Some safety experts want California to stop the cutting of quartz countertops saying it can't be done safely. Lawmakers, meanwhile, contemplate a ban on workers' lawsuits against quartz manufacturers.
An epidemic of a deadly lung disease among hundreds of workers who cut kitchen and bathroom countertops has regulators on opposite sides of the country considering two drastically different responses this week.
In a California hearing on Thursday, workplace safety regulators will be discussing a proposed ban on cutting so-called quartz or engineered stone, a popular choice for countertops. That's because this material creates an unusual amount of lung-damaging silica dust when it gets cut or polished, far more than natural granite or marble.
Meanwhile in Washington, Republicans on a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee convened a hearing to discuss a bill that would instead ban workers' ability to bring lawsuits against the companies that manufacture and sell the raw slabs of this engineered material. "They've got it backwards.
It's not the lawsuits that should be banned, it's the stone slabs that should be banned, because they are deadly and they cannot be fabricated safely," says Raphael Metzger , an attorney in California who represents numerous countertop workers and says hundreds of lawsuits are ongoing.
But Minnesota-based Cambria, the main manufacturer of the engineered quartz slabs in the United States, says that in addition to producing the raw slabs that it sells to distributors and countertop fabricators, it also runs a few of its own fabrication shops that cut slabs to order while controlling the dust with ventilation and wet cutting techniques.
"This demonstrates that quartz can be fabricated safely," said Rebecca Shult, the chief legal officer of Cambria in a Wednesday hearing on Capitol Hill. "Our workers are protected." She pointed the finger at countertop businesses that cut raw slabs on the cheap without the necessary protections.
"It's outrageous that these American sweatshops are not being shut down," she said. While Cambria is facing around 400 lawsuits from workers with lung disease who were employed in other companies, she said, "Cambria has no control over these third party businesses and their dangerous conditions.
We don't own them and we don't operate them…The wrong parties are being sued." "In my years in occupational health, I have never seen an industry say, "We sell a dangerous product but we have no responsibility for it once it leaves our factory, and rather than protect workers downstream, we are the ones who need protection from lawsuits," says David Michaels , an epidemiologist with George Washington University and a former director of OSHA, the federal workplace safety agency.
The countertop industry is in a crisis that's been growing quickly in recent years. Nearly 500 workers who manufacture kitchen countertops by cutting slabs of natural and artificial stone have fallen ill since 2019 with a serious and irreversible lung disease in California alone. There, more than 50 have needed lung transplants, and 27 workers have died.
Most are Hispanic men in their 40's or 30's, or even younger. "We fear the numbers will only continue to climb," said Alice Berliner, director of the Office of Worker Health & Safety for Los Angeles County Department of Public Health in a December public meeting . "Each number is a partner, a friend, a parent, a child, or a sibling.
These are human lives, not just numbers." Additional workers have gotten sick in other states, including Texas, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Washington. Massachusetts just found their first case, in a Hispanic man in his 40s who, for the past 14 years, had worked for stone countertop fabrication and installation companies.
One sickened worker, Leobardo Segura Meza, told a workplace safety board in California in 2023 that he worried there were "not enough lungs" for all the transplants that would be needed in this industry, which employs about 100,000 people nationwide.
Despite the recent passage of stricter workplace standards in California, Berliner said her team's visits to small and medium-sized countertop fabrication shops show that compliance with the rules remains low.
She said that over the last six months, while visiting more than a hundred fabrication shops, the safety officials did not observe any workers wearing the appropriate level of respiratory protection during high-risk cutting and polishing tasks.
And even though cutting the slabs without using a stream of water to damp down the dust can be extremely dangerous, she said that her office estimates that "at least 25% of shops continue to dry-cut stone." The steady rise in serious cases of lung disease has prompted the Western Occupational & Environmental Medical Association (WOEMA), a group of workplace health experts in 7 Western states, to petition California's Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board to simply ban the cutting of engineered stone with high amounts of silica.
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Source article: Kitchen countertop workers are dying. Some lawmakers want to ban their lawsuits | Source publish time: Jan 14, 2026 | Source language: en
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