3. James Hardie
We’ve known about the dangers of asbestos since the 1940’s, even though it was still widely used as a building material until the late 70’s, when use began to decline. One of the major downsides of asbestos is its tendency to cause mesothelioma, a type of malignant cancer that coats the internal organs. Fast forward to 1987 and you have James Hardie, an Australian manufacturing company, continuing to operate asbestos factories across Victoria, Queensland, and Western Australia.
James Hardie was the largest Australian producer of building materials around the time, and after thousands of cases of asbestos poisoning surfaced among its workers, an investigation was launched which found out that James Hardie was well aware of the dangers of asbestos, but continued to manufacture it anyway.
But James Hardie was prepared for the virtual avalanche of lawsuits that followed in the early 2000’s. Here’s how it worked: Their business structure was set up so that only subsidiaries of the James Hardie parent corporation were connected to the asbestos work. When the pressure got too heavy, James Hardie began cutting off ties to these subsidiaries, leaving them to take the brunt of the lawsuits even though they didn’t have enough money to compensate all the victims. James Hardie then moved to the Netherlands, and is now denying the responsibility because “those other companies aren’t part of James Hardie.”
Basically, they’ve dodged most of the responsibility as of 2012, while over 12,000 people have have been diagnosed with mesothelioma from their products.
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