Asbestos Exposure & Work History Investigation

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• Work History & Exposure Investigation

The Lehigh Valley is unusual in that a single work history often crosses industries — a few years at a cement plant, a stretch at Bethlehem Steel, then railroad shop work — sometimes on the same union card. Reconstructing that sequence properly matters, because each employer points at a different group of product manufacturers, and a history that looks like "he worked around here his whole life" can resolve into three distinct sets of defendants.

Every asbestos claim rests on a chain: this person worked here, during these years, around these products, made by these companies. The investigation is the work of building that chain out of what is left decades later. It is unglamorous and it is most of the case.

The employment half is usually tractable. Social Security earnings records establish employer and dates going back to the start of a working life. Union records — dispatch books, dues ledgers, apprenticeship files — often carry job-site detail that payroll never did, which matters for kiln workers, millwrights, pipefitters, boiler tenders, electricians, and railroad shop crews who moved between sites on the same card. Pension and benefit files sometimes hold job classifications. For veterans, service records supply the equivalent. Around Northampton the recurring names are the Atlas, Keystone, and Hercules cement works, Bethlehem Steel, and the Lehigh Valley Railroad, and the work of the investigation is tying a person to a specific one during a specific span.

Product identification is the harder half, and it is where cases are won or lost. Asbestos itself is not a defendant; companies are. So the question becomes which manufacturer's block insulation was on those lines, whose gaskets were pulled and replaced at that pump, whose packing, whose cement, whose brake linings. Sometimes an invoice or purchase order survives. More often the answer comes from people — a co-worker who remembers the brand on the bag, a foreman who remembers what the shop stocked, a supplier's records showing what it sold into that plant from the 1940s into the 1980s.

This is why co-workers matter so much, and why it is worth telling us the names of the people someone worked beside even if you have lost touch. In a household exposure case, the same logic applies one step removed: the working family member's job history is the spine of the claim, and the household routine — who did the laundry, whether uniforms were shaken out, whose car carried him to and from the plant through Northampton borough, Bath, Cementon, Coplay, Catasauqua, and Whitehall — is what connects it to the person who got sick.

None of this is billed to you. Record requests, searches, and the investigators' time are carried as part of a contingency case. Every case is different, and past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Cement and steel both kept substantial personnel records, and Lehigh Valley union locals have long institutional memory. Between Social Security earnings records, union books, and co-workers still living in Bath, Cementon, and Coplay, these histories are more recoverable than most.

Work History & Exposure Investigation — fees and costs in Northampton

No fee unless there is a recovery. Any fee is a percentage agreed in writing before representation begins.

Work History & Exposure Investigation — questions, answered