The Legislature will consider a bill this fall that could increase worker's compensation benefits to dependents after an employee's death and make it easier for workers suffering from occupational diseases, such as asbestosis, to obtain benefits.

Senator Hatch’s $108 Billion trust fund won’t meet future claims. What do victims do when the trust fund runs out of money? Likely future claims range from 1.9 million to 2.4 million. A trust fund designed to pay these claims could range as high as $245 billion (adjusted for inflation). Workers today are still being exposed. Estimates don’t include current exposures. The U. S. Geological Survey estimates that more than 29 million pounds of asbestos were used in product manufacturing in 2001. 

Her body's betrayals, in her 45 years, range from asthma to infertility, from miscarried quadruplets to malformed organs. She wears a scar across her throat like a necklace that binds her to others who have had thyroid tumors removed.  

 ASBESTOS CONGRESS POSTPONES ACTION ON ASBETSOS COMPENSATION BILL FOR AT LEAST 4 MONTHS As the Senate rushed toward its holiday adjournment, ...

For over 3 decades, Jon Gelman has represented thousands of individuals who have become ill as a result of exposure to asbestos fiber. He is the author of a nationally recognized treatise, now in its 3rd edition, on the subject. He has lectured extensively on asbestos litigation. On behalf of his clients he has successfully brought claims against the suppliers, manufacturers and health research groups of asbestos fiber and products. These types of claims are usually referred to as product liability cases.

Asbestos-related disease was reported in industry more than 70 years ago. Dr. H. Montague Murray in 1906 at the Charing Cross Hospital in London testified before a governmental commission inquiry about occupational disability that he had seen a man in 1898 who was very short of breath and who had worked in an asbestos factory. The man's lungs at autopsy were badly scarred. It was Dr. Murray's prediction that since the hazards of this exposure were now known, very few similar cases would occur in the future, and there was no need to provide compensation benefits.

The California Supreme Court recently decided that a special statute of limitations for injury or illness caused by exposure to asbestos does not bar an action for a second disease, mesothelioma, which was diagnosed several years after the original diagnosis of a related pulmonary condition. The asbestos worker was exposed to asbestos fiber in various industrial workplaces from the early 1940's until 1963, when he became a television repairman. 

On March 9, the U.S. House of Representatives initiated markup of H.R. 1283, The Fairness in Asbestos Compensation Act. However, this bill is anything but fair to the victims and families of asbestos, and would only shield the manufacturers of deadly asbestos products from full accountability for the devastation they have caused by stripping dying and injured Americans of their legal right.  

Even as the battle over the asbestos industry bailout bill continues full steam ahead in the House, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) and Senator John Ashcroft (R-MO), the author of the bill, in an extraordinary April 4 colloquy on the floor of the Senate, declared the Senate version of the asbestos bill dead for the year.  

An Alameda County jury has awarded $6.5 million to a Kansas woman dying of cancer, saying that her illness is the result of childhood exposure to asbestos that her parents carried from their shipyard job in the 1940s to their then-San Bruno home.  

The rules governing when a claim must be filed as a result of an occupational exposure to asbestos have been changed by the New Jersey Supreme Court. A signed and sworn workers’ compensation claim petition, even though unsupported by medical diagnosis, is sufficient to impute discovery of the existence of a claim and toll the statute of limitations.

Tiny Libby, Mont., depended for years on the jobs at a vermiculite mine. But the mine is closed now, and a P-I investigation shows the town is paying a tragic price for those jobs. 

 The Trustees of the Manville Personal Injury Trust and H.K. Porter Co. targeted the tobacco industry in two separate lawsuits demanding contribu...

While working in various capacities for approximately 30 years, an employee was exposed to asbestos fiber. During 1987 the employee retired. In 1988 the retired employee consulted with both a lawyer and a doctor. In November of 1989 the employee had actual knowledge that he suffered from asbestosis. 

In a decision that could open the doors to lawsuits by employees harmed by exposure to secondhand smoke or other indirect hazards in the workplace, an appeals court Tuesday upheld benefits for a West Milford custodian who died of cancer after exposure to asbestos in a school. 

Studies linking asbestos to disease began in the early 1900's. Direct exposure to asbestos has been implicated in various diseases, principally mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis, and lung scarring. The risks in all four diseases are closely influenced by dose and duration of asbestos exposure, and they involve long and variable latent periods after initial exposure (20-40 years). 

A federal jury in Newark has awarded $5.8 million in compensatory damages to a widow, and her two sons , whose husband died of asbestos-related lung cancer last year. 
Plaintiffs' co-counsel, John McConnell of Providence's Ness, Motley, Loadholt, Richardson & Poole, and Jon Gelman, a Wayne solo practitioner, say they believe the sum is the largest in a U.S. asbestos case in which punitive damages were not at issue. 

The jury that heard the case before U.S. District Judge H. Lee Sarokin returned its verdicts last Friday in favor of Ulrike Wundrack of West Milford and her sons. Their father, Robert, died in March 1989, at age 48. 

In its verdicts, the jury found the Keene Corp. of New York, an asbestos products distributor, 45 percent responsible for damages; Owens-Coming Fiberglas Corp. of Ohio, 35 percent liable; and the Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust, 13 percent liable. 

McConnell says that because Owens settled for an undisclosed amount two weeks into the trial, and the jury was not aware of that, the actual amount of the verdict is the $3.37 million assessed against Keene and Manville. 

Keene's attorney, Nancv McDonald of Newark's McCarter & English, could not be reached for comment. 

McConnell says the plaintiffs agreed not to seek punitive damages in return for Keene's agreement not to challenge corporate successor liability claims. Keene did not actually manufacture asbestos. 

McConnell says that Keene and Manville did not contest the plaintiffs' diagnosis of asbestos-related rnesothelioma, a form of lung cancer, during trial. Rather, they sought to show that the asbestos fibers that led to Wundrack's condition originated from other manufacturers. 

Of the $5.8 million award, $4.6 million was to compensate Robert Wundrack's pain and suffering and his sons' loss of his counsel, McConnell says. 

David Vance of The Valore Firm in Linwood represented Manville. Owens was represented by Steven Ceiba of Milwaukee's Borgelt, Powell, Peterson & Frauen, and by Russell Pepe of Harwood Lloyd in Hackensack. 

This article is reprinted with permission from the November 15, 1990 issue of the New Jersey Law Journal. c. 1990 American Lawyer Media.

 

In late June, 1998, U.S. District Court Judge Charles Wiener approved a revised notice for dissemination to 56 national and international unions to inform them that the Georgine class action had been decertified and the termination of the tolling of the applicable statute of limitations for individual actions had occured. 

A Haledon man is suing his World War II employer for damages in connection with the death of his wife, claiming that she died from asbestos particles from his job. In what Jon Gelman, a Wayne lawyer, said was the first action of its kind, James D. Parker filed suit yesterday in Superior Court in Paterson, seeking damages from the Union Asbestos and Rubber Co. for the estate of his wife, Angelina, who died of cancer last year at age 61.  

Unto the second generation, deadly asbestos fibers are now destroying the lungs of children of Paterson area asbestos workers of the 1940's, most of whom already have succumbed or are totally incapacitated from lung cancers and related diseases.