Asbestos, cancers… They worked in the mines and are sick

Hundreds of large cardboard sleeves of all colors surround the offices: in the premises of the CFDT Miners in Freyming-Merlebach (Moselle), new medical files of former miners are processed every month in an attempt to have their state of health recognized as an occupational disease. This union notably succeeded in having the anxiety damage of more than 700 Lorraine coal miners exposed to toxic substances recognized in 2021, after eight years of collective proceedings.

On Wednesday, the Metz Court of Appeal must rule on anxiety damage for 120 former metallurgy employees at ArcelorMittal. They were dismissed at first instance due to the limitation period, which was 30 years until 2008, but is now only two years. However, most procedures within the framework of the recognition of occupational diseases are carried out individually, on a case-by-case basis.

In one of the rooms of the union hall of Freyming-Merlebach, a small town on the border with Germany where many miners have worked, a retired couple consults a lawyer, responsible for helping them with their occupational disease recognition file. .

Camille Faber, who spent 31 years in the mine, suffered a series of occupational illnesses. For him, the fight began in 2009, with the first, the pleural plaques, linked to asbestos, which required five years of procedure to be recognized as “inexcusable fault” of the employer, now represented by the ‘State. “This is the third linked to asbestos”… and therefore the third legal procedure in this case.

Each time, it is up to the former miner to prove that his illness is linked to his work. In particular, he must collect written testimonies from three former colleagues, to attest to what he did at the mine, and how his work exposed him to asbestos, leading to the pathologies from which he suffered years later.

“I have at least 50 centimeters of files at home,” he sighs. And more, according to his wife. “Sometimes you just want to give up,” says Camille Faber. Faced with this administrative heaviness, these endless battles, “it seems like we are being denigrated, that we are nothing anymore. We made coal, we helped France” however, regrets the retiree.

Dozens of files like his still arrive every month. Currently, 300 files are in progress at the “asbestos” office, run in particular by Calogero Liduino, also a former miner. “A file cannot be put together in five minutes,” he recalls. “People come three, four, five times” to provide as many supporting documents as possible.

An amicable procedure could be organized, but the minors’ employer “systematically refuses”, which forces the applicants to go to court, he explains. It is also the expertise of this Moselle union, involved for decades in the issue of occupational health, which has enabled the recognition of night work and exposure to ionizing radiation as occupational factors causing cancer of the breast.

Josiane Clavelin was employed by the CFDT when she was a pediatric nursing assistant at the Freyming-Merlebach hospital, attached to the mines social security. Between 1990 and 2000, she noticed “around ten cases of breast cancer” among her colleagues, in pediatrics or in intensive care, and contacted the union to determine if there could be a link with her work. “But the fruit was not ripe”, the scientific studies linking night work to the risk of developing this disease have not yet been published.

After initial studies in 2007, the scientific literature is growing. In March 2023, a Moselle nurse was the first to obtain recognition as an occupational disease for her breast cancer. The whistleblower and Brigitte Clément, with whom she runs the hotlines and receives women suffering from the pathology, have been training activists on these issues throughout France since this year, so that other branches of the union can take charge. the plaintiffs.

They are also actively campaigning for the inclusion of the pathology in the table of occupational diseases, as prostate cancer was in 2022.