MISCARRIAGE IN SAN FRANCISCO

On 17 December 1990, the thin edge of a wedge was born: San Francisco passed a law regulating the use of VDT terminals, the first such law that is unlikely to be struck down by the courts (as a predecessor in Suffolk County, N.Y., was in 1989).

The reason why it is likely to remain on the books is that it does not claim or imply any health hazards from radiation, but deals only with eye strain, posture (back and neck) fatigue, and wrist stress, requiring adjustable chairs, detachable keyboards, tiltable and height-adjustable screens, and a 15-minute rest for operators after every two hours at the terminal. It will affect some 56,000 workers, and the cost to private business is estimated at more than $100 million. Many businesses are expected to leave the city.

That part of it is of interest only from the point of view of the "green" price rise discussed in the editorial, but it is probably not what is most important about it; the important part is the one that has been omitted at first, the imagined danger of radiation.

Also, I am not a physician and can have no weighty opinions on eye strain or posture fatigue. Clearly they are distinct dangers if treated without common sense, but evidently the matter is not very serious beyond that, for the ordinance applies only to businesses with more than 15 employees. If the hazard were so serious, they would not be exempt. Can you imagine a law prohibiting rape of VDT operators in businesses with more than 15 employees?

But the real importance of the ordinance is the alleged electromagnetic radiation and the alleged cancer from it. Not that the activists did not try to get it in. They had asked for a minimum of 5 ft protection distance between the screen or the side of a VDT, which would have meant much larger screens, but business, surprisingly, fought back and got the provision removed. "They do not want to give an inch on the radiation issue," thundered one L. Slesin, editor of a VDT newsletter, apparently in the same class as the Agent Orange racket, by which I mean that when liability artists try to reach into your pocket, they no longer need scientific (or for that matter, any) corroboration; a good press and an ignorant judge will do as well or better.

The distance of 5 ft, incidentally, is characteristic of the supersti-tion mongers and de-industrializers. If they were genuinely afraid of radiation, they would ask for a standard in, say, watts per square centimeter. It is not just that the measured radiation would be zero, but that if you move 5 ft away, you have to make the screen correspondingly larger to maintain the same angle of view, i.e., the same readability. But for that you have to increase the electron accelerations, magnetic fields, etc. accordingly, so that the alleged hazard would not really diminish. It's like protecting a bridge from overloads by posting "No tooth fairies over 20 years of age."