Jacob San Miguel said he had frequent nosebleeds from working hour shifts in clouds of fiberglass dust. His coworker, Jimmie Arnold III, went to the emergency room several times after waking up at night struggling to breathe.
He said it was because air contaminants on the job activated his asthma. Employees interviewed by KQED said the company has failed to fix health hazards at the facility, ignoring worker complaints for years. Georgia-Pacific is owned by Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the U. The employees at the Antioch plant said they often had difficulty breathing, chronic coughs and severe lightheadedness, including from the smell of known carcinogens and other chemicals hanging thick in the air.
The workers, most of them in their 20s, said insufficient ventilation at the Minaker Road facility causes them to routinely inhale fiberglass dust, formaldehyde and other toxins released from materials used to make drywall, which is also known as gypsum.
They worry about long-term exposure to chemicals such as formaldehyde, which has been linked to throat cancers. You are constantly coughing. He and other workers said ventilation fans at the facility are often broken or nonexistent, while machines constantly kick up dust and worsen the indoor air quality. Both kinds of masks are also hard to wear while doing strenuous physical labor with goggles on, so some prefer not to wear the masks at all.
A spokesperson for Georgia-Pacific, which has more than 30, employees at facilities in the U. We strive for continuous improvement in our key safety processes. Over the last decade, Georgia-Pacific facilities across the U. At least three employees have died on the job after falling 85 feet, getting sucked into machinery and drowning in a pulper tub.
