Hello, I'm Mandy 

Education BA English Wellesley College 1965; JD Harvard Law School 1968

 

Legal services lawyer in SF Bay Area 1968-1976 

 

First job entailed a multi-year battle that stopped evictions and housing demolition by the City’s Redevelopment Agency in the South of Market “Yerba Buena” area - where wealthy investors wanted a convention center; won inclusion of affordable housing in the new plan. Hawes then took on inadequate settlements of discrimination claims by seasonal cannery workers in King City, Salinas, San Jose, Oakland, and Sacramento; helped hundreds secure meaningful compensation for discriminatory treatment on the basis of gender and/or ethnicity.   Through BACOSH [1] Hawes wrote bilingual fact sheets on the health and safety hazards of hot, wet, noisy, and physically exhausting cannery work; she also helped cannery workers in San Jose – then known as the “Valley of Hearts Delight” advocate for their union rights through the Cannery Workers Committee.

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Private Practice and community work on behalf of electronics workers and their families 1976 to present- As canneries in The Valley of Hearts Delight laid off workers and moved to the Central Valley in the early 1970s the electronics industry was emerging and with it a new name for the area: “Silicon Valley”. Many laid off cannery workers were thrilled to get year-round assembly jobs in the so-called ‘clean’ electronics industry. Concerned that they were not being adequately warned or protected against hazardous materials used in in Silicon Valley, Hawes co-formed SCCOSH[2] and its ECOSH[3] project and in 1977 helped secure a federal grant for SCCOSH to run its PHASE project.[4]  ECOSH ran worker hazard trainings and campaigned for example the elimination of the carcinogen TCE in electronics work and control over its then so-called “safe substitute” TCA. [5]  SCCOSH’s PHASE project researched and disseminated hazard information on a wide range of solvents metals and formulations used in electronics and semiconductor fabrication, ran a worker hotline, and researched and produced hazard fact sheets.  Industry representatives opposed to these efforts to warn and protect workers had little trouble convincing the Reagan Administration to defund PHASE but ECOSH advocacy on behalf of safe jobs and healthy families continued.  Meanwhile, years of mishandling hazardous materials was about to catch up with two “clean industry” titans ‘– IBM and Fairchild.

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In 1981 waste TCA was improperly stored by IBM and Fairchild, got into the ground water and migrated to a large drinking water well in the Great Oaks Water Company service area in San Jose.   Disclosure of the contamination raised concerns over the miscarriages and birth defects reported where pregnant community residents had consumed the TCA- tainted water.  Hawes was part of the team that successfully sued IBM and Fairchild on behalf of the community exposed to the contaminated water. The discovery of the leaking underground tanks at IBM and Fairchild led to widespread and on-going monitoring and remediation of the so-called clean electronics industry’s impact on air and water in Silicon Valley.  Hawes’ focus stayed on conditions inside these facilities – where women of child-bearing age predominated. A 1986 State of the Art Review of the Microelectronics Industry made this important observation about the studies of the Great Oaks water contamination problem.

“It should be noted that contamination of well water by TCA in these studies occurred at levels substantially below the exposure levels likely for production work in the electronics industry. Electronics workers, exposed at the current standards, would be risk of exposures at least 1000 times those received in the Great Oaks Water Company Service Area. In addition, electronics workers have many simultaneous exposures to other substances associated with adverse reproductive outcomes." [6]

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As Hawes has advocated for years, closing the gap between environmental and workplace exposure scenarios and between allowable environmental versus workplace exposure limits is crucial to protecting not only workers – but also protecting the offspring of women workers of child-bearing age - who comprise the majority of the production workforce in electronics all across the world. 

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Through legal briefs, PowerPoint presentations, articles and interviews Hawes has documented the weakness of occupational exposure standards vis a vis reproductive health of electronics workers has multiple times since 1986. For example, when the reproductive toxicity of glycol ether solvents emerged in the early 1980s the Campaign to End the Miscarriage of Justice sought to get glycol ethers removed from electronics manufacturing.

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The industry’s response was to conduct two studies of miscarriage rates among production workers versus office workers. Both studies found a significantly higher rate of miscarriages among production versus office workers.   But because air sampling done in the production areas showed the levels of glycol ethers and other solvents to be only a small fraction of the “permissible exposure levels” for workers the industry tried to argue that the disparity in miscarriage rates could not be related to the work environment, period.   Hawes’ response was blunt: the supposedly low levels of exposure that were linked to high miscarriage rates was, yet another confirmation of how weak workplace standards are.  Another aspect of how the electronics industry handled the results of the miscarriage studies also deserves mention.

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When the results were announced at worksite meetings some workers who had given birth to children with problems reported to Hawes that when they tried to ask if their children’s injuries were work related, they were ignored, and some were pulled from the meetings.   Hawes found this response distressing and deceptive; here’s why:   A basic principle of toxicology is that a dose of a toxic that is sufficient to cause fetal death (i.e., a miscarriage) is also capable of causing harm that does not result in fetal death but can be very serious and potentially untreatable—e.g., irreparable damage to the developing brain Hawes has been fighting for the health of electronics workers and their offspring for over forty years; she has been working with concerned communities not only in Silicon Valley and other “high tech” centers in the US but also with groups in Mexico, Vietnam, the Philippines, Korea, the European Union, and more. 

 

This work has three components:  Legal advocacy for offspring with developmental disabilities and life-altering impairments, educational campaigns on the indefensible disparity between environmental and workplace exposure standards, and efforts to hold the industry accountable for the impact on the public of its failure to warn and protect young women workers of child-bearing age – specifically the substantial and on-going costs of special education, special medical care, in home support service and related needs of their developmentally disabled offspring.

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[1] Bay Area Committee on Occupational Safety and Health

[2] Santa Clara Committee on Occupational Safety and Health

[3] Electronics Committee on Occupational Safety and Health

[4] Project on Health and Safety in Electronics.

[5] TCA is shorthand for 1,1,1 trichlorethane , aka “methyl chloroform” common solvent used in electronics

[6] State of the Art Reviews Occupational Medicine: The Microelectronics Industry, Joseph LaDou MD Guest Editor, Vol 1, Number 1, Jan-March 1986.”Reproductive Hazards in the Microelectronics Industry” by Linda Rudo;[j MD MPH and Shanna H. Swan Phd, at p. 142