ABOVE: Attorneys James J. Bilsborrow (Weitz & Luxenberg) and Joe Slaughter (Hunterbrook Law) speak at start of Thursday’s Viscofan themed meeting at the Rabbittown Trade Center.
An overflow, standing room only crowd of several dozen filed into the Rabbittown Trade Center just off College Street in Danville Thursday night, as Hunterbrook Media hosted a community meeting concerning health and environmental issues involving Viscofan. A young reporter for Hunterbrook Media had advised the company’s Hunterbrook Law division to check out Viscofan allegations. And while a meeting at the Palmer Arena earlier this year dealt significantly with alleged union busting issues, this session was all about alleged health and property affects.
Attendees with Viscofan work in their past talked about everything from having COPD to having skin cancer to diabetes and kidney stone issues. And some of the COPD issues happened when workers were very young. Prior to the start of the meeting, there was conversation about people being sent to the hospital in taxis after being injured on the job, including one story of a driver stopping for another fee before he got to the hospital. There were also stories of supervisors being given quotas for how many people needed to be written up over a period of time, even if they were doing their jobs just fine; otherwise the supervisor would get written up.
CIMG spoke to a lady who worked there prior to the Viscofan days, when it was TeePak. But she has a loved one who did work there during the Viscofan days. She told us that either way this is dangerous work, and she has had health problems. But the difference, she says, is that when Viscofan took over, with their overseas headquarters in Spain, there was no empathy for the workers whatsoever; and she says they don’t feel there has to be.
AUDIO: This Viscofan is run by an outside company; and they do not believe that they have to follow the laws of our country.
Workers with health issues asked what can be done to prove any responsibility on the part of Viscofan. One of the presiding attorneys, James Bilsborrow from Weitz and Luxenberg, said that would be a complicated process. But he says they passed out questionnaires, talked to a lot of people; and they’ll look into what might be done next.
AUDIO: A lot of individuals who worked at Viscofan have had very similar health experiences. And you wouldn’t expect to necessarily see that if we just took a random sample of the population. And so we need to investigate that further.
Hunterbrook Law’s Joe Slaughter, who opened the meeting, said the next step is definitely to go over all of their information. He referred to Thursday night as a “listening exercise.”
AUDIO: I think if I had to pick one thing it’s that there’s a lot of people in this community that have a lot of issues with this facility. And that’s very clear from the folks that are in the room tonight; and we’re just here to listen, and to figure out if there’s anything we can do to make the circumstances better.
Attempts by CIMG to contact Viscofan have been unsuccessful.
