Asbestos lawsuit bill stalls over trust fund
WASHINGTON - Legislation to ban asbestos lawsuits by people sickened through asbestos exposure is stuck over how much money should be included in a compensation fund for victims, and Congress must decide what that figure should be, Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter said Tuesday.
A similar bill was killed last year by disagreements between business and labor over how much should go into a trust fund to compensate sickened employees who give up their right to sue.
During testimony at a hearing of Specter’s committee, representatives of corporations, insurers and labor still could not agree on the sum.
“I don’t think you’re going to get labor and business to agree on a dollar amount,” U.S. Appeals Court Judge Edward Becker, who has been working as a mediator on the legislation, told the committee.
Specter, who hopes to have something ready to send to the Senate soon, said senators likely will make the final decision on what that number should be. “I will be talking to my colleagues in the Senate to see if we can find some agreement and we will come up with a figure,” he said.
Senators say asbestos liability is driving companies out of business and leaving victims with little or no money for medical bills. And Specter and Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the panel’s ranking Democrat, favor ending asbestos liability and paying victims through a trust fund instead of having thousands of lawsuits with no end in sight.
Without support from both Democrats and Republicans, the bill will not make it through the Senate, Leahy said: “Without consensus on both sides of the aisle, there’s no way on God’s green earth it’s going to make it.”
While many business and labor groups agree that a trust fund should be created, one of the main sticking points is how much money should be put in that fund.
John Engler, president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, said the fund should have no more than $140 billion, a number former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., suggested during negotiations with Republicans last year.
“We believe that $140 billion is more than enough to pay all qualifying claims at fair values,” Engler said.
But Peg Seminario, the AFL-CIO’s director of occupational safety and health department, said that while suggested fund levels have increased since last year’s negotiations - when then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, recommended $108 billion - they were still too low. “We cannot and will not support legislation that does not provide fair compensation to victims and have sufficient funding and other provisions to ensure that it will indeed work,” she said.
Some businesses that would have to pay want the Senate to dump the whole idea of using a trust fund and come up with another solution. In a Jan. 3 letter, Federal-Mogul Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp., E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co., and other corporations opposed Specter’s proposed legislation.
On the Net Senate Judiciary Committee: http:// judiciary.senate.gov
National Association of Manufacturers: http:// www.nam.org
AFL-CIO: http:// www.afl-cio.org