March 2026 · 6 min read

Your Boss Didn't Give You a Mask. Now You Have Silicosis. You Can Sue.

You came to work every day. You cut countertops, you ground edges, you polished surfaces. Nobody gave you a respirator. Nobody told you the dust was dangerous. Nobody showed you a safety data sheet. Maybe nobody spoke your language well enough to explain it even if they'd wanted to.

Now you can't breathe. You have silicosis. And you're wondering: whose fault is this? Who is responsible?

The answer is: probably more than one party. And you have legal options against all of them.

Your Employer's Responsibility

Under OSHA's 2016 Silica Standard, your employer had legal obligations when you were working with engineered stone:

• Exposure assessment: Employers must assess worker exposure to respirable crystalline silica
• Engineering controls: Wet methods (water suppression) or vacuum dust collection when cutting silica-containing materials
• Respiratory protection: Appropriate respirators (at minimum N95, often P100 or supplied-air) when engineering controls are insufficient
• Training: Workers must be trained on silica hazards in a language they understand
• Medical surveillance: Workers with significant exposure must be offered medical monitoring

If your employer didn't do these things — if you cut dry, without a respirator, without training, without monitoring — your employer violated OSHA. This matters for several reasons.

First, you may have a workers' compensation claim. Even if your employer violated safety rules, workers' comp generally covers work-related injuries. File for workers' comp if you haven't already.

Second, in some states, an employer's intentional failure to protect workers can give rise to claims beyond workers' comp. An attorney can advise whether this applies in your state.

The Manufacturers' Responsibility

Here's what most workers don't realize: your employer's failures don't eliminate the manufacturers' responsibility. The stone manufacturers had independent obligations to warn about silicosis risk — to the workers who would ultimately be cutting their product.

Product liability law imposes a duty on manufacturers to warn of known hazards associated with their products. Engineered stone manufacturers knew:

• Their product contained 90-95% crystalline silica — a substance with a well-documented ability to cause silicosis
• Workers cut, ground, and polished their product in small shops often without adequate controls
• An epidemic of silicosis among engineered stone fabricators had been documented in Australia and Israel
• California was documenting its own epidemic by 2019

Despite this knowledge, manufacturers provided inadequate warnings — if any — on their products about the silicosis risk to fabricators. They marketed their products as premium, desirable kitchen surfaces without adequate attention to the workers whose labor transformed slabs into countertops.

Workers' Comp Is Not Your Only Option — It's Your Minimum

One of the most important things to understand: workers' compensation is the floor, not the ceiling, of your legal options.

Workers' comp is a no-fault system that provides medical benefits and partial wage replacement. It doesn't care whose fault it was. But it also has significant limitations:

• Workers' comp does NOT include pain and suffering damages
• Workers' comp wage replacement is typically capped at a percentage of your wages
• Workers' comp does NOT compensate you for future reduced earning capacity
• Workers' comp resolves your claim against your employer's insurance only

A product liability lawsuit against stone manufacturers can seek:

• Full medical expenses — past and projected future treatment, including lung transplant costs if applicable
• Lost wages — full amount, not a capped percentage
• Reduced earning capacity — the lifetime impact of not being able to do physical work
• Pain and suffering — compensation for the lived experience of this disease
• Loss of enjoyment of life

What If I'm Undocumented?

Your immigration status does NOT affect your right to file a lawsuit. Full stop.

Product liability law protects everyone on US soil who is injured by a defective or inadequately warned product. The stone manufacturers had no right to sell a dangerous product to workers regardless of those workers' immigration status. You were injured. You have rights.

Experienced mass tort attorneys who handle these cases regularly represent workers regardless of immigration status. Your information is protected by attorney-client privilege. Filing a civil lawsuit does not trigger immigration enforcement.

Time Is Running Out

Every state has a statute of limitations — a deadline after which you cannot file a lawsuit. Most states allow 2-3 years from the date you knew or should have known about the connection between your work and your lung disease. Some states have shorter deadlines (1 year in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana).

The discovery rule helps — it may mean your clock starts from your diagnosis or from when you first connected your symptoms to engineered stone exposure. But the clock is running.

If you have been diagnosed with silicosis or have breathing problems after stone fabrication work, the most important thing you can do right now is speak with an attorney. A free case evaluation costs nothing and takes 2 minutes.