by Philip Dray
Thus, somewhat nervously supported by business forces such as the Chamber of Commerce, which understood some kind of legislation was inevitable and preferred it come from a Republican administration, and backed solidly by OCAW, the UAW, the Steelworkers, and the AFL-CIO, the Occupational Safety and Health Act was signed into law by President Nixon in late December 1970. Hailed as a “safety bill of rights,” it extended federal protections for the first time to 56 million U.S. private sector workers. The new law gave the federal government the right to establish standards through a comment and review process, inspect workplaces, issue violations, and obtain court injunctions to close plants; it was also allowed to respond to workers’ demand for an OSHA inspection without prior notice to management, with employees gaining the right to accompany an OSHA inspector on company premises to ensure he or she observed all suspected violations.
The first several years of OSHA governance were far from encouraging. Underfinanced and overwhelmed by the tasks it faced, by mid-1971 only ninety-three hundred out of 4 million workplaces had been inspected; of these, only 20 percent were found to be violation-free, suggesting that many violations awaited discovery and enforcement. Soon after, during a nine-month period in 1971–1972, OSHA was able to inspect 20,688 plants, 77 percent of which were found not to be in compliance.101 Some representatives of organized labor fretted about the snail-like pace of reform, but as Ralph Nader pointed out in summer 1972, even they were having difficulty adjusting to the heightened focus on factory health and safety oversight. “Not one union has a physician, or engineer, or scientist, or lawyer working full time in Washington on the problem,” Nader complained.102 Things moved slowly on the standard-setting end as well. Of the fifteen thousand hazardous chemicals known to be used in U.S. industry, by August 1972 OSHA had set standards for only five hundred, a serious shortfall, as OSHA, since opening for business, had been inundated by worker complaints and questions from across the country about routinely handled chemical compounds. As an article in Today’s Health reminded the government officials among its readers, “It is not the rickety banister but the deadly vapor that worries the working man most.”103
THE DISTRESSING STORY of a young female technician at a nuclear materials processing facility in Oklahoma helped bring the issue into tighter focus. Karen Silkwood, twenty-eight years old in 1974 and a divorced mother of three, had started work at the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation two years earlier. The plant was located in the town of Crescent, not far from Oklahoma City, and belonged to Kerr-McGee’s constellation of energy interests in oil, coal, uranium, timber, and chemicals. Robert S. Kerr, a governor and U.S. senator known for his larger-than-life personality as “the Big Boom from Oklahoma,” had helped found the company in 1929; Dean A. McGee, a famously gifted explorer of valuable oil sites, joined in 1938. Kerr-McGee was one of the better-paying employers in the Oklahoma City area, and Silkwood felt fortunate to have a job there, particularly one that drew on her expertise, having attended Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, on a science scholarship. She was paid $3.45 an hour, a slightly higher wage than that received by her coworkers.
The facility in Crescent manufactured plutonium pellets that were assembled into eight-foot-long fuel rods to be used in an experimental fast breeder reactor being built for the AEC near Richland, Washington. Plutonium, a by-product of neutron-bombarded uranium, made its first appearance in 1945 when it was used in the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Nagasaki, Japan. Because the substance is highly radioactive, Kerr-McGee gave extra attention to how it was handled. Silkwood’s job was to perform quality-control tests on the pellets as well as the finished rods to make sure the welds were perfect.
In fall 1972, shortly after she came to Kerr-McGee, Karen joined OCAW Local 5–283 in a strike for higher wages. The company, financially secure and able to find eager replacement workers from economically struggling Oklahoma farms, held out for several months. Of the original one hundred OCAW strikers who struck Kerr-McGee, only twenty, including Silkwood, withstood the urge to return without a contract. The firm eventually did agree to a new pact with the workers, bringing her back to work, but she had become politicized by her experience on the picket line.
There was little about Silkwood’s background to suggest a role as a rebellious workplace advocate; relatively unworldly, she had come of age in the small-town environment of Texas and Oklahoma. But she was known to her friends and family as outspoken and stubborn, and as events would demonstrate, she could be, in the words of one biographer, “as tenacious as an abalone on a rock.”104 One colleague later recalled hearing her tell a superior, “Goddamit, I am right and you are wrong. If you want to tell me what to do, you oughta learn how to do the job right.”105 Drawn deeper into work with her OCAW local, Silkwood soon began curtailing many of her social activities, causing some coworkers to regard her with suspicion.
In spring 1974 the pace of work at the plant was stepped up, schedules were lengthened, and—most disturbing to Karen—the already mediocre plant radiation safety measures were relaxed. She was particularly worried about the young men Kerr-McGee had hired as replacements during the strike, many right off the farm. Having received a shortened version of the usual safety training, they were largely ignorant of radiation’s dangers. The plant’s new safety director, also hired at the time of the strike, held a degree in poultry science. Around the same time the usually upbeat Karen, who only a couple of years earlier had told a boyfriend, “I feel like I’m in love with the whole world,” began to experience bouts of depression. After working her twelve-hour night shift at the plant she often found it hard to sleep, so a physician prescribed for her a new muscle relaxant known as Quaalude, upon which she soon grew reliant.106 On July 31, 1974, Silkwood was mildly contaminated in a work incident. It did not appear to seriously threaten her health, but when a coworker was also contaminated a short time later, she expressed her concern about lax safety precautions to the company.
Later that summer Karen’s local tapped her to be one of three employees on an OCAW bargaining committee. Kerr-McGee had called for a National Labor Review Board–monitored election for October 16 to challenge whether OCAW had enough support at the Crescent site to continue to represent its workers, an effort known as decertification. Winning the election, maintaining the union’s NLRB certification as the designated bargaining representative for Kerr-McGee employees, was crucial to Silkwood and her cohorts, as a new contract was due to be negotiated later that fall and, for the first time, safety measures were to be a key issue. One of her colleagues, Jack Tice, had written to OCAW headquarters in Washington to complain that safety practices were not all they should be at the plant, and union vice president Elwood Swisher wrote back advising Tice to closely monitor the methods in question and then come to Washington to report. Karen began taking meticulous notes of safety violations she observed.
The local’s chances in the decertification election were not terribly good, as many of the original OCAW workers had departed during the 1972 strike and their jobs were now held permanently by the nonunion replacements. Nationally OCAW had 185,000 members, but the group at Kerr-McGee was small, and Oklahoma City was remote from other locals around the country. To Jack Tice, Karen Silkwood, and Jerry Brewer—the three members of the bargaining unit—it seemed likely the local’s chances would be improved if their efforts on plant safety could be shown to bear fruit, and it was with this in mind that the three left Oklahoma secretly for Washington on September 26 to meet with OCAW officials. They were also to meet with representatives of the AEC. It was Karen’s first time on an airplane.
Greeting them in the union’s Washington office was Tony Mazzocchi, the former New York chemical worker who had led OCAW’s lobbying efforts in the lead-up to OSHA, and now headed the union’s legislative office, and Steve Wodka, the union’s legislative assistant. Mazzocchi was at the time busy with asbestos-related illness issues, but he nodded with understanding as the three visitors recounted the safety
abuses at Kerr-McGee. When Mazzocchi explained that plutonium was one of the most highly carcinogenic substances known to mankind, Silkwood and her cohorts were shocked: no one at Kerr-McGee had ever warned workers that the material they handled each day could cause cancer.
During a break, when her two coworkers were out of earshot, Silkwood confided to Mazzocchi that Kerr-McGee was not simply negligent in its safety efforts, but that she believed workers occasionally cheated at quality control, passing along plutonium rods that were not safe. Mazzocchi was stunned. Such an allegation went well beyond workplace health concerns, since leaking fuel rods might potentially cause a meltdown or explosion at a nuclear plant, putting the public at risk. These were serious charges, and before they could be shared with the AEC, Mazzocchi and Wodka quietly instructed Silkwood “to go back to the plant, to find out who was falsifying the records, who was ordering it and to document everything in specific detail.”107 Mazzocchi asked Silkwood not to mention the quality-control cheating issue to anyone, as it was a grave allegation and would require hard facts to prove. If she could get evidence of her claims, he promised, he would get David Burnham, a reporter he knew at the New York Times, to look into the story.
Before the visitors returned to Oklahoma, Mazzocchi also suggested that OCAW arrange for scientists to come to the Crescent plant to inform the workers about the dangers of plutonium. Not only was this the right thing to do, he said, it would enhance the union’s stature with the workers as the decertification election neared. Accordingly, six days before the election, on October 10, two scientists dispatched by OCAW arrived in Crescent to describe the risks of cancer to about fifty interested Kerr-McGee workers. They detailed how fine plutonium dust could get inside one’s lungs, stomach, and esophagus. On October 16 the workers voted 80–61 to retain OCAW as their bargaining agent.
Now what remained was for Silkwood to get the evidence that Mazzocchi needed to expose safety cheating at Kerr-McGee. Karen was alone in this effort and not having an easy time. At work, she experienced three episodes of contamination and began suffering other health and emotional problems. She was by now using Quaaludes habitually, and had begun losing weight (she was down to ninety-four pounds); she’d also grown concerned, she told some close friends, that someone was after her, trying to hurt her, and that they had come into her home and put plutonium there. A Kerr-McGee team sent to her home found extremely high radiation readings, especially on a bologna sandwich in her refrigerator. A fecal test showed that Silkwood had ingested plutonium, and it also appeared that someone had placed plutonium in her urine-sample kit at work.
“Several people conceivably had motives for intimidating her,” investigative reporter Howard Kohn would write later in Rolling Stone, “a plant supervisor worried about being found out for falsifying records, a higher-up who feared a scandal, a coworker concerned that she would cost others their jobs.” Despite Mazzocchi’s strict warning to Silkwood not to tell anyone of her suspicions about safety cheating, it came to light that she had confided her undercover inquiries to at least one colleague. Wodka later theorized that word had gotten out what she was doing, or that she had been seen taking notes about the falsifying, and that in order to scare her and perhaps force her to quit the plant, someone poisoned the food in her refrigerator and also contaminated her urine samples.108
An AEC inquiry that followed Kerr-McGee’s own investigation confirmed that Silkwood had ingested plutonium and that her urine samples had been tampered with after they’d been excreted. Her roommate Sherri Ellis was also found to have been contaminated, likely by plutonium in their apartment. Kerr-McGee, disavowing knowledge of any clandestine effort to smear Silkwood’s reputation or contaminate her, suggested that she had for some reason carried plutonium out of the plant and taken it home.109
Karen, in long-distance phone calls to OCAW’s Steve Wodka, with whom she’d had a casual affair while in Washington, admitted being frightened, but said she had managed to gather information on Kerr-McGee’s falsifying of quality-control measures. He arranged to come to Oklahoma City on November 13, bringing along reporter David Burnham to meet her and see the evidence. That night the two men were waiting several miles away at a motel north of the city for Silkwood, who was to come there directly after attending an OCAW local meeting at a café in downtown Crescent. Silkwood never arrived. Driving alone on Highway 74 south toward the city, her car veered off the road, crossed the median, and struck a culvert on the opposite shoulder. She was killed instantly.
Because there were no skid marks to suggest she had tried to brake, police deduced that Silkwood had fallen asleep at the wheel. This conclusion sounded unlikely to those who knew Karen, and particularly to Wodka, who doubted she would doze off given the importance of her meeting with Burnham and the risks she was taking. It simply seemed out of character. Critically, the manila folder stuffed with documents Karen intended to give the reporter, and that others had seen her holding at the OCAW meeting at the restaurant, was missing from the crash site and never found. Unhappy with the official police version of her death, the union hired veteran Texas accident investigator A. O. Pipkin to examine the crash. Pipkin, who had handled two thousand such inquiries in his long career, explained that when a driver falls asleep at the wheel their car usually drifts to the right, not the left, as Karen’s had; he also hypothesized that from the tracks the vehicle had left, as well as indications she was gripping the steering wheel tightly at the moment of impact, she had not fallen asleep as she drove. He offered the alternative theory that her car had been rammed from behind, forcing her to lose control.
Despite the scrutiny of Pipkin, other experts, journalists, and investigators over the years, and recollections offered by colleagues, friends, and family, the case of Karen Silkwood has never been fully explained. Was she overly eager to embarrass her employer on behalf of her OCAW local or in the interest of publicizing the dangers of plutonium? Did her emotional state and her reliance on painkillers lead her to make irrational statements? Did she bring plutonium into her own home? Or was she the victim of a corporate conspiracy or a vendetta by a fellow employee?
While such questions will likely never be answered, Silkwood was correct that Kerr-McGee had failed to provide workers with adequate information about the risks of plutonium-related illness, and right to be alarmed by the corner-cutting she’d perceived in quality and safety control (some of her claims were later substantiated, but not all were as serious as she had believed). Whatever the circumstances of her death, she was a martyr to the principle that workers have a right to be fully informed about dangers in their place of work, and that employers have a moral duty to protect them.110 As her mother suggested, months after laying her daughter to rest, “We never did appreciate Karen as much as we should have. Look what she did. She gave her life to save others.”111
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A TIME FOR CHOOSING
ABRAHAM LINCOLN VALUED ORGANIZED LABOR; Grover Cleveland sent the army to suppress it; Harry Truman challenged the right to strike in coal, rail, and steel; Lyndon Johnson acted on issues of workplace health. But it was left to Ronald Reagan, the nation’s fortieth president, to do what none had done before: destroy a labor union. Reagan’s decimation in 1981 of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) would prove a seminal failure of labor-management relations in America, one from which the labor movement has never fully recovered. Coming early in his initial term, the showdown with the nation’s air traffic controllers would reveal the extent to which the ground had weakened under labor’s feet and would offer a first, and to many an unpleasant, glimpse at Reagan’s presidential mien.
As he never tired of reminding people, Reagan was a former president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the first member of the AFL to occupy the White House. Even the unionized air traffic controllers had been impressed enough with Reagan’s labor bona fides—and by a statement of support he gave the union while a candidate—to buck the trend of the wider labor movem
ent and endorse him over incumbent Jimmy Carter in the election of 1980. But despite Reagan’s union affiliation in Hollywood and his oft-cited admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt, he had in fact never been entirely comfortable with either the collective nature of labor organizations or the means by which they sought their objectives.
Reagan’s SAG experience during the 1940s was strongly influenced by contemporary political currents as well as the troubled status of unionization in the film industry. Los Angeles was not particularly union-friendly, due to the pressure of a continual stream of job seekers from elsewhere, a large local unemployed class, and an historic contempt for radicalism of any kind. Movie studios were perpetually strained by tight budgets and schedules, and viewed work stoppages as potentially calamitous, while the industry’s transience resulted in nonstandardized hiring practices and harsh working conditions, as well as an inhibition against labor organizing.
Concern among studio heads intensified in the late 1920s with the advent of sound motion pictures, as hundreds of stage actors, many of them members of Actors Equity, which had won a closed shop on Broadway, began making their way to California. In 1927 Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), formed a company union, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (later sponsors of the Academy Awards), intended to thwart the formation of independent unions. The Academy succeeded at gathering numerous Hollywood professionals under its umbrella, and did produce labor contracts, but it also enforced management-friendly regulations including salary caps, limits on the activities of talent agents, and rules prohibiting studios from poaching one another’s stars.
