The Multinational Monitor

SEPTEMBER 1997 · VOLUME 18 · NUMBER 5

T H E    L A W R E N C E    S U M M E R S    M E M O R I A L    A W A R D


THE SPECIAL SEPTEMBER 1997 LAWRENCE SUMMERS MEMORIAL AWARD* honors the National Peach Council, on the twentieth anniversary of a stunning letter sent by the Council's executive secretary to the assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health. Here is the full text of the letter which earned the National Peach Council the prestigious Summers Award:

National Peach Council
P.O. Box 1085
Martinsburg, West Virginia 25401


12 September 1977

Dr. Eula Bingham
Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health
U.S. Department of Labor
Washington, D.C. 20210


Recently we received the interesting DOL news release concerning worker exposure to DBCP.

It appears to us that you and Secretary Marshall may have overreacted, or at least that is your public posture.

While involuntary sterility caused by a manufactured chemical may be bad, it is not necessarily so. After all, there are many people who are now paying to have themselves sterilized to assure they will no longer be able to become parents.

How many of the workers who have become sterile were of an age that they would have been likely to have children anyway? How many were past the age when they would want to have children? These, too, are important questions.

If possible sterility is the main problem, couldn't workers who were old enough that they no longer wanted to have children accept such positions voluntarily? They could know the situation, and it wouldn't matter. Or could workers be advised of the situation, and some might volunteer for such work posts as an alternative to planned surgery for a vasectomy or tubal ligation, or as a means of getting around religious bans on birth control when they want no more children.

We do believe in safety in the work place, Dr. Bingham, but there can be good as well as bad sides to a situation.

Above all, please don't try to get a ban on the manufacture and sale of the chemical DBCP, because that would cause some losses of agricultural production which would be serious.

Sincerely,

Robert K. Phillips
Executive Secretary

* In a 1991 internal memorandum, then-World Bank economist and current Deputy Secretary of Treasury Lawrence Summers argued for the transfer of waste and dirty industries from industrialized to developing countries. "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?" Summers wrote. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. ... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." Summers later said the memo was meant to be ironic.

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