I remember when I 1st started working in a auto plant, I noticed that I would be blowing out black snot, from all the crap in the air. My foreman, a 40 year vet, looked at me and said " it's no worse than a couple of packs a day". He wasn't joking, and he was smoking. We just accepted that as part of the job, you got dirty, breathed dirty air, used dangerous chemicals, used dangerous machines, had a lot of loud noise around, worked crazy hours and shifts, and did all of this in a enviornment full of asbestos. But we had a job....
I remember spilling some hydraulic oil on my jeans one day. I don't know what was in the oil, but my jeans had holes in them within a couple hours, and I had to be treated for chemical burns. Another item, we used trichrolecline? for a solvent for layout die, which was made from carbon black. We would use it to get the dye off our hands, and used it in spray bottles to clean sheet metal panels and castings prior to layout. We had the stuff in 55 gallon drums. One day in 79, some guy in a suit came thru, looked around, the next day, the formen came around, with security guards, and confiscated all the spray bottles, and the drums. We were then told that it was a carcinigen. Somebody asked about the vats - the tooling group used vats of the stuff, hundreds of gallons in each one, to clean cutter bodys. The vats were shut down. A lot of the oldtimers died from cancer - many were smokers, and coupled with the work enviornment, it took a toll on the old guys. The air in those places was so bad that visibilty might only be a hundred feet or so. Sometimes we were sent home, because everybody's eyes were watering, and people were coughing. It had to get pretty damm bad for that to happen.
