This story is a few days old and and it's a summary article from a series on the NPR website about deaths that occurred in 2014. This particular article is about Mae Keane who died last year at the age of 107. Her claim to fame is that she briefly worked as a "Radium Girl" back in the 1920's. Now I admit that I had only heard of the Radium Girls in passing and was not familiar with their story, but the instant I read the NPR article it struck me as a story worth remembering.
Radium is a radioactive material that was being used to produce military equipment including glow in the dark watches.
From 1917 to 1926, U.S. Radium Corporation, originally called the Radium Luminous Material Corporation, was engaged in the extraction and purification of radium from carnotite ore to produce luminous paints, which were marketed under the brand name 'Undark'. As a defense contractor, U.S. Radium was a major supplier of radioluminescent watches to the military. Their plant in Ottawa, Illinois employed more than a hundred workers, mainly women, to paint radium-lit watch faces and instruments, misleading them that it was safe.
The company employed young women to paint the hands and dials on the watches and due to the delicate nature of the painting required the young women to put a fine point on their paint brushes by placing the brush in their mouth and moistening the tip (think of honing the tip of a thread so you can get it through the eye of a needle). Over time and with repeated ingestion of the radioactive material many of the women became sick.
"Of course, no one thought it was dangerous in these first couple of years," explains Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook.
...
By the mid-1920s, dial painters were falling ill by the dozens, afflicted with horrific diseases. The radium they had swallowed was eating their bones from the inside.
"There was one woman who the dentist went to pull a tooth and he pulled her entire jaw out when he did it," says Blum. "Their legs broke underneath them. Their spines collapsed."
Dozens of women died.
In fact by 1927 50 women had died due to exposure to the radioactive paint.
Mae Keane on the other hand hated the taste of the paint and was reluctant to put the brush in her mouth. After a few days a supervisor asked her if she'd prefer to quit and she accepted his offer. Mae turned out to be one of the lucky ones and yes lived until 2014 dying at the age of 107. She had health problems along the way, but it's impossible to say if they were caused or exacerbated by her brief exposure to Radium many years before.
The one good thing that came out of all of this is that it became the first time workers sued and won a case against an employer for occupational safety. It led to changes in regulations regarding handling of radioactive material and established a precedent for future lawsuits.
The Radium Girls saga holds an important place in the history of both the field of health physics and the labor rights movement. The right of individual workers to sue for damages from corporations due to labor abuse was established as a result of the Radium Girls case. In the wake of the case, industrial safety standards were demonstrably enhanced for many decades.
The case was settled in the autumn of 1928, before the trial was deliberated by the jury, and the settlement for each of the Radium Girls was $10,000 (equivalent to $137,000 in 2015) and a $600 per year annuity (equivalent to $8,200 in 2015) while they lived, and all medical and legal expenses incurred would also be paid by the company.
Of course none of this was accomplished without a fight and even fake studies paid for by the radium corporations trying to prove that exposure to radiation from XRays was the real culprit or at least a mitigating factor in their favor. Fortunately that ruse was discovered and in the end the companies settled. Though radium continued to be used in similar ways until the 1950's workers no longer placed the brush in their mouths and were given protective gear to wear while working with the paint.
Now obviously in the long history of labor abuses in our country this isn't the only example. it was merely one of the first in a long history of lawsuits that have made jobs safer for all of us. In the end we owe many of our labor laws, regulations and precedents that protect us all today to this brave group of women who stood up for their rights even as they lay dying due to corporate neglect. RIP, Mae Keane and all the women who weren't as lucky and thanks for being part of the historical efforts to make the country safer for common working people.
5:52 PM PT: From the comments a link to dsteffan's diary list. He has an extensive history of writing about regulations including on the Radium Girls which he published back in 2009: http://www.dailykos.com/...