Brake and Clutch Work

If you or a loved one spent years doing brake, clutch, or gasket work and has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, you may have a valid claim — and you may not be aware of the full range of compensation available to your family. We can tell you what a work history like that supports before you decide anything.

A brake converts motion into heat. The friction material has to survive being pressed against steel at temperatures that would destroy most substances, do it thousands of times, and wear predictably instead of failing suddenly. Asbestos handled that combination better than anything else available and cheaply enough to put on every vehicle sold.

Furthermore, the same reasoning applied to clutches, where a facing is deliberately slipped against a flywheel, and to the gaskets sealing hot joints throughout the engine and exhaust.

Keep in mind that the problem is inherent to the application. A friction product is designed to wear away. Every stop grinds a small quantity of lining into dust, and that dust collects inside the drum or the bell housing until someone opens it. What accumulates there is a mixture of asbestos fiber and the products of its thermal degradation, in a fine powder, in an enclosed space, until a mechanic takes the assembly apart.

This is why brake work is its own exposure category. Asbestos in a building sat still unless disturbed, while asbestos in a brake was being pulverized continuously as a condition of the product working.

Fiber came out of friction products at identifiable moments in the work. Each of the following was routine, and most were done without ventilation or respiratory protection.

Removing drums and wheels. Pulling a brake drum releases the accumulated dust straight away, at chest height and directly in front of whoever is doing it.

Cleaning the assembly. Before new linings went on, the backing plate, springs, and hardware had to be cleaned of accumulated dust. Compressed air, dry brushing, and rags were the usual methods, and all three put the dust into the air.

Grinding, beveling, and arcing linings. Shoes were frequently ground or arced to match a drum's diameter, and pads chamfered to prevent noise. Machining a friction product generates fine dust in quantity, and it does so at the machine in the middle of the shop.

Drilling and riveting. Riveted linings were drilled and riveted to shoes, generating dust at each hole.

Clutch work. Removing a clutch means opening a bell housing that has been collecting facing dust since the clutch was installed. Replacing a disc and resurfacing or replacing a pressure plate repeats the pattern.

Gasket work. Scraping old asbestos gasket material off head, manifold, and exhaust flanges by hand, dry, with a scraper, at the breathing zone — that was ordinary engine work.

Sweeping the shop. Dust from every one of the above settled on the floor and was swept up dry at the end of the day, re-suspending it. Shop cleanup is a real exposure category, and the person doing it was often the youngest employee.

Taken together, for a working mechanic these were the daily content of the job, repeated across a career.

One practice deserves separate treatment because it was both the most effective way to release fiber and, for decades, the normal way to do the job.

Blowing out a brake assembly with a compressed-air hose was fast, thorough, and standard. It also took the entire accumulated contents of the drum, a fine dust of asbestos fiber ground down over tens of thousands of miles, and atomized it into a cloud in an enclosed bay, at the mechanic's face, in a shop with other people in it.

The EPA has published guidance on preventing asbestos exposure among brake and clutch repair workers, recommending wet methods and enclosed cleaning systems in place of dry removal, available through its asbestos program. Note that the existence of that guidance reflects the underlying reality: the practice it replaced was dry, uncontrolled, and universal.

For comparison, the federal occupational limit is 0.1 fiber per cubic centimeter as an eight-hour average, with an excursion limit of 1.0 fiber per cubic centimeter over 30 minutes. A cloud of brake dust released deliberately into a closed bay is not a borderline case against that standard.

Keep in mind that anyone reconstructing a mechanic's history should establish specifically whether compressed air was used, because it substantially changes the exposure picture and it's the kind of detail a former co-worker will remember clearly.

A common assumption is that asbestos exposure ended in the 1970s or 1980s. For friction products that assumption is wrong, and it matters because it causes people to rule themselves out incorrectly.

However, asbestos was removed from most construction materials and insulation applications comparatively early. Friction products followed a different and much longer curve. Asbestos-containing brake and clutch components remained in production, in distribution, and above all in service on vehicles already on the road long after insulation had moved on. A vehicle built with asbestos linings kept those linings until they were replaced, and replacement parts continued to be available.

As a result, a mechanic whose career ran through the 1980s and 1990s may still have had substantial friction-product exposure — particularly on older vehicles, heavy trucks, buses, agricultural and construction equipment, and imported parts. Keep in mind that if you've assumed your own career started too late to matter, that assumption is worth testing before you act on it.

A service bay is an enclosed space, and the dust released into it reached more people than the mechanic holding the tool.

Other shop staff. Service writers, parts counter staff, apprentices, and anyone else in the building breathed the same air. Bystander exposure is a recognized pathway, and a service bay is an enclosed space.

Fleet and heavy-equipment mechanics. Truck, bus, transit, rail, mining, and agricultural equipment used larger friction components with correspondingly more material, and fleet shops did brake work at volume.

Home and hobby mechanics. People who did their own brake and clutch work in a garage had no ventilation at all, frequently used compressed air, and often had family nearby. This group routinely does not think of itself as occupationally exposed and often does not connect a diagnosis to the work.

Family members. Fiber went home on coveralls and in the car. Household exposure from a mechanic's clothing follows the same pattern as any other trade — see take-home and secondary exposure.

Even decades later, latency makes all of this harder to see in hindsight. The CDC describes the interval between first exposure and clinical disease as usually 20 to 40 years, which places the relevant work decades before the diagnosis that prompts the question.

Automotive work is often less well documented than unionized industrial employment, particularly for people who moved between independent shops or worked for small employers. That said, it's still reconstructable.

• Social Security earnings records. An itemized statement lists every employer by year and is usually the backbone of an automotive history. Request it early.
• Employment records from dealerships, fleet operators, and larger chains, where they survive.
• Union records for mechanics who were organized, and for transit, municipal, and fleet shops.
• Military service records for anyone who did vehicle maintenance in service.
• Co-worker testimony. For friction products this is often decisive, because the key facts appear in no document: which brands of lining the shop stocked, whether compressed air was used, how the floor was swept. Names of anyone still living are worth recording now.
• Product identification. Which manufacturers' brake and clutch products a shop used. Parts invoices, supplier relationships, and brand recollection all contribute.

In fact, that final category is what makes a claim, because the defendants are the friction-product manufacturers. Many later reorganized in bankruptcy and now resolve claims through trusts; the GAO counted 60 such trusts holding roughly $37 billion at its 2011 review. How trust and civil claims interact is covered in trust claims and tort suits.

If you turned wrenches for a living and now have an asbestos diagnosis, nothing has to be decided today. What helps is a list: every shop you worked in, roughly when, what you worked on, and any lining or clutch brand you can still picture on a box.

We'll take it from there. There's no cost to find out whether a history like yours supports a claim, and no fee unless we win. If you'd rather start by pulling your Social Security earnings statement and writing down the names of co-workers who are still around, that's a good use of the time too.

It costs nothing to find out where your family stands.