What Did She Know that Night?: The Death of Karen Silkwood

It was a dark windy night on November 13, 1974, when Karen Silkwood got into her Honda sedan and started down Oklahoma State Highway 74. She was traveling at 50 to 55 miles an hour on an absolutely straight highway, when her Honda was slammed in the rear by another car, sending Silkwood onto the shoulder of the highway and into a concrete bridge culvert. She died instantly. The highway patrol said Karen Silkwood fell asleep at the wheel. But many people think differently. Silkwood was on her way to meet Stephen Wadka, an official in her union, the oil chemical anatomic workers, and David Burnham, a New York Times reporter. With her, Silkwood carried documents detailing her own investigation into plutonium contamination at the Kamigee nuclear power facility where she worked. She was on her way to this meeting in order to disclose information to her union and to the public, which implicated Kamigee in both black market plutonium operations and health

and safety violations that were life-threatening to workers at the plant. The document she carried disappeared from the car following the crash and have never been found. What did Karen Silkwood know that night? It's obvious she had damaging evidence about the Kamigee facility. Many think her death is also part of a much bigger story. In a Kermagee factory in an Oklahoma town, worked a legend of a one wise for her days. The factory made few rides up plutonium. Karen Silkwood knew the dangers of those deadly rings. Who was in a bind, leading her union in a safe war? She was right, but kind of on the lonely side, and somebody out there thought she was

right. She was driving down the road to close our dees by losing her hands for the New York Times. The cops they said she fell asleep at the wheel, union privatized as she was hit from the eye. I was struck the most about Karen Silkwood's life, but many ways up until the end of the last two months of her life, it was an utterly ordinary life.

Just like a lot of myself, a lot of people I know had a little bit of soap opera about it. She was left by her husband and he married her best friend and took three children. It was just an ordinary American life, she was good in her high school science class, she did not, she had low expectations, she didn't think she was going to be a scientist. The most she wanted to be was a technician, and so it was really just the story of a working class woman's life. But what impressed me as I worked on it was the little victories in people's lives, which are not like the big victory of delivering the document. The real hopefulness in the sense of victory comes from me and Karen Silkwood's life. When she went through this process of saying she didn't like what was happening then somebody had stopped her and shut her up, and then she'd go around them and she'd start saying

it again. So it was just the courage to keep going when all the encouragement from the people around you was just to stop and give up. In the end I thought that she was really a very courageous woman and that where some people would have fallen by the wayside and said this is too hard a fight, I'm moving too much of life, this is terrible. She didn't, she really did finish her job and she really did go away beyond the bounds of what you would have thought the woman of her background would have accomplished. Jane Dillon, author and performer of the One Woman Play Silkwood. Karen Silkwood began work at Kermagy in the summer of 1972. The plant had recently been organized by the oil chemical and atomic workers. She got a job at Kermagy which was considered fantastic, she considered it really fantastic. She had wanted to become a technician, she had gotten married instead and then when she enrolled in night school she was pregnant and so she had never really gotten the training

to become a technician. So she got a job in this nuclear power plant and she was grateful just to get a job. She began work in the plant in 1972, she worked there for two years. During the course of that time there were a lot of contamination incidents in that plant. The boyfriend Drew was belonged to the union and he got her to join the union. She had no union background, no particular interest in that but she did join the union. She then started noticing that there were these contaminations. She worked in quality control of the plant and she tested the welds, they had a welding machine that tested 12 fuel pins at once, one of them was a sample. If the sample pin broke it meant there was something wrong with the welds on those fuel pins and the whole lot of 12 had to be rejected. She found out that she would report that a sample pin had broken but the record could be falsified

and they would accept that lot of 12 and she started worrying what was going to happen because she did have the science background knew something about nuclear energy. She died worrying what was going to happen at a nuclear power plant and they got these faulty fuel rods with these cracks on the welds. So she just started keeping a notebook of what was happening around the plant. Her development is really the most interesting of any person I've ever looked at. It really happened all within the last couple of months of her life. She joined the union, they set up a health and safety committee. She was personally very outraged, she had lost her children and this plant was full of these 18 year old kids that had absolutely no background and radiation. They didn't tell them how dangerous it was and they would even take the plutonium pellets and put them in BB guns and fire them because they didn't know it was even really harmful. Plutonium is the most toxic substance known, a single particle of the size of a grain of pollen

has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory test animals. In small doses radioactive plutonium particles can lie latent for many years and eventually cause cancer and plutonium keeps its radioactivity for a quarter of a million years. From 1970 to 1974 there were 80 reported cases of contamination at Kiermege. The company had shipped radioactive waste in improper containers on two known occasions and one time there was a leak in a flatbed truck that was storing the wastes. The negligence on the part of Kiermege has the potential for contaminating not only the workers in the plant but also a large number of citizens in the surrounding population. In the spring of 1974 Kierren Silkwood was elected to the governing committee of her OCAW local. As her union activity increased, so did her concern for the health and safety of herself and her co-workers who handled plutonium at the plant. During the summer of 1974 Kierren and some of her co-workers began to notice a production speed up coupled with a decline in safety standards.

She became concerned about the hazardous effects such a process would have on the workers. On September 26th Kierren and two other union members went to Washington D.C. to meet with national OCAW officials. Silkwood's delegation and OCAW official Stephen Wadka took their complaint against Kiermege to the Atomic Energy Commission officials. They charged the company with both poor health and safety conditions and the falsification of quality control information. At the hearing Wadka explained to the delegation that plutonium was thought to cause cancer. This was the first time Kierren Silkwood or her colleagues had been told about the lethal effects of plutonium contamination. While the Atomic Energy Commission, she went up there, she presented the list, and they said, thank you, we'll send an inspector out. And they said, if you want to prove something, you're going to have to prove it. You have to get more documentation. Well, this really got to Kierren Silkwood. She thought, like most of us think. Well, if you just go to the government and if you just go to somebody up there, they're going to take care of it.

I mean, she had every belief she was going to go there and she was going to hand him this information and they went to step in and clean up the plant. She was not a radical. She was not a feminist. She was not anti-nuclear. She was just a union worker. Well, she became real inferior when she started to think of all these kids coming to work in this plant. Nobody was detecting them. Danny Shehan, lawyer for the Silkwood case, describes what happened as a result of this hearing. The Atomic Energy Commission, in fact, had to be disbanded the next year because it was in the pocket of the nuclear industry. And that's been established of absolute fact. And so they just said, well, I'm sorry, little girl, but you know, you haven't shown us adequate documentation to prove this thing. So you'll have to go home. So she was furious and she went and talked with the union officials and they said, look, you go back and get documented proof from inside that facility of the things that you've said. She told them that there were two things that she told those officials. She told them first that while the company had reported that only 80 people had been contaminated in that entire facility over a four-year period. In fact, it turns out that there were 595 people had been seriously contaminated that the company knew it.

They had handwritten affidavits of each incident locked in their secret files inside that company. She also told them that in fact what was happening, and this is the one a lot of people may have heard about, is that they were making plutonium fuel rods for the nuclear reactors at that facility. Their little stainless steel cylinders about as big around as your little finger, and they're about eight feet long. And they fill these stainless steel cylinders with these plutonium pellets. Now, plutonium is the stuff that goes in nuclear bombs to make nuclear weapons. So it's terribly dangerous stuff. And they would put this stuff in these fuel rods. And according to the rules, they had to weld closed the tops of these fuel rods to keep them from leaking radiation. Because they take about 100 of these little fuel rods, and they put them in a bundle they call a gatling gun. And they sink it down into a nuclear reactors core. And that's where the energy comes from. And if they're leaking radiation out of the tops of any of these things, it like short circuits across the top of this, and it'll cause a meltdown. And what she discovered is that when they had to take x-ray photographs of the welds in these fuel caps, and if there were any flaws in the welds, it would allow radiation to leak out.

So if there were any flaws that showed up in these x-rays, they had to put the whole batch back in and do it again. She discovered that when the x-rays were being taken of these welds, potential flaws were showing up in the welds, and the company was covering over the x-rays with magic marker. And she told the people that the union that that was true, they almost died. And they said, look at Karen, if you can go back and get copies of those doctorate x-rays, we're going to blow these people right out of the water with this during the negotiations. She went back and proceeded to the entire month of October of 1974, she got put on the night shift, and went around inside the plant in these offices getting copies of all these documents. She also discovered it turns out during those investigations that that nuclear facility was missing over 40 pounds of bomb grade plutonium, that they had no explanation for missing. And she got a hold of those documents.

She set up a meeting that she was going to meet with David Burnham of the New York Times on November 13th. Well, she was supposed to start the contract negotiations on November 5th. That was the first day of the contract negotiations. Well, actually on November 6th, on the day before, she was supposed to chair the first contract negotiations. She was working at her glove box, where she helped do these x-rays, and she started to take her coffee break, and all the alarms went off, and she was completely contaminated with radioactive plutonium. And they dragged her downstairs into the decontamination chamber, and started to tore off all her clothes and burnt them, and started scrubbing off the first layer of her skin with wire brushes. And they went up and checked the place where she was working, and there was no radiation leak at all. And she came back in, they scrubbed all the skin off, and sent her home that night. She came back in the next morning, getting ready to chair the contract negotiations. She was working in her office, where the paperwork is all done. She got ready to leave, and all the alarms went off again, and she's covered again from head to foot with radioactive plutonium. And they dragged her downstairs again, and started with these brushes, these wire brushes, scraping off the second layer of skin, telling her how, oh, it's too bad you can't chair these contract negotiations.

We knew how bad do you want it to, but you know, your health and safety is of utmost concern to us. Well, that she screamed and hollered about it so much that they ended up stopping the decontamination process, and sent her for the last 15 minutes of negotiations that evening, leaving 40,000 disintegrations per minute of radioactive plutonium in each nostril, which she inhaled all night long into her lungs. She came back the next morning, and upon entering the facility was found to have been contaminated from head to foot again. They seized her, and they brought her, they sent her to a government installation out at Las Alamos, New Mexico, upon top of this big desolate plateau out in there, and kept her there, saying they had to give her all these special tests. Well, they, as soon as they took her away, they went to her, her apartment, and started searching through the apartment. And one of the people that was in charge of it says they were apparently searching for some kind of papers of some sort. They tore the wallboards out of her house and tore up the rugs and everything, and then asserted that they had to do this because of a special nuclear emergency.

Well, they were looking for the documents. Now, the question arises, how did they know she had the documents? Okay, well, what she was kept at that nuclear facility out in Las Alamos all the way up to the night of November 12, which was the night before she was supposed to go meet this, this newspaper reporter in Oklahoma. She snuck out of the facility, got away, got in an airplane, a night flight, and flew into Oklahoma City that night. She called the newspaper reporter on the telephones at her, at her boyfriend's house, Drew Stevens home, and set up the appointment to have him come out that she got out of the facility that they were going to come and have the meeting. She walked in the next morning on the 13th of November, six years ago, and chaired those contract negotiations, much to the dismay of the Kerming Nuclear Officials. The one guy I took his deposition in the trial, he said that she conducted herself in a most ungenerally manner throughout the entire negotiation. So, she left that negotiation, went and debriefed the other union members at the plant, and told them that she had these documents in this Manila folder that were going to get this company.

Went out and got in her car, and was driving to Oklahoma City to meet with the New York Times reporter. They were sitting there waiting, eight o'clock came, and no car in nine o'clock. They went, they jumped in the car, started going back to there, and found this big crash scene. Her car had been taken away, her body had been taken away, nobody would tell them where it was. Turns out the car had been taken to the Seabring Ford dealership, which does all the work on the trucks of the Kerming Geek Corporation, and the documents had been removed from the car. Are you Karen Silkwood, the news is bad, your body is on fire, the worst that we've had might have been the canister, probably the gloves, better not get too near to the ones that you love. Are you Karen Silkwood, we have heard about you, talking to the outside, the dumb thing to do, people lose confidence.

We might close down, little girl, the stakes are high, we don't fool around. Almost two years after Karen Silkwood's death, the House subcommittee on Energy and the Environment began hearings into the Hall of Fair. One of the witnesses was Jacque Shruji, a journalist for the Nashville Tennessean. Shruji had been gathering material on Silkwood as part of the research for a book on nuclear power, which was favorable to the nuclear industry. Before the hearings began, Shruji told Peter Stockton, the committee staff investigator, that Silkwood was a sexually promiscuous, dope-smoking child deserter, and that any effort to make a heroine of her would only prove to be an embarrassment to the Congress. Shruji told Stockton that these charges could be proven from transcripts taken from wiretaps and bugs of Silkwood's conversations.

She said she got the transcripts from James Redding, the director of security for Carnegie. Apparently, the FBI in cooperation with Carnegie had been closely following Silkwood's activities. Shruji told committee staff investigators Stockton that she would give him the transcripts, but when he went to Nashville to get them, she backed down. During the hearings, Shruji admitted under oath that she had access to additional information on Silkwood. This information turned out to be raw FBI files to which the House subcommittee on energy and the environment had been denied access. The committee's counsel telephoned FBI agent Larry Olson to ask about the Silkwood situation. Olson replied, Mrs. Shruji has a very special relationship with the FBI that I am not at liberty to discuss. The special relationship was further elaborated on by Shruji herself when she later admitted to her publisher that she had used her press credentials to infiltrate anti-war and civil rights groups for the FBI. The committee's lack of access to FBI files was hampering its ability to get to the bottom of the Silkwood matter.

Right before the fall election, a prostitute in Detroit called a press conference, saying that she had many customers connected to the mafia, but that her favorite customer was John Dingell, chair of the House subcommittee looking into the Silkwood affair. As a result of this controversial press conference, Dingell was removed from his seat as chair of the subcommittee, but he was reelected to Congress anyway. By this time, Karen's father, Bill Silkwood, was beginning to realize that the mystery surrounding his daughter's death would not be unraveled by the subcommittee alone. He asked Danny Sheehan, a civil rights lawyer, to initiate a suit on behalf of the family. There are two counts in the complaint that was filed. The first count charged the Kermingy Nuclear Corporation with legal liability for having been responsible for placing radioactive plutonium on the Bolognian cheese in the home refrigerator of Karen Silkwood when she was trying to organize the health and safety standards at that plan. The second count charges a criminal conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Karen Silkwood and the other workers at the plan that were trying to organize a union to protect the people in lieu of the, or in view of the terrible health and safety standards that were there.

So that you have the two, you have a contamination count and you have the civil rights criminal conspiracy count. Now, only one of them has been tried so far. Now, that's one of those little known facts about a well-known subject here that because we won ten and a half million dollars for the contamination count, the judge that was assigned to the case, finally, after two federal judges were removed for bias, he separated the two counts for trial purposes and said, look, let's dispose of this first count. Let's deal with the contamination, let's have the trial on that and get this thing dealt with. And if that thing goes favorably, then we can deal with the second one. Now, when the Pellet Court confirms our victory in that and asserts that we've got that, a ten and a half million dollars. Oh, yeah, very confident, very confident. Yeah, there's, there's not going to be much question about that. It's just going through the motions here. And we're delighted every step they want to take on appeal on this thing. It goes up to a higher court. And that means that the ruling covers more territory in the United States. We're delighted. Plus there's a, there's a million dollars a year in interest being generated on the ten and a half million dollar judgment.

So there, the family is getting a million dollars a year when Kermagee fights it. And the public interest community is getting the rules that were won in the case applied to a larger and larger jurisdiction. So we're delighted they can argue about this as long as they want. And when we get this thing finally resolved, then we're going to be given a trial date for the second count. Could you tell us a little bit about the trial? One of the most important things to remember about the trial is that it was, it was confined simply to the contamination count. And when the jury came in, everybody figured it was about the murder case. You know, it's all over the country. Everybody's heard about it. And they're saying, gee, somebody killed Karen Sokwood that they thought they were going to get to be the jury that sat on that question. So for the first couple days of the trial, the most important thing to get across to these people was that we weren't being allowed to present the evidence about the killing. And they were kind of straining constantly trying to get at that information.

And so once we got them understanding that this was about the contamination count on the thing, we then proceeded to explain what the information was that she knew about at that facility. And how she was trying to get this information out, it was information the evidence we were putting in was not entirely unconnected to the fact that she'd been killed. And the jury kept constantly understanding that even though we weren't doing anything to tell that we were just talking about the contamination. And an extraordinary series of things happened during the trial, that when the judge separated the criminal conspiracy case from the contamination case, we brought in a local lawyer that does personal injury damages. It was just like a broken leg case came in to try this in the Kermiggy Nuclear Corporation was furious. They thought it was going to be this big political anti-nuclear kind of trial, but we had all the goods on them.

So we wanted to get a real professional. I do civil rights prosecutions. I don't do broken leg cases. And so we bring in this guy who I consider to be the very best in the entire country right now. His name is Gerald Spence. And he is a super trial lawyer. Well, we had the assistance of him working in the trial with us at that stage. And then we had some additional assistance that is most peculiar that we had two priests on the investigation team that were working with us. And I was a candidate for the Jesuit Order. A third would be priest anyway during the trial. And everybody was making jokes about that. Oh, well, it's got on your side. You know, it's a big G up there helping you on this all of a sudden. We laughed and sort of smiled at them. And in the first week of the trial, after all these years, the very infamous Rasmussen report, which had earlier been prepared by the Time of Energy Commission, saying that their statistical studies showed that there was less than one in a billion chance of anybody ever being seriously injured by a nuclear facility that it was revoked in the first week of our trial. That the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had finally been crushed under all the pressure that had been building up over the years to revoke that report.

So in the very first week, that report was revoked. In the second week of our trial, was when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was compelled to shut down 15 nuclear reactors around the country, because they were found that their pipes were so they were in earthquake areas and their pipes could break and cause a meltdown. So they had to shut down 15 nuclear reactors, it was all over the headlines. And this was in the second week of our trial in which we were demonstrating how dangerous these nuclear facilities were, how Karen Silkwood had come to know the inside details about that, and how she was trying to reveal this when she was contaminated. Was this admissible evidence? Oh, it was interesting. You didn't have to admit it. You didn't have to admit it at all. But what it did is it was clear that everybody in the courtroom, of course the courtroom was packed. I mean, it was one of the famous cases going on in the country at the time, and people are just seething in the courtroom, and this information is buzzing all through the courtroom. Then in the third week, we were attempting to demonstrate that this particular facility out in Oklahoma was built in an especially dangerous area, that it was built right in the middle of tornado alley, where tornadoes come every spring.

And there was a man by the name of Uttridge, who was an employer of the company, was on the stand testifying about how this big nuclear reactor was so powerful, or this nuclear facility wasn't a reactor, it was so strong, it could stand a direct hit from a tornado. Well, that night, the biggest tornado in the history of Oklahoma hit in Oklahoma, and wiped out a seven mile area down in southern Oklahoma, while he was still testifying. And so then we came into the fourth week of the trial, and the fourth week of the trial, the China syndrome opened in Oklahoma City, and of course the whole sequence of people getting the reporter getting run off the road, and the x-rays, falsified x-rays being taken out of the car, that all comes from the silkwood case, of course. And so they were going crazy, the judge had to give the jury an instruction not to go see the China syndrome, and there was all kinds of publicity about it everywhere, and in any relationship between the two was purely coincidental. Well, of course it wasn't coincidental, and then in the fifth week of the trial, in the fifth week of the trial, three mile ion melted down.

And by that time, they stopped making jokes about whether God was on our side, and as I pointed out to them, it wasn't that you had to have God on your side, reality itself was on our side, because the things that we were telling the people in the trial were all true. What was their strategy? Their strategy was to try to assert that Karen Silkwood must have taken the plutonium out of the nuclear facility and intentionally contaminated herself for the purposes of embarrassing the corporation. Well, that gave us an open lead, we said, look, I'm glad you mentioned that. Let us point out to you why she didn't have to do that to embarrass the corporation. Let us point out to you what the documents were that she had in her car, that mysterious night. Well, we were right up to the very edge of the thing that everybody in the court wanted to know about. And so we got an opening, you could drive a Mack truck through to put in all the information about the documents that she had, including the testimony of a woman who was at the restaurant that night, from what she left and was killed, testifying in detail about seeing her with these documents. Thank you very much.

Are you Karen Silkwood? I'm Karen Silkwood, I'm Karen Silkwood. There were maybe three really basic rulings that were entered in the case. It's the first case in history of charging a nuclear facility with legal liability for contaminating someone off site.

And it turns out that Karen's home was 20 miles away from the nuclear facility. So the court ruled that she stood in the same shoes as any other citizen who lives around those nuclear facilities so that the legal issue that was getting ready to be resolved in this case is what are the standards that are going to be imposed by a federal court to protect citizens who live around these nuclear facilities from being radiated. So that was the first really important thing and the standards that they set were that the nuclear facilities were absolutely liable for any contamination of any citizens around those nuclear facilities. And that if it could be demonstrated that they any citizens were actually injured as a result of such radiation exposure, they had to pay. What then what they attempted to do is they tried to argue that well, you can't say that Karen Silkwood was injured because the amount of radiation to which she was exposed was below the levels that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission say are okay.

Well, that was the second most important thing that happened in the trial because the judge said to the jury, look, you as the jury can listen to what the NRC says are safe levels. But you have to make a determination of fact of whether or not those are safe levels. And if the evidence persuades you that even levels of exposure below those that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says are safe, in fact, injure a person, you can give money damages to the people that are in fact injured. So in effect, it totally neutralized the years and years and years of work that the nuclear corporations have put into lobbying the Congress and their congressman whose elections they pay for to try to get this absolute safe rule set up so they can go wrong contaminating people if they want and not be held liable. Were you surprised at that? No. No, he was right. It was absolutely clear that you had, I mean, it's ridiculous, you know, just because an airplane company obeys the the CAB regulations for the Civil Air Analytics Board.

If it crashes on top of your house and kills everybody in your house, what are you going to come back and say, gee, I obeyed all the rules. So therefore, I don't have to pay for your house. You know, I mean, so once you get a look at it, it's preposterous. And the third thing was in a very important ruling, the Kermagee Corporation maintained that even if Karen Silkwood would have gotten cancer from having been exposed to the levels of radiation to which she was exposed, she couldn't come in now before she had the big huge tumor in her lungs and Sue. She had to wait until she was dying in order to come into Sue. The court ruled that that wasn't true. The court said that if it could be demonstrated that the exposure to low levels of radiation had caused irreparable cell damage, which over a period of time would develop into cancer that in fact you had cancer then. And therefore you could sue right then to recover. Now that's really fundamental because it relates to the whole three mile island thing. We're representing the six citizens groups around three mile island right now. And it can be demonstrated that they've been exposed to levels of radiation, which even if they're below those the NRC says are okay, have clearly generated cell damage to the people there. So they're gearing up right now for a mass class action against that nuclear facility.

Everybody's wondering if mankind is cursed. He's ruining the sky and the ocean even worse. But I'll predict the cause of this eradication from the earth. Oh, plutonium is forever. Now oil slicks someday will disappear. We'll stop dumping BCVs and up new. But there is one producer that we should really be here. Oh, plutonium is forever. But we'll let go of it for our purposes ever. It will be our past two days. Yes, plutonium is forever. I'm coming on oxide, gonna be still your breath. Asbestos poisoning if the workers are horrible death. The aerosol and the conco, mixture is now so left.

Oh, plutonium is forever. Now. It will be our past two days. Yes, plutonium is forever. Now somewhat the oil company. To have the base divestment and somewhat the utility to be denied the rates adjustment. Now they're all after plutonium that they get such a good investment. Because, oh, plutonium is forever. Take it away. While the first part of the Soapwood case has wide-ranging implications for victims of unsafe working conditions and more community-wide contamination,

the second part, yet to go to trial, has even brought a ramifications. Jane Dillon explains the far-reaching significance of this civil liberties suit. To me, the more interesting of the cases is the civil liberties case. That case is now in appeal just to see if they can have a trial. They're going in under the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act is involved with discriminating against the class of people, a minority class of people. We're most familiar with it if it's used against discrimination against blacks or discriminations against women. The whole point of this case is, can we use the working class as a class that is discriminated against? And they're having the judges are now deciding whether we can call the workers a class, working class. It involves a conspiracy of the Oklahoma State Police, the FBI, and the security forces at that plant who conspired to stop Karen Silkwood from finding out the health and safety information.

They had her under surveillance. They contaminated her. They tapped her phone. This is a precedent setting case. It involves the right of workers to find out what's happening for them in a plant, and it involves the right of unions to organize. And it'll be very important to show that no matter how powerful the conspiracy is, and I think a conspiracy involving the FBI in this country is usually pretty powerful, that the people have a right to that knowledge about what they work with, and a right to organize into unions to protect themselves. There once was a union made, who never was afraid of the goods and the gigs and the company things and the deputy sheriffs who made the rage, she went to the union fold. When the meeting it was called, and when those company boys came round, she'll stood her round. No, it can't scare me. I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union. This union made was wise to the trick stop company spies. She wouldn't be fooled by company stools. She'd always organize the guys. She'd always get her way when they ask her for her pay.

She'd show her card to the National Guard, and this is what she'd say. No, it can't scare me. I'm sticking to the union. I'm sticking to the union. Oh, you can't scare me. I'm sticking to the union. I'm sticking to the union. Go the day I die. Occupational safety and health is not a new issue for working people. Unions have long been fighting for a consideration of the health and safety of workers since early organizing days. But industry has been struggling equally as hard to stave off introducing life-saving protective measures for workers on the job, and the companies are winning out. Estimates of job-related fatalities range from 15,000 to 150,000 deaths per year. In addition, job-related disease rates are even higher. In 1972, the Presidents Report on Occupational Safety and Health states that at least 390,000 new cases of disabling occupational disease develop each year.

These diseases plague coal miners, textile workers, chemical workers, plutonium workers, and even clerical workers to name but a few. The workplace is becoming more rather than less hazardous. Cancer rates are particularly problematic, and the incidence of cancer is increasingly becoming identified as a job-related problem. In a federal study cited by then Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Joseph, California, it was estimated that 20 to 40% of cancer deaths were caused by on-the-job exposure. Jane Dillon, author of Silkwood, has done extensive work in the area of occupational safety and health. It's not just if it was only nuclear energy, that would be a big problem, but it's so much more prevalent than that. In the last five years, the incidence of cancer, which I can't remember is statistics, they've gone up a phenomenal amount in this country. We have 3,000 new chemicals a year come on the market in this country, only about 60 to 85 of those are ever tested as to what they do to human beings.

So we have this proliferation of asbestos, chemicals, all sorts of lead, everything now that workers handle just about everything is causing these severe problems. Now, we as a nation, not just workers, are going to have to really deal with this because it is affecting the future generations. Every chemical that is a known carcinogen is also a mutagen. That means it changes the genetic structure of the human being, that means you will produce defective children from it. So we can get people now in a double-edged way. They'll die cancer someday and they'll produce defective babies before them. Well, this is a problem that we as part of the human family have to really take care of now because we don't want that kind of a world for ourselves. We have people dying in mills, we have people dying in lead plants, we have people dying of black lung and coal mines.

And I know what it takes to change that. It takes industry making less profits, including more money into safety. In some cases, in some cases, and not that high a percentage of them, it takes the plant closing down, which is loss of jobs. In most cases, industry frightens you into thinking, we'll close down if we have to deal with this. It's a matter of better safety equipment, it's a matter of better ventilation, it's a matter of control over the process of the manufacture of the product. So that this is going to be a problem that we are all going to have to deal with in the next few years. And it's not just that the consciousness is rising about it now, it's that more chemicals are coming on the market. This is we are getting more and more sophisticated and more and more sophisticated ways of killing people at the same time. And we may someday have to ask questions about how important or certain things we have.

When I have dealt, and a lot of people are an occupational health and safety or like this, I get so burnt out from some of the stories. But after one, I start to say, there are a lot of things we have in our American way of life that I'm going to have to do without, because I can't deal with the guilt of what it does to people to make that. There are a lot of things that aren't progress, because we may have a certain kind of plastic or we may have a paint that lasts years and years longer than other paint. But we may also be responsible for killing and naming people because of that. And I myself am not willing to take that responsibility over other people's minds. The case of Karen Sokwood has spurred a wide range of interest in the media, not only in her story, but also in the more general issues of occupational safety and health and civil liberties. One of the most dynamic depictions of the Sokwood story is a play presented by Union Sister Productions Incorporated, a non-profit performing group which was created to portray the struggles of working women. Sokwood is a one woman play written and performed by Jane Dylan. Jane spent many months researching Karen Sokwood's early life, along with the months at Kermagee, which led up to her death.

This research has been transformed into a compelling play about this significant personal story. The play opened in Washington DC and is currently traveling throughout the country to bring the story of Karen Sokwood to working people all over the nation. Jane Dylan describes the play, Sokwood. The play is about the process of which she comes to work with a play, a plan. And she just will do anything to keep that job. And I've had jobs where I would do almost anything to keep them. So where she starts saying, look, there's something wrong here. And it's a clumsy process. She didn't just start saying, hey, I'm not going to do this. It's a clumsy process. And there's a very human story here. And people identify with the clumsiness of that process. Because we all of us have things we're scared about. And we all of us act some ways differently than what we think we should act.

And so the play very much deals with, if I had to put in a capsule, what is the play is about? I would say it's about a person learning they can speak up. Which I think is a universal problem that may be more prevalent with the working class, but spreads through all classes. Eight days before she died, Karen Sokwood. Eight days before she died, Karen Sokwood went to work, contaminated with plutonium, to Carnegie near Oklahoma City on the Simmeron River to test nuclear fuel rods. Seven days before she died, Karen Sokwood went to work, contaminated with plutonium. She showered again, scrubbed the poison off her skin, named for Pluto, the god of the dead. She was health and safety official for her union. They were in contract negotiations.

Six days before she died, Karen Sokwood went to work, contaminated with plutonium on her skin, clothes, and on her nasal smear. She was contaminated internally, one of 73 at Carnegie on the contaminated Simmeron River. And she wanted to know how much plutonium could a person ingest before it burned her insides. She crouched over the brown heater and drew the apartment and said, I think I'm going to die. A team from Kuramagi wearing moon suits checked her apartment. They quarantined it, hauled it away in a truck, buried it. They had to buy a new dress to bury her. She called her mother and her boyfriend, and union headquarters in DC, and they feel guilty, and they're still trying to find out what was in that itch thick stack of papers that disappeared four years ago. And why the FBI told their Oklahoma agent to close the case. But he talked to a reporter in a radio station before he decided not to be a hero.

Before the plutonium poisoning, Karen Sokwood liked to unfold maps on the floor, watch roads hop scotch, forget the oil slick clouds over netterland texas, the grey matter where she grew up, and plan getting away for the weekend with Drew in his primary red Austin Healy sprite that substituted for job frustration, because he wanted to be a fine laboratory analyst, but he quit. Because everything got in the way of a good job at Kuramagi and ego salad, a Caesar salad, and the rods weren't checked because someone would get in trouble. The x-rays of the fuel rods were touched up, so the voids in the bed welds wouldn't show on the plutonium fuel for the breeder reactor at Hanford, Washington waiting to be tested, potentially explosive radioactive sieves. In Morehead, Kentucky, at Maxi Flats, the plant's solid waste has liquefied. It's creeping into stream beds and creeks that feed into the licking river, to the Ohio, to the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico, unless an atom bonds to clay, blows away as dust is inhaled or eaten. It's a big company, Kuramagi. 39 of their 100 uranium miners got a rare and fatal form of lung cancer, working in Navajo Reservation Mine for $1.60 an hour, ship rocked New Mexico.

I still don't know how I got contaminated. She called her mother the day before she died. Karen Silkwood said, I feel like someone's using me for a guinea pig. She was afraid she'd melt inside from the heat of the massive internal contamination of plutonium, which does not exist in nature, like napalm. Kuramagi is a big oil and atomic corporation. The late Senator Kerr retired a $35 million air. A bunch of oil cowboys run the show, real boom-town mentality. They bid $2 million to low on the fuel rod contract, and ran truckloads of bomb-grade plutonium out of that plant on phony orders, and Karen Silkwood had some documents that disappeared. The FBI expert on sexual politics said publicly, Karen abused herself with a baloney in her refrigerator contaminated with plutonium.

He said she stole plutonium from the plant, Tampex style, to embarrass the company. Karen Silkwood knew contamination means cancer. She was health and safety official for her union, one of 73 who inhaled the god of the dead at work, besides it was sliced baloney, but the FBI agent said it anyway. The police said she fell asleep at the wheel, but they repaved the road to hide the skid marks. On the day she died, Karen Silkwood met all morning on the contract for the union. They thought she'd still be in Los Alamos in New Mexico for tests at the government lab where they talk in terms of full body count, but other experts say if you can measure it at all, it's too high. That afternoon, she met with authorities who sealed her apartment. In case those papers she'd been seen sneaking, we're still in there. At 6 o'clock, she called Drew. She said, I'm fine, a little excited, and believe me, I have everything.

She left a dinner meeting in her small light Honda hatchback with the papers for the meeting with the union rep and the New York Times. On the way, Karen Silkwood's car was slammed from behind at 55 or 60 miles an hour and driven into a concrete abutment. The campaign to discredit Karen Silkwood began. She left her husband. She left her three kids with their new mother and her past when she was 26 in 1972. She earned her own money and she bought a color TV, a stereo, a motorcycle and a new car. Went to rock and roll concert, smoked oak, made the scene for a while, moved in with her boyfriend Drew, moved out, gotten to overtime at work, got contaminated and gotten to the union, and the company files, she died. Because she knew too much, they say, not just bum welds and avoidable accidents, but enough plutonium diverted to make a dozen bombs sold or held for a better price on the international black market in ultimate weapons plutonium is worth more than gold.

Just one of 73 contaminated workers at the Simmeron plant, not to mention 39 Navajos with lung cancer in New Mexico, or the people who drink downstream of more head Kentucky, or the continent downwind of Hanford, Washington. The bomb quality plutonium missing in bulk is the reason the FBI told us operatives to shut up, and the Congressional investigation was canceled after Mr. McGee went to Washington. The court case is on its third judge, such is the interest. Franciscan brothers offered a stockholders resolution that was not put on the agenda, even on proxy mailings, and the plant was closed, locked up, like it never happened. Karen Sokwood's story is a case of one working woman's concern for the health and safety of her co-workers, and for that of the general public as well.

Her story demonstrates that companies like Karen McGee will go to great lengths to make higher and higher profits, and that their actions can be life-threatening to workers. Karen Sokwood is only one of the thousands and thousands of workers who die every year as a direct result of the industrial choice of profit over people. Her life stands as an example for all working women and men. Her death will only have meaning if it can represent to working people that they must organize in their own interests for a safe and healthy place to work. The court case is a case of one working woman and men. Her death will only have meaning if it can represent to working people that they must organize in their own interests for a safe and healthy place to work.

What did she know that night was produced by Denise Abrams and Willa Sidenberg for the Mother John's Memorial Special on W.Y.S.O. in December of 1980. Material for this program was taken from articles in Ms. Magazine in these times and the book Death on the Job by Daniel Berman. Thanks to Kathy Spicer for her help and to Gary Peck for providing the recording of Jane Dylan. The poem eight days before she died, Sokwood, was written and read by Susu Jeffries and recorded by Judith Gregory in March of 1980. Special thanks to Danny Sheen, attorney for the Sokwood case and Jane Dylan, author and performer of the One Woman Play, Sokwood. If you're interested in bringing Sokwood to your area, write Union Sister Productions, 1620, 11th Street, Northwest, Washington, DC, 2001.

The poem eight days before she died, Sokwood, was written and read by Susu Jeffries and willa Sidenberg for the Mother John's Memorial Special on W.Y.S.O in December of 1980. The poem eight days before she died, Sokwood, was written and read by Susu Jeffries and willa Sidenberg for the Mother John's Memorial Special on W.Y.S.O in December of 1980. Sokwood, was written and read by Susu Jeffries and willa Sidenberg for the Mother John's Memorial Special on W.Y.S.O in December of 1980.