Asbestos companies try to eliminate their liability.

Asbestos is still killing.

That's the stark message ATLA and its allies are employing to counter congressional legislation recently introduced to help America's surprisingly prosperous asbestos manufacturers. The legislation would protect the companies and their profits from the tens of thousands of their employees who are still getting sick and sicker from on-the-job exposure to asbestos.

The legislation is the brainchild of Samuel Heyman, the billionaire CEO of the huge GAF Corp. (which owns an asbestos subsidiary), who is also a prominent contributor to the Democratic Party.

Among Senate cosponsors of the bill are Sens. Christopher Dodd and Joseph Lieberman from Connecticut, Sen. Bob Torricelli from New Jersey, and Sen. Charles Schumer from New York--all Democrats who are often progressive and usually pro-worker.

Introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) and Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.), the bills (H.R. 1283 and S. 758) were put into motion just before the Easter break. The efforts to defeat them are expected to persist well into the summer months.

As Los Angeles trial attorney Robert Steinberg has written, "This is essentially an attempt by the former asbestos companies to limit and in many cases eliminate their liability for the payment of damages to both present and future victims of asbestos disease."

The primary objective of the bills is apparently to screen out most of the thousands of workers who, over the next three decades, are expected to be afflicted with probably terminal asbestos-related disease. These include asbestosis, lung cancer, and once-rare mesthelioma, an invariably fatal cancer of the lining of the chest cavity.

The Hyde/Ashcroft bills would establish a complex bureaucracy replete with mandatoryediators and stringent medical criteria to deny compensation to asbestos victims by keeping them out of court.

Under the proposed legislation, all punitive damages would be eliminated. Victims and their lawyers would have to go through numerous hoops to achieve a "certificate of medical eligibility" from an industry-funded Asbestos Resolution Corp. before they could file a claim in court.

Steinberg reports that "payment, if allowed at all, would be made pursuant to a matrix of lesser values than are currently being paid by way of settlement in equivalent cases in the tort system.

"If a case does not settle, a claimant can proceed but must do so only after being funneled through a mediation process before being able to go to court or elect binding arbitration," Steinberg continues. "The case can only proceed in federal district court since the jurisdiction of local courts is eliminated" by the bills.

The asbestos and insurance industries have argued the legislation is necessary to resolve asbestos cases gridlocking America's courtrooms--a false claim, since the courts long have been cleared of asbestos claim logjams through class-action suits, "fast-track" rules, and other judicial consolidation procedures.

In recent years, the vast majority of claims have been settled out of court, and only about 100 cases actually go to trial annually.

Despite conventional wisdom, America's asbestos epidemic--the worst occupational health plague in U.S. history that is only now beginning in the developing world--is barely more than half over. Although an estimated 259,000 workers already have died prematurely from asbestos-related disease, at least another 166,000 have similarly agonizing deaths ahead of them over the next 30 years.

Asbestos manufacturers began learning of the direct linkages between their workplace conditions and their employees' adverse health conditions in the 1920s but refused to alert the workers, the government, or the public until forced to do so in the 1970s. That half-century hush-up did not help them when victims' claims began reaching courtrooms in the years soon after.

Although more than a dozen asbestos companies once opted for Chapter 11 bankruptcy solutions, none has been forced out of business, and, as Steinberg observes, the companies are informing the financial markets that their businesses are strong and that they expect future earnings to allow them to "outgrow" their asbestos health problems.

Workers' spouses and children also have been afflicted with asbestos diseases as for years workers brought asbestos fibers into their homes. A jury in Texas recently awarded $2.1 million to a woman who contracted lung cancer from washing her husband's asbestos-laden clothing. The defendant in the January ruling was the Aluminum Co. of America (Alcoa). (Cavitt v. Aluminum Co. of America, No. 25743 (Tex., Milam County Dist. Ct. Jan. 11, 1999).)

Asbestos companies are now at the doors of Congress because all other efforts to limit their payouts and increase shareholder value by reducing their liability have failed.

As attorney Steinberg says, "One may fairly ask why the federal government should now intrude into this area and impose an industry-inspired solution to a problem that has been historically managed by private litigants in both federal and state courts with some modest success."

John Bell, a former speechwriter for the director of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is a communications consultant to ATLA.