Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,170

This is the grave of Karen Silkwood.

Born in 1946 in Longview, Texas, Silkwood grew up in the conservative Protestant world of postwar east Texas. She was a good student and a member of the National Honor Society but even that didn’t mean an easy way into a good college when you were poor and rural and a woman in the mid 60s. She won a scholarship to go to Lamar State College of Technology (today Lamar University) in Beaumont. But Silkwood didn’t stick with that. She married an oil pipeline worker. He sucked. They had three children in quick succession, but he also had women on the side. He spent all their money on fancy things and the other women as well. She confronted him, he refused to change, and she left him.

Silkwood was now a young single mother without any resources. This was a rough situation. So she worked. She moved to Oklahoma City and got a job in a hospital. That led to a bunch of jobs here and there, trying to find something to make ends meet. Now, at the same, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened up a lot of blue collar hard jobs to women. A lot of people didn’t like that, both companies and the male-dominated unions. But the courts found consistently that, in fact, Title VII was indeed part of the law and that is what Congress had decided. So there was a path for a good income for a woman like Karen Silkwood now. She got a job with Kerr-McGee, working as a metallography lab tech at the Cimarron River Fabrication Site in Crescent, Oklahoma. This was a plutonium production facility.

Despite this being Oklahoma, not only was this plant unionized but by what was just about the best union of the era, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers. Now, the OCAW had a different approach to issues of health and safety than many unions. Most of them took unsafe work as a fact of life, more or less, and imbibed in cultures that came from the workers themselves that prided themselves on dangerous work. So something like OSHA was a good thing, but also not something that they really cared about that much. Some of that was in the OCAW too, but its legislative director Tony Mazzocchi had a different belief. He believed that the workplace was an environment as important as any forest or desert and he believed that workers should use the new laws about safety and chemicals to build power on the shopfloor. Some thought he was a hopeless leftist for this, others saw him, as he has been called as “the Rachel Carson of the American workplace.”

Well, Silkwood soon found her job super dangerous and she didn’t like that. Shortly after she was hired at Kerr-McGee, the workers engaged in a strike over bad workplace conditions. Silkwood participated, learned a lot, and became a committed union support. She also experienced what it was like to lose. The thing about Oklahoma is that it wasn’t that hard for the company to find scabs. Not a big union culture there. The company also tried to get workers to decertify the union. That didn’t succeed, but after 10 weeks, the workers came back, angry and defeated legally but not in spirit.

Then in 1974, with the company seeking to increase profits, it forced workers to labor for longer shifts and safety standards declined even further. And this was a nuclear plant, safety standards had to mean something. Silkwood was first exposed to radiation then, discovering contamination in the emission spectroscopy lab. Meanwhile, the company continued trying to decert the union. At about this time, Silkwood joined the bargaining committee for the union. Her role–and her role in fighting the decert–was to focus on health and safety. And boy did she. She found all kinds of horrible things going on. A lack of showers meant workers weren’t getting radiation off them. Plutonium was going missing, for God’s sake.

It was about this time as well that she got to know Mazzocchi, during a meeting in Washington where she and her committee met with OCAW leadership. He encouraged her to continue. He wanted to use this to fight for the union’s sheer existence at Kerr-McGee. He told Silkwood about the connections between plutonium and cancer–and while you might think, what??, there isn’t really any reason she would have that knowledge. The knowledge of the rank-and-file worker of the shit they were dealing with at the workplace in this era was very, very low. There just wasn’t education and in a lot of cases, workers didn’t even know or have access to knowledge of the chemical makeup of the substances they handled on the job.

Mazzocchi’s strategy then was for Silkwood to continue to gather information and then the union would present it to the Atomic Energy Commission. She wholeheartedly agree. So the company decided to murder her. Now, that’s a big claim and it can’t be proven to the point of charging someone in the legal system. But it’s clear that someone along the line, maybe a foreman, maybe a senior supervisor, maybe someone further up the corporate ladder, decided that Silkwood should be dead. That’s especially true after her and Mazzocchi’s strategy worked and the increased fears of exposure led to workers voting to keep the union in the decert election.

Somehow, Silkwood was irradiated with 400 times the safe limit of plutonium, in a way that had to be intentional. Her gloves at work were not punctured. She discovered this during a self-check that was then confirmed by further testing. It was so bad that her house had to be torn down. This got in the news. The company responded that she contaminated herself to hurt Kerr-McGee, a ridiculous and absurd claim.

So Mazzocchi told her to talk to New York Times reporter David Burnham, who had broken the Serpico case in New York about police corruption. He flew to Oklahoma for the meeting. She had lots of documentation. On the way to meet him, her car was forced off the road, she was killed, and all the documents disappeared. Karen Silkwood was 28 years old. Further analysis showed she had been forced off the road by a car hitting her from behind. This all led to massive media coverage. Kerr-McGee soon got out of the nuclear business entirely, closing its plants in 1975. After a legal battle from her survivors, where in court the company again claimed she was a troublemaker who contaminated herself, Kerr-McGee settled out of court for $1.38 million. Then the movie came, starring Meryl Streep, which was released to acclaim in 1983.

A note: when people don’t trust the return of nuclear energy today, this case is a big reason why. The people who controlled the nuclear industry were awful. The reason Silkwood and The China Syndrome had such power is because the kind of expertise that was said to be able to lead us to some better tomorrow was shown to be totally corrupt, self-serving, and dangerous to the public.

Karen Silkwood is buried in Danville Cemetery, Kilgore, Texas.

If you would like this series to visit other murdered union activists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Abraham Rabinowitz, an IWW member killed in the Everett Massacre, is in Queens. Louis Tikas, the leader of the UMWA in Ludlow during the coal strike of 1914 and whose murder started the Ludlow Massacre, is in Trinidad, Colorado. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.