A Johns-Manville Summer Employee's Essay, Analysis of My Job Environment, on the Billerica Plant (1968)

An eight-page typed essay, "Analysis of My Job Environment," by an unnamed student who worked a summer in the press department of Johns-Manville's Billerica, Massachusetts, plant, marked by hand "Summer Employee 1968 or 1969." After a short company history taken from a J-M booklet, he describes making Marinite asbestos board: "the semi-raw asbestos fiber is dumped into a grinding machine" and milled "into a cotton like fiber," blown by duct to a mixer with water, lime and Celite, pressed into 4 by 8 foot sheets, steamed and baked. His jobs were racking and unracking sheets, cleaning and vacuuming, washing pallets, unloading freight cars and sometimes running the grinding and mixing machines.

What it shows

The student explains that cleaning and vacuuming were done "for the main reason of personal health," since otherwise more dust would collect in the air, "thus causing a health hazard," and that "anything that enters the lungs other than air is harmful." He mentions respirators among the protective gear certain operations required. The essay, apparently written for a college course, cites interviews with a foreman, Walter Clarke, and an employee named Guilmette. Someone wrote "died in 1898 of lung disease" in the margin beside the paragraph on the founder, Henry W. Johns.