History of Feminism

By all measures, Armida Mesa was an unlikely candidate for breast cancer. She is Latina (Hispanic women have a lower rate of the disease than most ethnic groups); she has given birth to two sons (childbearing also lowers susceptibility); she doesn't smoke or drink; and neither her mother nor any of her seven sisters has any history of the disease. Why Mesa beat the odds and was diagnosed with cancer in 1984 at age 40 will never be known for certain.

Mesa, now 57, believes she knows why she got sick-and why her co-worker Suzanne Rubio died of breast cancer at age 36, and why several more of her acquaintances also developed cancer. They all worked at an IBM semiconductor plant in San Jose, California, making the silicon chips that run computers, cell phones, and other high-tech products. Now, along with 250 other semiconductor workers and their families, Mesa is trying to prove that the toxic mixture of chemicals used in high-tech factories has caused cancer in workers and birth defects in their children-and that their employers knew of the hazards but did not act to protect them.

"This is a forgotten group of workers," says Dr. Joseph LaDou, director of the International Center for Occupational Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, who has studied the industry ever since large-scale semiconductor manufacturing began in the 1970s. In the United States, nearly 300,000 people work in semiconductor plants; about one-quarter perform jobs that put them in routine contact with the toxic chemicals that are used to produce chips. Worldwide, the total number of semiconductor workers is estimated at more than 1 million, with US companies like Motorola and Intel dominating the market and investing billions each year to build new plants in places like Malaysia, the Philippines, and China.

As the industry continues to expand, LaDou predicts that health problems among workers, many of them women and minorities, will mushroom. "It's quickly going to become a much larger problem than anyone ever conceived," he warns. "We could be looking at an epidemic larger than what we went through with asbestos."

In the "clean rooms" where chips are made, workers don protective clothing, including head-to-toe "bunny suits." But the garments are not meant to safeguard humans; they are designed to keep impurities from contaminating the chips. Air is constantly recirculated, but the filters trap dust, not chemical fumes. Over the course of their shifts, workers breathe or come in contact with dozens of known or suspected carcinogens, including toluene, cadmium, arsenic, benzene, and trichloroethylene. They also can't escape the compounds created as the various chemicals combine-mixtures whose toxicity has never been tested, except on them.

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