Johnson and Johnson knew for decades that asbestos lurked in its Baby Powder

Particularly, this article received significant attention just in the last few days and should be removed as a duplicate.

The answer must involve making the risks outweigh the benefits, through both an increased probability of being caught and a higher level of punishment.

but if it has a carcinogen in it? do you really still want to? i fail to understand how humans can behave like this.

If the answers are yes, and not too many, most companies will go ahead.

I think it's very important to keep your frame. With passive investors who simply are not privy to any of the decisions and middle management who are often powerless, our question should be how we make executives responsible for the actions they oversee. Especially when those actions are discovered to be harmful years after they have left.

Perhaps one option is that all executive stock options and compensation over a particular amount should be held in trust, distributed only incrementally, so that their "privatization of profits" can be recovered in the case of material damages done by the company while it is under their direction & control.

The other thing we could do is give standing to middle management so they can sue executives from this trust if they can show executives were negligent. Incentivize middle management to have a financial stake in preventing unsafe behavior.

It happens all the time. You just hear about it one time out of every thousand. The history of industry is littered with these kinds of intentional, knowing abuses of consumers.

> Not saying I have an answer.

Tremendously high penalties that destroy all profitability gained from consumer abuse and prison time for those knowingly engaging in abusive behavior.

You then describe the behavior of a sociopath.

Also I have a very hard time following the 'poisoning infants is OK as long as I get a promotion' line of thought.

Well, I do have a simple one. You take each person that you can show that knew about the problem, propose a punishment proportional to the power they had, and send them into a judicial system where they can defend themselves before facing the punishment.

The fact that things do not seem to work this way is disconcerting.

You can split the tests into three main categories: cosmetic, financial and safety, with different allowed variances for each.

As a financial example, we had to pay excise duty on the alcohol, so the tests for ABV were stringent and cross-checked by reference laboratories. All internal tests were done with robust internal controls using gas chromatography and every few months, a random set of samples would be cross-checked with a reference laboratory by distillation. The internal results could be trusted because they were routinely validated, and the instrumentation calibration was checked for every single run.

When it came to safety, this was also taken seriously. Two incidents I recall were a hoax call from someone claiming they had contaminated the water supply with paraquat (weedkiller) and another where some stainless steel tanks had developed microfractures which caused coolant (high concentration KCl) to leach into the product. In both cases all the stops were pulled out to collect samples and get them checked by a reference laboratory. No one wants the bad publicity or being sued because the product was contaminated with something nasty.

Things were a bit laxer for cosmetic checks (colour, taste, CO2 concentration etc.). However, there was a clear specification for each test detailing min/optimal/max for each metric, and it required management sign off to allow non-conforming batches to be passed through. They were usually blended with higher quality batches to bring it in line with the specification.

So overall, the point I want to make is that where there were legal or safety requirements, having regulations and financial penalties in place did cause the company to care very, very deeply about accurate testing, including having internal tests cross-checked by an independent external laboratory. And for every product defect, there was a chain of accountability via management sign-off, with the understanding that the QC department was independent and impartial. We used to rigourously check every single batch at every stage of production, including multiple replicates for critical tests, and also including the packaged end product. Reading the story about talc, this didn't happen on any appreciable scale. The question I have for talc is this: why didn't they do this level of testing, taking samples from each lorry load out of the mine, after processing and refinement, and after packaging? The testing might not have been as accurate as they might have liked, but they didn't even seem to try to get an impartial picture of the level of asbestos contamination, perhaps because they didn't really want to know, and instead stuck their heads in the sand and pretended the problem didn't really exist. That's what seems wilfully negligent here.

We also had an entire department which stored a few tens of bottles/cans/kegs of each batch, and we would test one of each every few months to check changes throughout and beyond the nominal shelf-life. The story mentions testing a single package of talc from the company museum. The question here is, why didn't they have a library of stored packages from every batch ever made? This would have permitted re-analysis over time. It might have even reduced their liability since they could prove which batches were contaminated and which were not.

"knew for decades"

This apparently happened over and over again, regarding a single product.

"Everything has pesticides in it. If we start caring about these things, we may as well stop living."

Well, I did what I could. The consequences are yours to bear.

[1]: https://www.levylaw.com/talc-asbestos-mesothelioma/

On the weekends, they wear a regular swimsuit...

"Asbestos" is a scary word to some, just like "radiation" is to others. but unless the discussion includes concentration levels we're not discussing risk, we're discussing fear.

[1] http://www.clarkcountynv.gov/airquality/announcements/Pages/...

That could be a hypothesis at least. But I agree on the proportion point. I would want to know how much asbestos there is in Kellog's Cornflakes or whatever.

I guess people just forget about all ethics when huge debt / investment / incentive is involved. Leverage over media and governments along with an army of lawyers and bean counters just makes this whole thing possible.

Meanwhile globalisation has arguably made it more difficult for SMEs to market / sell products in industries within which big corps have huge interests.

But if it's getting upvotes, I guess it's because other people missed it as well.