Low Pay And Occupational Hazards Trouble Some Industrial Chemists

To chemists arriving in San Francisco for next week's American Chemical Society meeting, Arnold Thackray, director of Philadelphia's Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, suggests something to keep in mind. If you check into a hotel room today, he says, and you're wearing a polyester suit, "odds are everything in the room is composed of chemically processed polymers except for your body--and we're on the verge of decoding [even] that." During a time of remarkable advances, one might conclude that now is a great time to be a chemist. Yet today's bleak economic conditions and a growing awareness of occupational hazards lead others to conclude the opposite. Layoffs by companies throughout the chemical industry, low salaries, hazardous working conditions, and few changes on the horizon make optimism difficult. Says chemical consultant Mordecai Treblow, who has worked with employment issues as a member of the American Chemical Society (ACS), "The employment trend for industrial chemists is downward--there aren't any bright spots, with the possible exception of pharmaceuticals." On the other hand, small firms are growing, technology is rapidly advancing, and the science is on its way toward solving molecular riddles scarcely imaginable decades ago. In all, says Joan Burrelli, a senior research analyst at ACS, "It's all comparative. It's a worse time to be a chemist than it was a couple years ago, but [chemists] are better off than, say, auto workers." So although the expected 12,000 chemists converging on San Francisco for the April 5-10 ACS meeting will attend symposia on fuels, AIDS prevention, and materials recycling, much of the talk in the aisles will probably focus on other topics--like layoffs, by which industrial chemists have been hit the hardest. Cutbacks by large firms such as the Upjohn Corp. at its North Haven, Conn., plant and the Westinghouse Science and Technology Center in Pittsburgh have left many chemists unemployed. As of March 1991, the latest year for which figures are available, 1.6 percent of United States chemists were unemployed. This might seem low--and it is by comparison to overall United States unemployment rates of more than 5 percent during that same period--but it comes after four previous years when the unemployment rate never broke 1.1 percent; and Burrelli believes it may be "1.8 percent or higher" now. Layoffs, however, are not the only problems in the field. Chemist Nicholas Castellucci is happy with the safety of his environment at Northrop Corp. in Hawthorne, Calif., where he is a senior technical specialist, but he's quick to point out that this is rare among industrial chemists. For most, he says, their days include exposure to hazardous chemicals and lax safety procedures. "Most chemists don't have the opportunity to put on a spacesuit every morning, but that's what they need," he says, noting that he feels the problems chemists face are a result of too-lenient Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration guidelines and industry noncompliance. He recalls a job he once had in which he spent time next to "a vat of a boiling bath of chromic and sulfuric acids," inhaling highly toxic fumes. When he went to management to suggest a change, "they slapped my hand" and told him to keep quiet, he recalls. Worse, he says, less-skilled technicians don't even know such fumes are toxic. "They don't have the fear," he says. Chemical safety and health consultant Jay Young isn't sure he agrees. Young helped write the OSHA Laboratory Standard, and he says, "My general impression has been that the lab standard is being honored." Still, he acknowledges, "I have in no sense undertaken even a casual poll, and I could be wrong." Even those who manage to overcome problems of safety and layoffs, says Castellucci, must contend with low salaries. Though ACS statistics indicate that a Ph.D. chemist can now expect to start at $46,000, Castellucci points to ad after ad in current publications for such positions starting at $10,000-$15,000 lower. Nonetheless, chemistry is not all low pay and bad conditions. Mike Petterelli, manager of analytical services for OBG Laboratories Inc. in Syracuse, which performs soil and other environmental analyses, sees the other side. "Because our procedures are dictated by EPA," Petterelli says, "they require the use of cutting-edge instrumentation," which he finds "inspiring." As for pay, Petterelli acknowledges that "our entry-level people [with bachelor's degrees] are probably starting off in the high teens to low twenties," but notes that environmental labs traditionally start low and offer 8 percent to 9 percent annual increases, rapidly catching up with industry averages. In addition, he says, the new chemists "are using instruments that probably have robotics, are run by PCs.... Very few of our chemists are actually doing [frequently unsafe] wet chemistry processes." Moreover, says the Beckman Center's Thackray, such advances enable chemists to more effectively do the investigating that makes chemistry an exciting field in the first place. Despite chemistry's problems, Thackray believes that this is a good time to be a chemist, especially with the current emphasis in science turning to matters molecular--the chemist's home court. "We might say the molecule has come into its own," says Thackray, who has watched chemistry progress for more than 30 years as a student, a professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, and lifelong observer of the relationship between science and society. "The action is on the molecular level now. And the chemist is the molecular scientist par excellence."

Low Pay And Occupational Hazards Trouble Some Industrial Chemists

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