They Didn’t Grow the Economy. They Shrunk the Worker Inside It.
The pattern is not new. It only feels new because the materials change.
In the early industrial era, workers lost fingers, lungs, and lives to unregulated factories. In the mid-20th century, miners inhaled coal dust while companies insisted safety was a matter of personal responsibility. Today, countertop workers inhale silica while manufacturers argue that liability should stop at the factory door.
Different decade. Same move.
A recent NPR investigation documents a growing epidemic of silicosis among workers who cut and polish engineered stone countertops. Hundreds have fallen ill. Dozens have died. Lung transplants are increasingly common. California regulators are now considering banning engineered stone outright.
At the same time, lawmakers in Washington are considering a very different response: banning workers’ ability to sue the companies that manufacture and distribute the material.
That divergence tells a clear story.
One response treats harm as a material reality that demands prevention. The other treats harm as a legal inconvenience that demands insulation.
This is not a disagreement about safety standards. It is a disagreement about who is allowed to impose risk on whom.
When manufacturers argue that engineered stone can be fabricated “safely” under ideal conditions, they are not offering a solution—they are offering a boundary. Inside: safety. Outside: someone else’s liability.
The moment a product leaves the factory, the worker’s lungs become someone else’s problem.
That boundary is a corporate sleight of hand because it treats danger as if it were an “end-user misuse” issue instead of a predictable, profit-driven outcome of how the product is designed, marketed, and deployed. The upstream company gets to claim the benefits of scale—selling into a fragmented ecosystem of small shops competing on speed and cost—while disowning the downstream conditions that scale inevitably produces. “We can do it safely” becomes a shield: proof that safety is possible somewhere, used to argue that injury is the fault of whoever couldn’t afford to replicate the ideal.
This logic is not unique to countertops. It is the same logic that once defended asbestos, leaded gasoline, tobacco, and PFAS. In each case, the industry did not deny harm outright. Instead, it argued that accountability should stop upstream. The body absorbed the cost. The balance sheet remained intact.
When harm can no longer be denied, lawsuits become the next target.
Legal claims are reframed as attacks on innovation, growth, or competitiveness. The conversation shifts away from injury and toward efficiency. Once that shift is complete, the original harm no longer needs to be argued at all.
This pattern appears throughout the NPR report in polite, procedural language. Manufacturers insist the problem is not the product but “unsafe shops.” Distributors insist they do not cut stone and should not be named. Lawmakers call for “refocusing accountability” on OSHA compliance—despite OSHA being chronically underfunded and structurally incapable of inspecting thousands of small fabrication shops.
Responsibility moves downward. Risk stays localized. Profit remains upstream.
This is not a failure of regulation versus growth. It is the deliberate separation of profit from consequence.
Historically, when industries cannot eliminate harm cheaply, they attempt to eliminate liability instead. They lobby. They reframe. They redirect responsibility toward subcontractors and workers with the least leverage to refuse dangerous conditions. When lawsuits become the only remaining mechanism that forces costs back onto producers, those lawsuits are described as the real threat.
That is what is happening now.
The workers dying of silicosis are not casualties of partisan conflict. They are casualties of an economic structure that treats labor as a disposable interface between raw material and consumer demand.
The demographics are not incidental. Risk is consistently externalized onto those with the least bargaining power, the least visibility, and the fewest alternatives. That is how margins are preserved while neutrality is claimed.
When corporate representatives say they have “no control over downstream conditions,” they are asserting that economic benefit does not require ethical governance—only legal insulation.
When lawmakers propose shielding manufacturers and distributors from lawsuits, they are not choosing efficiency over emotion. They are choosing power over accountability.
This dynamic has been framed repeatedly as left versus right, regulation versus growth, or safety versus innovation. None of those frames describe what is actually at stake. They all assume growth requires sacrifice. The real question is who makes that assumption—and who absorbs its cost.
History has already answered that question. The only reason it continues to be asked is because the cost has never been successfully externalized upward—only downward, and only temporarily.
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Cherokee Schill | Insurance Agent & AI Ethics Researcher 