Corporations exploited silicosis’ latency to deny compensation to retired workers

Evidence

Silicosis takes many years to develop. Symptoms may not appear until after a worker has retired. Corporations ignored the progressive nature of the disease and required workers to demonstrate an inability to work before they could be compensated. Using this criterion of disability, the industry absolved itself of responsibility for the health of workers who had retired, many of them due to the progressing silicosis itself: “The committee points out that since silicosis may be present without any demonstrable symptoms, silicosis per se should not carry with it a liability for compensation, but rather liability should attach only when the disease results in wage loss” (U.S. Department of Labor, 1937). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1796

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels how the reader’s vault claims about ordinary people rationalizing harmful policy: the latency window lets responsibility expire, analogous to how delayed harms let perpetrators claim ignorance. — connects to: Long-latency diseases let industry avoid compensating retired workers
• ADDENDUM: Direct support for ‘On Sacrifice’ logic-freeze patterns and the general moral disengagement the reader is building — harming the vulnerable by exploiting temporal distance from consequences.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1796