists be objective and empathetic at the same time? Karen Messing’s decades of research into workers’ health, especially the health of women workers and those of the lower rungs of the working class, are examined and analyzed in a very interesting and readable style. Dr. Messing shows how collaboration with community partners such as unions can improve research but how this type of research is increasingly threatened. She shows how research can and should make change in the workplace to improve workers’ health.
— Cathy Walker, past director, National Health and Safety, Canadian Auto Workers
Karen Messing is a riveting storyteller who illuminates areas usually enveloped in the fog of expertise and pedantry. She belongs to a lamentably rare breed; she is a militant intellectual. An accomplished scientist, she tells, in a personal, evocative style, of the way she came to better understand the relationships between employers, science, and labour. Her encounters with, and analyses of, science and scientists hired by capital and government to regulate working conditions lead her to question both the impartiality of science and the accompanying lack of empathy for workers, particularly women. This is a valuable book for anyone interested in social theory, sociology, and, most importantly, the health and safety of workers.
— Harry Glasbeek, author of Wealth by Stealth
Messing has long been one of the leading practitioners of “listening to workers’ stories” as a way of understanding their health. Pain and Prejudice describes how this approach evolved, why it is so effective, and some of the leading findings. It provides a unique window into the world of worker health and safety.
— Wayne Lewchuk, professor, School of Labour Studies and Department of Economics, McMaster University
Pain and Prejudice:
What Science Can Learn about Work from the People Who Do It
© 2014 Karen Messing
First published in 2014 by:
Between the Lines
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Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Messing, Karen, author
Pain and prejudice : what science can learn about work from the people who do it / Karen Messing.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77113-147-6 (pbk.).
ISBN 978-1-77113-148-3 (epub).
ISBN 978-1-77113-149-0 (pdf).
1. Industrial hygiene. 2. Radiation – Toxicology. I. Title.
RC967.M48 2014 613.6'2 C2014-902457-6
C2014-902458-4
Cover design by Jennifer Tiberio. Cover photo © iStockphoto.com/angelhell
Text design and page preparation by Steve Izma
Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges assistance for its publishing activities from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and through the Ontario Book Initiative, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
Contents
Preface
1 Factory Workers
2 The Invisible World of Cleaning
3 Standing Still
4 The Brains of Low-Paid Workers
5 Invisible Teamwork
6 Home Invasion
7 Teachers and Numbers
8 Becoming a Scientist
9 Crabs, Pain, and Sceptical Scientists
10 A Statistician’s Toes and the Empathy Gap in Scientific Articles
11 Can Scientists Care?
Notes
Index
Preface
MANY RESEARCHERS IN OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH never actually get the chance to talk to people suffering from the work-related health problems they study; their research keeps them in their laboratories, far from the factory floor. But for the past thirty-seven years, I have been lucky enough to be forced into direct contact with the world of work and made to see, hear, smell, and touch the environments that make workers sick.
When I arrived at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in 1976, its Department of Biological Sciences had only existed for seven years. The political excitement of the 1960s and the “quiet revolution” had inspired the province of Quebec to create a publicly funded university. By the time I was hired, some professors and administrators had persuaded the university that it should do something for “communities not traditionally served by universities,” meaning unions, women’s groups, and community groups. After some negotiations, UQAM promised to pay professors to do research on topics suggested by these groups. UQAM created a community outreach service and even hired co-ordinators to link professors with community needs.1
One day, the co-ordinators visited our department and asked whether anyone was interested in being a resource. My collaborator and friend Donna Mergler, a professor of physiology, encouraged me to participate; she was already giving educational sessions on the health risks of noise and asbestos. I couldn’t see how my doctorate in molecular genetics of lower organisms could be directly useful to the community, but I put my name down. A couple of months later, the co-ordinators called to tell me they had gotten a request for help from radiation-exposed refinery workers who needed a geneticist. My career took an irreversible turn.
Over the following years, Donna and I developed a research program in occupational and environmental health that benefited from community input. In 1990, we founded CINBIOSE,2 a multidisciplinary research centre that has been able to support other community-friendly researchers with similar interests.
Stimulated in part by the program at UQAM, Marc Renaud, the new head of a provincial government organization that gave grants for health research,3 decided to offer a program unlike any other source of support for scientists. The grants would be given to university-community partnerships on presentation of a joint research program. In order to ensure that the scientists would listen to the community group, the group or a co-ordinating organization would control the money. The peer review committee rating the proposals would also have community representation.
CINBIOSE got a call from the community outreach office suggesting we apply. For the next fifteen years, until the program was abolished, we got large amounts of money to partner with the women’s committees and health and safety committees of Quebec’s three largest trade union confederations. Our original partnership included ergonomists, sociologists, and legal scholars, as well as the six union representatives. We called it l’Invisible qui fait mal (literally, The Invisible that Hurts), referring to the fact that occupational health risks in women’s jobs are often less impressive and obvious than they are in men’s jobs. This group sponsored dozens of research projects and interventions. We created a book on ergonomics and women’s work that European unions translated into six languages and we wrote a United Nations policy paper on gender and occupational health.4 Our legal specialists helped get new laws passed and old ones respected.
I have been surrounded by a strong, active, nourishing support system, favourable to labour, while doing research in occupational health. This explains why, even while in academia, I have been able to listen to workers’ stories and helped to understand them. I have been allowed to observe how lack of respect and understanding from employers, scientists, and the public affects their working conditions and thereby their health. I have been freed from some of the constraints of the scientific establishment and allowed to see how scepticism towards workers’ pain has influenced and even shaped the academic field of occupational health research.
The context in which we were able to develop these relationships is fast disappearing as the globe veers to the right. Canada’s conservative government has replaced community representatives with industry spokespeople on research granting organizations and “peer” review boards. The Faculty of Science at UQAM expelled CINBIOSE from its sponsored research centres and sent us off to the Faculty of Communication. Our provincial funder closed its doors and its successor decided that our publications were not being seen in the right academic venues. So it will not be as easy for those who come after us to cross the gap between the university and the community of low-paid workers, which I call the “empathy gap” – an inability or unwillingness among scientists and decision-makers to put themselves in the workers’ position.
I retired from teaching in 2008, although I continue to do research and supervise graduate students. In this book, I will explain some of what I learned from workers about their jobs, their health, and their lives. I will try to demonstrate how the gap in experience and interests between low-paid workers and the classes above them affects their health and the scientific discourse about it, with costs for scientific quality, for the public, and even for employers.
I will describe how I learned about the reality of work at the bottom of the social hierarchy and was confronted by how little employers and the public know about that reality. I came to understand how the science I had learned in school and from my colleagues was often inadequate to interpret the effects of low-paid jobs on workers’ health. And I will try to show that, because of its ignorance of many real working conditions, the science of occupational health does not always do as good a job as it could in finding out about all workers’ health.
Toward the end of the book, I try to examine my academic field a bit more critically. Do occupational health scientists just lack empathy with people of lower status? Or are there more structural problems at work? It seems to me that there is a complicated interplay between scientists’ training, their “personal” attitudes towards workers, and their economic and social interests. I have no expertise in political science or economics to help me tease out these relationships, but I do know that scientists could be more helpful than we are in improving workers’ health. My last chapter tells some success stories that can suggest paths for change.
But before discussing solutions I have to explain how I experienced the gap between workers and scientists and how my colleagues, students, and the workers I came to know pulled me across that gap.
This book owes a lot to my students and collaborators, from whose work I have freely borrowed. They will be cited in the text, but I want to mention specifically: Donna Mergler, Ana María Seifert, and Nicole Vézina, who showed me how to do occupational health research with respect for workers; Katherine Lippel, who made me aware of how complicated occupational health policy is; Stephanie Premji and Jill Hanley, who led me to the story of the many ways that immigrants’ health is affected by their specific workplace conditions; France Tissot, Stephanie Premji, and Susan Stock, who have worked with me on the hidden inequalities in epidemiological analysis; Carole Gingras, Lucie Dagenais, Jocelyne Everell, Céline Charbonneau, Nicole Lepage, Micheline Boucher, Pierre Lefebvre, Marie-France Benoit, Ann Potvin, Ghislaine Fleury, Gisèle Bourret, Michelle Desfonds, Sylvie De Grosbois, Martine Blanc, and Sylvie Lépine, among others, who helped me again and again to understand the needs of the workers in their unions; and Florence Chappert of the Agence nationale pour l’amélioration des conditions de travail (France) who gives me hope. I also sincerely thank (in no particular order) some of the courageous worker-friendly scientists who have encouraged and inspired me: Barbara Silverstein, Laura Punnett, Hester Lipscomb, Céline Chatigny, Cynthia Cockburn, Patrizia Romito, Annie Thébaud-Mony, Laurent Vogel, Maria De Koninck, Jeanne Stellman, Jim Brophy and Margy Keith, Romaine Malenfant and Robert Plante, Ghislaine Doniol-Shaw, Danièle Kergoat, Catherine Cailloux-Teiger, Ruth Hubbard, and Åsa Kilbom. And the many generous workers who let us observe them and explained what we couldn’t see.
More specifically I owe thanks to Melissa Wakeling, Glanmore National Historic Site, Belleville, for the reference used as an epigraph for chapter 7, to Donna Vargas for information on the Montreal Day Nursery (chapter 2), and to Chantal Lavigne of Radio-Canada for generously sharing her research results on teachers (chapter 8).
I was lucky enough to be encouraged by the Scribblers: the late Martin Kevan (we miss you), Barbara Scales, Ana María Seifert, and Pierre Sormany. Pat Armstrong and her graduate students at York University were very helpful, especially Suzanne Day. Katherine Lippel, Harry Glasbeek, Cathy Walker, and Daood Aidroos gave very helpful comments on parts of the book. Amanda Crocker, my editor at Between the Lines, and copy editor Cameron Duder both made important, thoughtful suggestions for improving the manuscript. I didn’t take everyone’s suggestions, but I appreciated all of them. Thanks to Gloria Steinberg for keeping me going, and to my wonderful family, in-laws, and stepfamily for their love and support. And of course to Pierre for input and support with the book, the title, the research, and my life.
Chapter 1
Factory Workers
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, MY FATHER took me for a morning to the factory where he was an executive. To my delight, he let me sit at the line and watch the women wiring radios. The red, blue, and yellow wires had to be soldered in the right places in each radio. The women even let me play with the coloured wires while my father was busy. This occupied me for a while, but then I got down off my chair and went to see my father in his office. I had something on my mind. I asked him, “Don’t they get bored doing the same thing all day?” He replied, “No, they don’t. They’re not smart like you, Karen.”
I was floored. My father was telling me that these grownup women were not as smart as me, a five-year-old who had a pretty good idea of my low rank in society. What he was saying didn’t seem too plausible, but he seemed to be sure of what he said. I puzzled over this for a while and never forgot it.
Many years later, circumstances conspired to suggest to me that my father might have been mistaken about the intelligence of workers. When I was seventeen, I was suspended from my university for a piece of minor mischief and it would be three months before I would be allowed to go back. I applied for jobs in a bookstore and several restaurants and was finally hired as a waitress at a cafeteria known for its quick lunches. I was supposed to supply each customer with a tray, napkin and silver, take the order and yell it to the kitchen staff with the right code name, in detail, for each preparation (special hold the green, burger New York . . . ). For each of the ten or so main dishes, I had to supply the right side dishes or condiments. If the order appeared with all its fixings in due course in the window from the kitchen, I had to give it to the right customer. If it didn’t, I had to negotiate with the kitchen staff, trying to balance the customer’s grumbling against the way Henry the cook, a scary guy, would get annoyed with me for nagging him.
I was a pretty terrible waitress. The women who had been doing counter service for several years were able to handle orders from four customers at a time. Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! went the trays on the counter and the silver and the food on the trays. But I never could manage juggling more than two customers. And – most humiliating for an honours Ivy League student – the biggest obstacle was not physical, it was mental. For the life of me, I couldn’t manage the cognitive challenge of getting the orders and their details right and following their progress for more than two customers at a time. Beverly, a girl my age who had been hired just before me, was a great comfort. She explained little tricks she had picked up, like forgetting about the parsley on the egg if there was a long line of customers. And it was getting to know Beverly that put the final touches on my growing suspicion that people could be working class and bright at the same time. She had all the stigmata of a life in poverty – missing teeth, uneducated speech patterns, sole support of a new baby – and she was at least as quick mentally as I was. We had a great time together making fun of the managers and the kitchen staff until I went back to university and my real life.
It was also in this job that I began to understand about power relations between employers and workers. Beverly and I were paid what was then minimum wage, $1 an hour. To me, even in 1960, this seemed a tiny amount of money, and I couldn’t understand how Beverly and her baby could live on it. Especially since the employer made us pay him for cleaning our uniforms. It seemed to me that we shouldn’t have to pay for this since the uniforms didn’t belong to us. But the manager quickly made me understand that if I wanted the job, I would pay for the cleaning and I would shut up. And a few of the customers were quite as efficient in getting across the idea that if I wanted to keep the job, I wouldn’t object to any of their patronizing or flirtatious remarks. If I smiled enough, sometimes they would even leave me a quarter on their tray.
For the next few years, I behaved myself and finished university and graduate school. My only close encounters with low-paid workers took place as a customer. It wasn’t until I got a job as a biology professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) that I had another, very different kind of contact.
In 1978, a problem arose at a phosphate refinery near Montreal. The men who worked there heard that the ore they processed was contaminated with radioactive dust. The refinery’s waste rocks had been sold to the province as road paving, and a technician had noticed that the roads emitted radiation and worried that commuters might be exposed. Reading the newspapers, workers in the plant learned for the first time that the material they handled was radioactive and dangerous to human health. They called the union, who called the university outreach office, who called me. I was the only potential resource who came close to knowing anything about radiation and genetic damage. The union health and safety counsellor and I drove out to the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River one cold day and met with the union executive in their little union office. There were six men in their thirties and forties who had spent years in the plant. They told us that not only was their workplace full of radioactive dust, but the workers had been taking home the factory waste to use as phosphate fertilizer in their gardens. I knew little about the effects of radiation on humans, but I gave the six men the Genetics 101 version of how radiation works: its energy can damage chromosomes and thereby change genes, and altered genes don’t work as well, possibly affecting health. I glibly mentioned that the damage could be passed on to the next generation and beyond.
“So my daughter’s problem could come from my job?” asked the union president “Jean-Jacques.” With a bump, I woke up to the fact that I wasn’t in my classroom and should have been gentler. Too late – I had created a shock. Of the six men around the table, five were married, four had children, and those four each had a child with a significant health problem, from cleft palate to clubfoot. The fifth married man had a pregnant wife, and he and, suddenly, I were both worried about their future child. And, yes, several months later the child was born with a serious birth defect: she suffered from tracheal-aesophogeal fistula, a condition where there is a hole between the air passage and the digestive tube running from the mouth to the stomach.
I had no idea how to approach human genetics professionally, but it was clear to me that someone had to do something to find out whether there was a problem at the plant. Thus began a frustrating and mystifying period where I tried to contact qualified people – university professors and medical researchers – and interest them in helping those hundred men exposed to radiation to find out what was happening to them and their families. Mystifying because, for some reason, none of the logical people to contact showed any interest in getting involved in a situation that was, to me, humanly compelling as well as scientifically fascinating. I first called a genetics researcher at a children’s hospital in Montreal and, in my innocence, started out on the wrong foot: “I’m Karen Messing and I’m a biology professor at UQAM and we have an agreement with a union to give them information on health and safety risks and we need an expert on human genetics.” “No, I’m not interested in working for a union” was the reply. “No, I didn’t mean the union would hire you, it’s just that these people are exposed to radiation and have malformed children and I don’t have the expertise to judge whether the radiation is causing the problem,” I explained. “No, I’m not interested in working for a union,” he repeated.
One of the union executives whose wife had had a malformed child was referred to a local hospital genetics counsellor I will call “Dr. Tremblay.”1 Dr. Tremblay told him, “These things just happen, we’ll never understand them. But they could not be associated with your work.” I heard about this and tried to reach Dr. Tremblay to find out why he thought they could not be associated with the executive’s work. I left messages for him and then for others in his service, but no one returned my calls. And so it went, even though I edited any mention of the union out of my subsequent phone calls. None of the people whose job it was, none of the researchers whose expertise it was, would meet the workers as a group or study their situation. Just imagining a potential conflict with an employer was enough to put off my colleagues, who, to do them justice, hadn’t met the distressed fathers. And truly, talking with them was maybe best avoided. I still haven’t forgotten the face of the man who said, “I worked all my life in this crummy plant to keep my family safe and healthy and now you’re telling me I maybe gave my son his heart problems.” Or the fiancée of another worker who explained to me that she had broken off her engagement because she wanted to have children and was afraid of radiation damage.
At that time, I had just joined our biology department and my research program in genetics was aimed at developing and strengthening a fungus that would kill mosquitoes. I had gotten a grant with two of my colleagues, entomologists who knew how mosquitoes should be killed, and we were doing well. I had hired some students who were busy growing fungus on plastic dishes and floating their spores on the surface of water where the mosquito larvae lived. My department was happy it had hired me because I had shown I could get grants from federal and provincial sources.
What was I going to do about the refinery workers? I talked it over with Micheline Cyr, Ana María Seifert, and Claire Marien, three very bright undergraduate biology students who were looking for a term project. They offered to look at the radiation exposures with me. Week after week we read about radiation and discussed how to deal with the scientific and human issues at the factory. We felt terrible because we had no way of knowing whether the children’s problems were in fact due to their fathers’ work, and no one would help us find out. We didn’t know whether to reassure the fiancée or to commiserate with her.
We were especially concerned because we were learning more about the working conditions at the plant. We met a veteran worker who told us how dusty it was. He explained to us that when the workers needed to have dental work done, their dentist made them stop working for weeks before; otherwise their jaws were too weakened by exposure to the phosphorus in the dust, and the dentist was afraid to damage them. (A year later, when the employer allowed us to tour the plant for the first time, every surface was dusty. We felt dusty ourselves, inside and out, after just a few minutes.)
The union arranged a Sunday morning breakfast with the men and their families so they could fill out a questionnaire on their reproductive histories, to give us some idea whether there were too many miscarriages, stillbirths, or malformed children. Micheline, Ana María, Claire, and I went to a small church basement where the wives served us bacon and eggs and pancakes. I gave a presentation about the effects of radiation on health. This time I was a bit more tactful but the audience was understandably tense. Still, the wives were glad to have a place to ask their many questions. Most of the workers were too young to have had children and so only thirty wives filled out the questionnaire. Their answers confirmed that there might be a problem but we couldn’t really be sure because there was such a small sample to work with.
The scientific literature was not much help to us because it only talked about rays. It was full of calculations about the doses people would get from an external source of gamma or X-rays, but I couldn’t find anything about what happened if you swallowed radioactive dust. How long would the dust stay inside you? Would the radioactive elements concentrate in certain organs? Given that the radiation was not outside the body, all the calculations in the scientific literature about the distance of the human body from the radioactive source were no use to me. So we needed some way to find out whether the radiation was causing damage.
I had been to school with Professor Abby Lippman of McGill University, who had done her Ph.D. in genetic counselling. She was able to introduce me to a clinician who knew something about how to examine human chromosomes. Dr. Naomi Fitch kindly offered to teach me how to examine the chromosomes myself, so I went to her lab for re-training. (This was at a time when scientific institutions were less rigid; today, no department or funder would give a newly hired professor enough slack to dabble in extraneous research fields.) The union was able to access a little money via the UQAM-union agreement, enabling me to hire Micheline, Ana María, and Claire to help out with the chromosome study. We collected blood from a small sample of workers and prepared slides with special staining to be able to see the chromosomes. The students and I examined the slides (which had been mixed in with slides from other people so they could be classified “blind”) and we all thought we saw many more signs of damage in the samples from workers than those from people who didn’t work at the refinery.
When we sent our report to the union and the employer, some other geneticists finally got interested. In fact, I got a call from the president of the Canadian Genetics Society asking for my slides – he had been consulted by the employer and wanted to do a counter-expertise (a paid contrary opinion). And, after more than a year of silence, Dr. Tremblay the genetics counsellor finally called me back. He told me the employer had also consulted him and had told him to threaten me with a lawsuit. He warned me to drop the whole idea of doing a study.
Further education about the workings of North American science followed. The students and I were still worried about our lack of experience in examining human cells and wanted to have independent confirmation of our results from someone not associated with the union or the employer. A friend of a friend was a recognized expert on occupational health in the U.S., a professor at a major school of public health. When we contacted him, he offered to re-do our study. We were delighted, since we needed to know whether it was true that the refinery workers’ chromosomes had been damaged. “Professor Ivy” came, took blood samples, and disappeared from view. A few months later, all the (French-speaking) workers received a letter in English on the letterhead of his prestigious university saying their chromosome tests were negative and they had no problems. We did not get a copy, but the union called us and said our results had been wrong. When I phoned him for confirmation, Professor Ivy told me that sending the letters was a secretary’s error and that he had not yet looked at the samples. He had been busy with other things; he was negotiating tenure at his job. He offered to send a letter of correction to the workers but never did that either, resulting in further confusion. During our phone call, he did ask me for permission to use a photograph of one of the workers’ blood samples in a textbook he was editing, because he had never seen a worker’s chromosome damaged in that particular way.2
We never received any information about his analysis of those samples, so we never knew whether our results had been accurate, although Professor Ivy’s interest in the highly damaged chromosome seemed to indicate that there might be some problem. More importantly, to this day, over thirty years later, the workers have never been given any confirmation about their health status or the future of their children and grandchildren. Because of the episode with Professor Ivy, they were never sure they could trust us either. In light of all the conflicting information, the best the union could do was to bargain with management, offering to stop dealing with us if management would clean up the radioactive dust in the plant and install a new ventilation system. Management was happy to accept, and we were ousted. As far as we know, no other scientist has ever studied these workers’ chromosomes. The refinery closed in May 1992, leaving behind 1.2 million metric tons of radioactive waste to be disposed of by the public health authorities.3 Professor Ivy went on to head a U.S. government occupational health research organization and still has an excellent reputation in scientific circles.
My brush with radiation science was not over. During our study of the refinery workers I had read and learned a lot about radiation and its effects on human beings. I also got connected with a loose network of researchers in the new field of occupational health. In the 1970s and 1980s, people were just starting to become aware of industrial contamination. Dr. Jeanne Stellman of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union in the United States had recently published Work is Dangerous for Your Health, which alerted workers to their chemical and physical exposures.
Two years later, because of my growing familiarity with radiation exposure, I accepted when a hospital union asked me to be an expert witness for an X-ray technician who was asking her employer for paid leave for the duration of her pregnancy. “Suzanne” had already had a malformed child, and several of her colleagues had recently had miscarriages. She didn’t want this fetus to be exposed to radiation and had left her job on her own initiative. She was trying to get back pay through a contract provision allowing for leave for pregnant women exposed to workplace risks.4 The employer maintained that she was not exposed to any risk because her dosimeter readings showed very low exposures.5 But the union estimated that the risk of accidental exposure was unacceptably high because workers said that the prescribed precautions were frequently ignored. Workers had seen medical students turning on X-ray machines before the technician had left the room, and they had counted the number of times the lead-shielded doors were inadvertently left open. They also didn’t trust the dosimeters because some technicians had purposefully left their dosimeters in front of the X-ray machine for long periods without ever hearing that their readings were abnormal.6
I thought the union had a chance of winning the grievance, but I did not realize what we were up against. At that time, in 1980, I was an untenured professor, thirty-seven years old. My only published research was on fungus. Although I had done a lot of reading and research on radiation, it would be five years before I would publish my first peer-reviewed scientific article about human genetics – the most important qualification for expertise. As I prepared for the hearing, I found out to my consternation that the employer’s expert was Professor Edward P. Radford. He had chaired an international commission on the effects of radiation on humans and had published hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and communications on the subject. Debate was currently raging in scientific circles about the effects of low-level exposures to ionizing radiation and Radford was among those who perceived those effects to be negligible. I felt scared and inadequate. I tried in vain to get other, better qualified scientists to replace me, but no one would accept going up against Radford, not even when the union offered to pay them at an appropriate rate for international experts.
The hearing, which I remember as taking place in a little dark room in Quebec City, was tough. A small army of lawyers had been paid to show I was wrong. Although there was a superficial resemblance to my doctoral defence, where three professors attacked my results, the stakes were much higher at this hearing. I felt naively as if my competence alone would determine the fate of the children of the radiology technicians, whom I had come to know and care about. I thought that if I did well, their future fetuses would not be exposed to radiation. Our side had no lawyer, just a self-educated union counsellor, and I was unprepared for the kinds of questions I got from the opposing lawyers. Scientists have no training or experience in how to deal with legal issues and I was no exception. I had discovered a few publications that supported our argument that technicians could be exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation, and I summarized them. Even though Radford had gone back to the U.S., I knew that he would get a translation of my testimony and could tear it apart if I made a mistake. Still, I felt that Suzanne had a good case, since there was a proven risk of an accidental exposure and the union had raised doubts about the dosimeters. Also, even if the scientists had been able to agree that there was no danger from the radiation, wouldn’t Suzanne be exposed to an inordinate amount of stress during her pregnancy, given her belief that her previous child had been damaged by her work?
We lost, of course. It wasn’t even a contest. The judge decided that the union’s testimony about actual workplace practices was not relevant and concluded that the technician’s job was “no more dangerous than being exposed to sunlight.”7 I felt humiliated and guilty for not having been up to the task. Luckily, Suzanne’s baby, born long before the verdict was pronounced, seemed perfectly healthy. Suzanne, who had quit working at her own expense, was able to go back after childbirth with no ill effects, other than loss of income. But there would be no leave for pregnant radiology technicians.
I now think that my experience at the hearing explains a lot about why my more experienced, older colleagues had shunned the refinery workers. Getting a Ph.D. requires scientists to learn thoroughly how to do one kind of scientific research and respond to one kind of critique. We become expert in responding to other scientists’ questions, and we are able to anticipate them and do our work carefully to avoid criticism. Our whole sense of self depends on being right, leaving no stone unturned, no argument unanswered. We learn the rules of scientific discourse and some packaged statements to produce when we are not sure. Uncertainty on our part is OK, even praiseworthy, because we are admitting we don’t know all the answers and are still seeking the truth. In fact, for scientific articles, the standard says we are only allowed to make a statement if we have less than a 5 per cent chance of being wrong. The punishment for not observing the rules is harsh: our thesis will not pass, our articles will be refused, our grant requests will not be funded, we will get nasty, critical reviews from our colleagues, people will make fun of us in conferences, we will not get jobs, students will not want to work with us. So our whole, very long period of training teaches us never to say anything positively. We are taught to feel contempt, even disgust for scientists who make unqualified positive statements. They are not being scientific.
When science intersects with real life, the rules change. In courts and government hearings, scientists are supposed to give opinions. I remember U.S. Senator Ed Muskie who listened to a series of scientists testifying on environmental hazards and said mockingly, “On the one hand this is the case, and on the other hand that is the case. . . . We need more one-handed experts who can be explicit on what should be done.” The judge at Suzanne’s hearing needed to make a decision, so any shillyshallying was unwelcome. In law, an expert has to go with the most likely interpretation – to live with up to a 49 per cent probability of being wrong. And Suzanne needed me to explain clearly why I thought her fetus was in danger. Protecting my scientific reputation by hedging was not an option. So, at the hearing, I was repeatedly put in the unfamiliar position of having to make bald, un-nuanced statements that reflected my best guess. And I was faced by a heavy opposition that was having no problem telling me I was wrong. I felt off-balance.
So other scientists are not necessarily indifferent to workers’ anxiety and suffering – just uncomfortable with making statements that go counter to their training and understandably unwilling to undergo stress and humiliation in a lost cause. Even reluctant to get too close to the actual people whose lives are affected by their research, for fear of losing their “objectivity.”8
If scientists testify in any arena where the money is all on the opposing side, they can be sure that they will be subject to a barrage of questions and criticisms. Even though they may believe in the case they defend, they will be well aware that not every i has been dotted nor every t crossed. They will have an unacceptable choice: make strong, positive statements that overstate their perception of the evidence, or qualify everything that they say, making their testimony useless to the sick or endangered worker. I had accepted the union’s request to testify only because our university’s unique agreement with the trade unions and community groups had given me up-close access to workers and union counsellors. I remembered the anxiety of the refinery workers. As a mother, I empathized with Suzanne’s terror about having another malformed child. And I deeply respected the devotion of the union health and safety counsellors. But most academics don’t have any chance to meet these people, and no way of understanding their experience. In the thirty-two years since the hearing, I have become aware of a gulf in experience that separates low-status workers from academics and others in the social classes above them, and workers don’t have access to media where their experience can be publicized.
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