Sterigenics: Preventing Future Notification Problems

As I’ve written before, I worked at Hinsdale South High School for 25 years, from 1987-2012, which is where I met my wife (who worked there from 1982-2001) and which is where we both were negatively impacted by the ethylene oxide released by the Sterigenics medical instrument sterilization plants in Willowbrook, less than a mile from Hinsdale South which operated from 1984-2019. In addition, I’ve argued previously about how employers in the affected area near to the Sterigenics plants have a moral responsibility to notify past employees who might have been affected by the carcinogenic gas to which Sterigenics subjected them for decades. Progress has been slow on that front unfortunately, as I still haven’t been able to get my old employer, Hinsdale Township High School District 86 to notify all of its past employees, despite lobbying them since this past October.

Efforts to get the school board to do the right thing by past employees will continue, but there is an even larger issue which this situation perfectly illustrates: Humans move with alacrity when their cleverness leads them to something which they believe will make things better; unfortunately, they are much slower to acknowledge how that cleverness leads to negative consequences which can take longer to manifest themselves or do so in subtle ways. Our immense hubris blinds us from even considering that our latest wonder could have the slightest thing wrong with it. I would point to just about every significant “advancement” we’ve taken as evidence of this. By the time we recognize that nothing is perfect, that every heralded advantage we create and market will inevitably be offset by a disadvantage, that advantage has become integral to our lives; we can’t imagine a world without it. But how those two opposing consequences balance out over long periods of time is an equation that will forever be debated, at least until our irrational faith in human intelligence causes us to destroy the very planet on which we depend. The Sterigenics pollution crisis is just another brick in the wall of progress vs. problem we have built: Healers throughout the world benefit from the sterility EtO is able to guarantee for medical instruments, while residents near the plants where the instruments are produced get cancer. As one of those who got cancer, I can’t pretend to be objective about how this equation will ultimately balance out. But I can insist that we learn something from it. And that’s surprisingly easy for us to make happen, in this instance at least.

To wit: Every employer needs to set up a system for workers which would enable that employer to notify employees after they no longer work there should anything negative (like the long-term cancer-causing pollution to which District 86 employees were exposed) come to light many years after the negative thing’s first occurrence. In other words, regardless of where I go or how long it has been since working somewhere, my ex-employer should be able to notify me quickly and efficiently should some hazard nobody was aware of at the time come to light. And this would actually be simple to set up.

Whenever someone leaves a job, the employer should keep contact information on file and maintain it in perpetuity—it certainly wouldn’t take up much room as a spreadsheet on a human resource person’s computer. Then, should new information which could impact past employees come to light, the old employer could just access its file on past employees and notify them without any fuss.

Obviously, past employees regularly move and change positions, so it would be their responsibility to let their old employers know how to reach them, to update their contact information as needed. An employer’s responsibility would be to send out notifications to the current addresses it had as well as maintaining a file for those addresses. Employees, then, would need to update their old employers any time they moved. In the digital age, contact information could be something as simple as an email address, especially since many of us don’t update or change this very often; I’ve had the same Hotmail account for the past thirty years, so under my system, regardless of how many times my geographic position had shifted, District 86 could still contact me as well as my many retired colleagues with a single group email.

Obviously, this does little to solve the Sterigenics situation since most employers have nothing like this in place. But given all the issues which can arise long after someone has left a workplace, there’s no reason why every employer in the country shouldn’t be required to maintain a contact list for past employees, with past employees accepting the responsibility for keeping their past employers up-to-date on how to reach them. Let’s not wait for the next Sterigenics/ethylene oxide crisis to make this happen.