The Coke Ovens Legacy: Poverty, Cancer

Throughout their working lives, employees of the Sydney Steel coke ovens suspected that their jobs were unhealthy. The decrepit battery of ovens, where coal was baked into coke, belched clouds of noxious, chemical laden fumes. Year in and year out the men worked in that malodorous haze.

They dared not complain because they feared that he government's solution might be to close the plant altogether. At least they had jobs, unlike so many of their neighbors. The threat of permanent unemployment loomed larger than any theoretical risk to their health, particularly since the company kept assuring them they had no cause for worry.

Last spring, under heavy pressure from Environment Canada, the province closed the Sysco coke ovens. Facing permanent layoff, the men finally began assessing the toll the years of work on the battery had exacted. What focused their attention was the growing impression that too many of their former co-workers were dying - "dying like flies," in the words of Don MacPherson, secretary of the newly formed Coke Oven Workers United for Justice.

When MacPherson's group began researching the subject, it quickly uncovered a mountain of epidemiological studies linking employment at the coke ovens to various forms of cancer and respiratory illness. In Ontario, The workman's Compensation Board has long recognized this link, and pays compensation when coke ovens workers fall victim to occupational disease.

Not so the Nova Scoda Workers' Compensation Board. When Joseph Assoun, an 18-year year veteran of the coke ovens with a 41-percent loss of lung function, applied for compensation. Sysco s superintendent of personnel services wrote the board that, "We are not aware of any hazardous environmental exposure that Mr. Assoun would have been in contact with." The WCB rejected Assoun's claim.

Sysco's assessment of the health effects of coke oven employment differed sharply from an unpublished Health and Welfare Canada study. In August,1985, Dr. J. Roy Hickman, director of the Bureau of Chemical Hazards advised Environment Canada that pollution from the Sysco coke ovens "could be expected to result in increases of morbidity and mortality in the coke plant workers and probably in the residents of Sydney."

Last spring, from an anonymous source, the Coke Ovens Workers For Environmental Justice received copies of two Environment Canada studies dating back to the early seventies. The reports, marked "restricted" and "internal" documented serious hazards at the SYSCO coke ovens and urged the installation of pollution controls. SYSCO never acted on the recommendations.

Over the last few months, the men have carried out a survey of their own, a study of recently deceased co-workers. Of 86 former Sysco coke oven workers who died within the last 25 years, 50 died of cancer or of complications from cancer. That cancer death rate is four times the national average.

These are not just numbers to Don MacPherson. "I worked there for 25 years," he says. "I know ever one of them." The medical catastrophe facing the former coke workers is complicated by a grim financial oudook. An historical quirk - the fact that another company briefly took over he coke ovens during the 1970s has left most of the men without seniority or pension eligibility, despite dec ades of service. Although many of them now have temporary jobs on the Sysco modernization project, hardly any will have Jobs once the project is complete.

When the coke ovens closed, its employees were promised first crack at jobs on the Sysco tar pond clean-up. (Containing the effluent from 80 years of coke production, the tar pond is eastern Canada's worst hazard ous waste site.) Now it turns out that of the 140 jobs in the clean- up, most are in engineering or skilled trades for which the coke ovens cast-offs aren't qualified. Only seven positions are deemed suitable for the former employees.

The Coke Oven Workers United for Justice has now merged with the compensation committee of the local steelworkers union. The national office of the United Steel Workers of America is actively supportug their cause. They want a comprehensive epidemiological study that would document the full extent of industrial disease among coke oven workers and among people living near the defunct plant. And they want the Nova Scotia Workmans Compensation Board to provide compensation for industrial diseases caused by coke oven employment (a step the Ontario Board took years ago).

Industrial blackmail kept the coke oven workers quiet for decades. With the ovens closed, the blackmal no longer works. Don MacPherson and his friends are fighting mad, and they're fighting back. "I'm completely outraged with it," MacPherson says.
"There's no way I could describe the hatred I have for those bastards for what they've been doing to us, and what they have done to the public at large. That's my exact sentiment. And I'm going to do every god damn thing in my power to see that the bastards pay for it."