Secondary & Household Asbestos Exposure Claims

Quick answer

Covers spouses, children, and other household members exposed to asbestos carried home on work clothes, tools, or in a car
The claim is built around the worker's job history even when the worker themselves never got sick
The working family member does not need to be living for the claim to proceed
Laundry is the classic exposure route — shaking out coveralls released fiber directly into a person's breathing space
No upfront cost, and we come to you. Call (610) 822-7673

Allentown’s household exposure stories often start on an assembly line rather than in a boiler room. Truck building involved brakes, clutches and the friction materials that went into them, and the dust from that work settled on the clothes of the men who did it. Those clothes came home to the West End, the East Side and the South Side, and were shaken out and washed with everything else.

Secondary exposure — take-home exposure — is what happened when asbestos left the plant on somebody's clothes. A worker at the Mack plants, the Western Electric works, or Lehigh Structural Steel finished a shift covered in dust, drove home through the West End, East Side, South Side and Center City, Whitehall, Fullerton, Catasauqua, Emmaus and Macungie, and the dust came with him: into the car, onto the porch, into the hamper. Whoever handled that laundry got a concentrated dose, often daily, for years. Frequently that was a wife. Sometimes it was a child who hugged a father in his work clothes.

These claims are legally the same in one respect and different in another. The same, in that the responsibility rests on the companies that made and sold asbestos products they knew to be dangerous. Different, in that the person who got sick has no employment record of their own. Nothing in a personnel file will show it. So the case has to be assembled around the worker's history — his employer, his job title, his years, the products he handled — and then connected to the household routine that carried fiber home.

That means the questions we ask are domestic rather than industrial, and people are sometimes surprised by them. Who did the laundry. Whether the work clothes were washed with everything else. Whether he shook them out on the back step first. Whether he changed at the plant or drove home in them. Whether the same car carried the family on weekends. These ordinary details are, quite literally, the evidence.

The working family member does not need to be alive, and often is not — sometimes he never developed an asbestos disease at all, which throws families off entirely. Neither fact ends the claim. What matters is that his job put asbestos in the house. Allentown is the Lehigh County seat, so the county courthouse is in town. Venue follows the defendants rather than the family’s address, though, and Philadelphia’s dedicated asbestos program is frequently available for a Lehigh Valley case.

Time limits apply and generally run from the diagnosis rather than from the exposure, which was often decades earlier. Every case is different, and past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Allentown also had more two-earner plant households than most towns in this network, because Western Electric deliberately recruited women when it chose the city in the 1940s. A household might have one adult at Mack and another at the Union Boulevard works, each bringing a different kind of dust home. A household claim is built on each worker’s history and on the domestic detail of who did the washing.

Call (610) 822-7673

Secondary & Household Exposure Claims — fees and costs in Allentown

Consultation and initial case review, at home or at the hospital	$0
Mesothelioma or asbestos claim, handled on contingency	No fee unless there is a recovery — the percentage is agreed in writing before representation begins
Requesting employment, union, and military records on your behalf	Included in the case review

No fee unless there is a recovery. Any fee is a percentage agreed in writing before representation begins.

Secondary & Household Exposure Claims — questions, answered

My husband worked on the brake line at Mack. Could I have been exposed doing laundry?

Possibly. Friction-material dust clings to work clothes, and whoever shook out and washed them could breathe it. A household claim is built on his job, his years and the laundry routine.

My mother worked at Western Electric and my father at Mack. Which one matters?

Possibly both. Each worker’s history is documented on its own, and a household can have more than one route by which dust came home.

We lived in the West End, nowhere near the plants. Does that rule it out?

No. Household exposure travels on clothes and in cars, not by distance from the plant. What came home and who handled it is what matters.

I never worked around asbestos. My husband did. Can I still have a claim?

Yes. Take-home or secondary exposure claims exist precisely for household members who breathed asbestos carried home on a worker's clothing, tools, or vehicle.

My father worked in the mills but never got sick. Does that matter?

No. The claim depends on his exposure to asbestos products at work and on the dust reaching the household, not on whether he developed a disease himself.