For a century, the workers’ movement has known a brutal truth: occupational disease is the slowest-motion disaster in the workplace, and the law almost always arrives after the bodies have piled up. Asbestosis taught that lesson in blood. Silicosis — a preventable, incurable lung disease caused by breathing in respirable crystalline silica — is now teaching it again.
This time, the victims are young stoneworkers cutting engineered quartz countertops, many of them migrant workers in kitchen worktop fabrication shops. They are developing accelerated silicosis and acute silicosis after only a few years of exposure, in a regulatory environment that has learned almost nothing from the asbestos catastrophe. The silicosis vs asbestosis comparison is not academic: it is a warning that the same playbook of delay, denial, and deregulation is being run again — and workers are paying with their lungs.
