Title: APHA Drafting Letter of Support for Fernanda Giannasi
Author:
Section/SPIG: Occupational Health and Safety
Issue Date:
Fernanda Giannasi has been a labor inspector in Brazil for over two decades. During this time her work has brought her into contact with workers who mine and manufacture asbestos-containing products, still in widespread use in Brazil. She is a founder of ABREA, the Association of Asbestos-Exposed Workers in Brazil, and the Coordinator in Latin America of the Citizen’s Virtual Network Against Asbestos.
In 1999 she received the annual international award for her occupational health and safety work from the APHA Occupational Health and Safety Section. In 2001 she was made a Fellow of Collegium Ramazzini, a respected international organization of scholars and researchers in the field of occupational health and safety.
She is widely known in Brazil through her work in ABREA and through her public speeches and many TV and newspaper interviews. In 2001 she was a finalist for the prestigious Claudia award for Brazil’s Woman of the Year.
In 1998 she was sued by Eternit S.A., a major Brazilian asbestos company, for comments she made about the company’s treatment of ailing workers. After world-wide protests, including a letter of support from APHA, the case was dismissed and the company decided not to appeal the court’s decision. Now she is being sued for a second time: This time by former Labor Minister Almir Pazzianotto Pinto for insulting his honor, a crime under Brazilian law. Pinto supported a company union founded by Saint Gobain, a French-based multinational with major asbestos holdings in Brazil, and was publicly criticized by Giannasi after the breakdown of negotiations. She accused him of falsely listing the names of current and past asbestos workers as supporters of his union, and of other “maneuvers.”
Since the suit was initiated, her activities as a labor inspector have successively been restricted. In December 2003 she was forbidden by the Labor Ministry to inspect an asbestos cement factory in northern Brazil. Later she was told that for her own protection, she could no longer travel outside Sao Paulo to carry out inspections. In February 2004 she was officially informed by the Ministry that she could no longer participate in any labor inspections and has been restricted to her office in Sao Paulo.
Her criminal trial for offending the honor of the former Labor Minister was to have begun on Feb. 17, 2004. However, when she arrived in court, she was told that the original magistrate assigned to the case had been arrested on corruption charges (for alleged ties to organized crime in Brazil). The new presiding judge has now postponed further hearings until September 2004.
The stakes for Giannasi are high. She remains confined to her office, unable to carry out her ordinary work duties, and has recently received death threats from unknown parties. These threats take on new meaning in light of the unsolved slaying of three other labor inspectors on a public road on Jan. 28, 2004, as they were going to investigate a soybean plantation allegedly using slave labor. (In the interior of Brazil, these inspectors are routinely accompanied by armed federal guards, but in a cost-cutting measure such protections have been withdrawn recently.) Also, Giannasi has had to bear the legal costs of both trials herself; she has had no financial support from the Ministry in which she works.
Members of the OHS Section of APHA, who know and remember Giannasi from her visit to the United States in 1999 to receive our section award, have as individuals been sending letters and e-mail to Brazil in her support. She has also received letters of support from Collegium Ramazzini, many major British labor leaders, and seven members of the British Parliament, who have introduced a so-called early morning motion to bring attention to her case. There has been relatively little public discussion of her case in the United States, and the leaders and members of our Section believe a letter of support from APHA will be timely and most helpful.
NOTE 4/26/04: APHA is currently drafting a letter of support for Fernanda.
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Note to OHS Section members:
For further information on Giannasi’s case, you can go to the Web site of the London-based International Ban Asbestos Secretariat <www.ibas.btinternet.co.uk>. Also for an international perspective on production and use of asbestos worldwide and its impact, see Joseph LaDou’s current article in Environmental Health Perspectives, March 2004, pp.285-90.