ST. LOUIS — A St. Louis jury on Thursday awarded nearly $4.7 billion in total damages to 22 women and their families after they claimed asbestos in Johnson & Johnson talcum powder contributed to their ovarian cancer in the first case against the company that focused on asbestos in the powder.
The jury announced the $4.14 billion award in punitive damages shortly after awarding $550 million in compensatory damages after a six-week trial in St. Louis Circuit Court.
Johnson & Johnson called the verdict the result of an unfair process that allowed the women to sue the company in Missouri despite most of them not living in the state and said it would appeal, as it has in previous cases that found for women who sued the company.
“Johnson & Johnson remains confident that its products do not contain asbestos and do not cause ovarian cancer and intends to pursue all available appellate remedies,” spokeswoman Carol Goodrich said.
Mark Lanier, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement that Johnson & Johnson had covered up evidence of asbestos in their products for more than 40 years.
Medical experts testified during the trial that asbestos, a known carcinogen, is intermingled with mineral talc, which is the primary ingredient in Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Powder and Shower to Shower products. The plaintiffs’ lawyers said asbestos fibers and talc particles were found in the ovarian tissues of many of the women.
“We hope this verdict will get the attention of the J&J board and that it will lead them to better inform the medical community and the public about the connection between asbestos, talc, and ovarian cancer,” Lanier said. “The company should pull talc from the market before causing further anguish, harm, and death from a terrible disease.”
During closing arguments on Wednesday, Lanier told the jurors this case was the first where jurors saw documents showing that Johnson & Johnson knew its products contained asbestos and didn’t warn consumers, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
The company has been sued by more than 9,000 women who claim its talcum powder contributed to their ovarian cancer. Johnson & Johnson has consistently denied that its products can be linked to the cancer.
Goodrich said the verdict awarding all the women the same amount despite differences in their circumstances showed evidence in the case was overwhelmed by prejudice created when so many plaintiffs are allowed to sue the company in one lawsuit.
“Every verdict against Johnson & Johnson in this court that has gone through the appeals process has been reversed and the multiple errors present in this trial were worse than those in the prior trials which have been reversed,” she said.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs said punitive damage awards are limited by state law to five times the amount of compensatory damages awarded and defense lawyers probably would file a motion to reduce the award.
Six of the 22 plaintiffs in the latest trial have died from ovarian cancer. Five plaintiffs were from Missouri, with others from states that include Arizona, New York, North Dakota, California, Georgia, the Carolinas and Texas.
One of the plaintiffs, Gail Ingham, 73, of O’Fallon, Missouri, told The Post-Dispatch that she was diagnosed with stage-3 ovarian cancer in 1985 and underwent chemotherapy treatments, surgeries and drug treatments for a year before being declared cancer free in the early 1990s.
Ingham, who used baby powder for decades, said she joined the lawsuit because women who use baby powder “need to know what’s in there. They need to know what’s going on. Women need to know because they’re putting it on their babies.”
My source is a Facebook post that’s being circulated by representatives from the Cast Members’ Union.
On May 1, 2018 – for the first time since September 2017 – the Company entered the room to negotiate with the Union. They’ve put two options on the table.
Option 1: the exact same offer that 93% of voting Cast Members rejected back in December 2017.
Each Cast Member would receive the thousand dollar tax cut bonus that the Company already promised them, but only if they settle an unsustainably low raise (fifty cents per hour).
Option 2: the Cast Members will receive a more sustainable raise, but at the cost of renegotiating a bunch of really important Union rights.
This option is spelled out in a thirty-eight page proposal. It has a few ups, but a lot more downs.
• By 2021, the lowliest Cast Members would be paid fifteen dollars an hour. Higher-paid Cast Members would either get a seventy-five cent raise or a three percent raise, whichever is higher.
• All Cast Members would finally receive the bonus that the Company promised them.
• In the event of a massive closure – like during a hurricane – the Company would pay Cast Members for up to five days of missed shifts. (Currently, the Company isn’t contractually obligated to pay them anything.)
THAT SAID
• The Company would no longer have to pay overtime rates to Cast Members who are scheduled for fewer than five days a week. Tough luck, part-timers!
• The Company would get rid of sixth-day overtime and seventh-day doubletime altogether. So if you work for that brutal and exhausting amount of time, you would be rewarded with regular pay.
• The Company would stop the Union from having a say in how Cast Members are scheduled altogether.
• The Company would change transfer guidelines. A Cast Member would have to wait a full year before transfering to a new location. (Currently it’s six months.)
• The Company would only allow Cast Members to transfer to a new location if they have two attendance entries and no reprimands. (Currently it’s five attendance entries and one reprimand.)
• The Company would be allowed to transfer Union Shop Stewards to other locations upon whim. The Shop Steward wouldn’t have a say in the matter.
• The Company would no longer have to reimburse a Cast Member who takes a leave of absence due to civil or criminal charges, even if the Cast Member is found Not Guilty. (It shouldn’t matter either way, but still.)
• The Company would no longer be required to have a Shop Steward present when Management calls a Cast Member in for disciplinary reasons.
• Currently, Cast Members can clock in fifteen minutes before their shift starts and clock out fifteen minutes after it ends. The Company would reduce that to five minutes, before and after.
• If a Cast Member has a grievance that can’t be resolved by an Area Manager or a General Manager, the Company would no longer have to send a higher-ranking representative to resolve it. The grievance would just go unresolved.
• The Company would only provide Holiday Pay to Cast Members who have worked the day before the holiday, the day of the holiday, AND the day after the holiday.
• The Company would place a cap on the number of hours of Vacation Time and Sick Time that a Cast Member can accrue. (Currently it’s based on the number of hours that the Cast Member works, but the Company wants to base it on the number of hours paid up to 1,800 hours.)
• The Company would no longer be required to have a Shop Steward present for Scheduling Bids and Vacation Bids.
• The Safety Committee is a forum where Cast Members can voice safety concerns in their work area to Management. The Labor/Management Committee is a forum where Shop Stewards can voice their concerns to Management.
The Company would combine these two Committees, and diminish the Union’s representation in them.
• The Company would now be allowed to subject Cast Members to random drug testing at any time, for any drug, without even notifying the Union first.
• The Company would no longer allow Cast Members to speak one-on-one with Union Representatives while on the clock. Not backstage. Not during a break. Nothing.
• The Company would no longer allow the Union to contact Cast Members directly at all. They’d have to do it via mail or solicitation letters.
• The Company would no longer allow the Union to contact Non-Union Cast Members at all.
• The Company would allows Cast Members to join the Union without paying monthly dues. This would de-fund the Union, which would basically kill it altogether.
• The Company wouldn’t be required to negotiate another contract with its Cast Members until 2022 (assuming the Cast Members still have a Union to advocate on their behalf).
Jesus fuck. I love the things the people at Disney and the companies resources can create but fucking hate the company itself. Some of these terms are just pure evil.
Please spread this. Disney fans especially. People need to know how this company is treating its employees. The world needs to put pressure on Disney to treat its Cast Members right.
THE MONOPOLIZATION OF AMERICA: The Biggest Economic Problem You’re Hearing Almost Nothing About
Not long ago I visited some farmers in Missouri whose profits
are disappearing. Why? Monsanto alone owns the key genetic traits to more than
90 percent of the soybeans planted by farmers in the United States, and 80
percent of the corn. Which means Monsanto can charge farmers much higher
prices.
Farmers are getting squeezed from the other side, too,
because the food processors they sell their produce to are also consolidating
into mega companies that have so much market power they can cut the prices they
pay to farmers.
This doesn’t mean lower food prices to you. It means more
profits to the monopolists.
Monopolies All Around
America used to have antitrust laws that stopped corporations
from monopolizing markets, and often broke up the biggest culprits. No longer.
It’s a hidden upward redistribution of money and power from the majority of
Americans to corporate executives and wealthy shareholders.
You may think you have lots of choices, but take a closer look:
1. The four largest food companies control 82
percent of beef packing, 85 percent of soybean processing, 63 percent of pork
packing, and 53 percent of chicken processing.
2. There are many brands of toothpaste, but 70 percent of all of it comes from just two companies.
3. You may think you have your choice of sunglasses, but they’re almost all from one company: Luxottica – which also
owns nearly all the eyeglass retail outlets.
4. Practically every plastic hanger in America is now made by one
company, Mainetti.
5. What brand of cat food should you buy? Looks like lots of brands but behind them are basically just two companies.
6. What about your pharmaceuticals? Yes, you can get low-cost generic versions. But drug companies are in effect paying the makers of generic drugs to
delay cheaper versions. Such “pay for delay” agreements are illegal in other
advanced economies, but antitrust enforcement hasn’t laid a finger on them in
America. They cost you and me an estimated $3.5 billion a year.
7. You think your health insurance will cover the costs? Health
insurers are consolidating, too. Which is one reason your health insurance
premiums, copayments, and deductibles are soaring.
8. You think you have a lot of options for booking discount airline
tickets and hotels online? Think again. You have only two. Expedia merged with
Orbitz, so that’s one company. And then there’s Priceline.
9. How about your cable and Internet service? Basically just four
companies (and two of them just announced they’re going to merge).
Why the Monopolization of America is a Huge Problem
The problem with all this consolidation into a handful of giant firms is they don’t have to compete. Which means they can – and do – jack up your prices.
Such consolidation keeps down wages. Workers with less choice
of whom to work for have a harder time getting a raise. When local labor markets
are dominated by one major big box retailer, or one grocery chain, for example,
those firms essentially set wage rates for the area.
These massive corporations also have a lot of political clout.
That’s one reason they’re consolidating: Power.
Antitrust laws were supposed to
stop what’s been going on. But today, they’re almost a dead letter. This hurts
you.
We’ve Forgotten History
The first antitrust law came in 1890 when Senator John Sherman
responded to public anger about the economic and political power of the huge
railroad, steel, telegraph, and oil cartels – then called “trusts” – that were
essentially running America.
A handful of corporate chieftains known as “robber barons” presided
over all this – collecting great riches at the expense of workers who toiled
long hours often in dangerous conditions for little pay. Corporations gouged
consumers and corrupted politics.
Then in 1901, progressive reformer Teddy Roosevelt became
president. By this time, the American public was demanding action.
In his first
message to Congress in December 1901, only two months after assuming the
presidency, Roosevelt warned, “There is a widespread conviction in the minds of
the American people that the great corporations known as the trusts are in
certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare.”
Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to go after the
Northern Securities Company, a giant railroad trust run by J. P. Morgan, the
nation’s most powerful businessman. The U.S. Supreme Court backed Roosevelt and
ordered the company dismantled.
In 1911, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust was broken up,
too. But in its decision, the Supreme Court effectively altered the Sherman
Act, saying that monopolistic restraints of trade were objectionable if they were “unreasonable” – and that determination was to be made by the courts. What
was an unreasonable restraint of trade?
In the presidential election of 1912, Roosevelt, running again
for president but this time as a third party candidate, said he would allow
some concentration of industries where there were economic efficiencies due to large
scale. He’d then he’d have experts regulate these large corporations for the
public benefit.
Woodrow Wilson, who ended up winning the election, and his
adviser Louis Brandeis, took a different view. They didn’t think regulation
would work, and thought all monopolies should be broken up.
For the next 65 years, both views dominated. We had strong
antitrust enforcement along with regulations that held big corporations in
check.
Most big mergers were prohibited. Even large size was thought to be a
problem. In 1945, in the case of United States v. Alcoa (1945), the Supreme
Court ruled that even though Alcoa hadn’t pursued a monopoly, it had become one
by becoming so large that it was guilty of violating the Sherman Act.
What Happened to Antitrust?
All this changed in the 1980s, after Robert Bork – who,
incidentally, I studied antitrust law with at Yale Law School, and then worked
for when he became Solicitor General under President Ford – wrote an
influential book called The Antitrust Paradox, which argued that the sole
purpose of the Sherman Act is consumer welfare.
Bork argued that mergers and large size almost always create
efficiencies that bring down prices, and therefore should be legal. Bork’s
ideas were consistent with the conservative Chicago School of Economics, and
found a ready audience in the Reagan White House.
Bork was wrong. But since then, even under Democratic administrations, antitrust has
all but disappeared.
The Monopolization of High Tech
We’re seeing declining competition even in cutting-edge,
high-tech industries.
In the new economy, information and ideas are the most
valuable forms of property. This is where the money is.
We haven’t seen
concentration on this scale ever before.
Google and Facebook are now the first stops for many Americans
seeking news. Meanwhile, Amazon is now the first stop for more than a half of
American consumers seeking to buy anything. Talk about power.
Contrary to the conventional view of an American economy bubbling
with innovative small companies, the reality is quite different. The rate at
which new businesses have formed in the United States has slowed markedly since
the late 1970s.
Big Tech’s sweeping patents, standard platforms, fleets of
lawyers to litigate against potential rivals, and armies of lobbyists have
created formidable barriers to new entrants. Google’s search engine is so
dominant, “Google” has become a verb.
The European Union filed formal antitrust charges against
Google, accusing it of forcing search engine users into its own shopping
platforms. And last June, it fined Google a record $2.7 billion.
But not in
America.
It’s Time to Revive Antitrust
Economic and political power cannot be separated
because dominant corporations gain political influence over how markets are
organized, maintained, and enforced – which enlarges their economic power
further.
One of the original goals of the antitrust laws was to prevent this.
Big Tech — along with the drug, insurance, agriculture, and
financial giants — is coming to dominate both our economy and our politics.
There’s only one answer: It
is time to revive antitrust.
Working off of the labor of others, only there because of being born into capital and pre-existing familial or business relations? Yep
And people still try to defend this shit with ‘Well they MUST work REALLY HARD to earn THAT kind of money!!!’
I assure you they don’t. I assure you the people earning the least money are working the most. I don’t see CEO’s doing 60 hour weeks just to keep food on the table. They don’t do that, because they don’t have to, because they get paid so much they aren’t desperate enough to have to.
If you follow me, reblog this. It is an important piece of data. I would love to see one for the annual tax expenditure of minimum wage versus CEO’s as a proportion of their annual income.
This is the aggregation of labor. This is what it looks like. It has happened before. It will likely happen again unless it is changed.
House of Brat 