The Killing of Karen Silkwood: The Story Behind the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Case, 2nd edition

Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, Wntr, 2001 by Robert Sass

by Richard RASHKE, Ithaca: ILR Press, Cornell University Press, 2000, 448 pp., ISBN 0-8014-8667-X.

Karen Silkwood was killed on November 13, 1974, at 28 years of age while driving to meet a reporter from the New York Times with documentation about plutonium fuel rod tampering at the Kerr-McGee uranium and plutonium plants in Cimarron, Oklahoma. Richard Rashke, an investigative reporter, has a clear purpose in telling Silkwood's story, a story about perilous working conditions and defective products at Kerr-McGee and her fight against the indifference of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI, and the Atomic Energy Control Board.

Rashke's account demystifies the U.S. nuclear industry by piecing together fragments from the debris of the official occupational health and safety (OH&S) establishment. The book upsets the conventional wisdom and challenges the taboos about OH&S in general, and in so doing elevates reason and understanding about OH&S public policy and practices. The author presents a chilling revelation about the coziness within a hazard-ridden industry of its managers, professional and expert arbiters, regulators and haughty lawmakers.

Kate Bronfenbrenner petitioned for a re-issue of this book on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Karen Silkwood's death as a testimonial to a heroic activist for reform of working conditions. Silkwood is now firmly embedded in that part of the feminist tradition that links working and living conditions and provides OH&S with a class analysis that rejects the liberal trade-off between the integrity of the body and the economic considerations. OH&S emerged from the feminist social-work tradition of the early settlement houses, on the model of Jane Addams and Hull House in Chicago at the turn of the century. This tradition brought together women who were highly significant in shaping OH&S: Alice Hamilton (the first industrial hygienist in North America), Florence Kelly (an early factory inspector in Illinois and crusader against child labor), and, later, Francis Perkins (Secretary of Labor in the Roosevelt New Deal administration). These women investigated and wrote about hazardous working conditions, child labor, and the need for workers' compensation.

Karen Silkwood represents a contemporary expression of this tradition. In her Foreword, Kate Bronfenbrenner refers to Karen as a "whistle-blower" against powerful corporations and their stable of obsequious, puppet-like allies. By uncovering corruption in the economic realm, she made it possible for civil society to deal with it politically. This is significant for OH&S is not on the political agenda in either the U.S. or Canada and remains a blind spot in the education of managers, in the curriculum of business schools, and in the study of industrial relations.

Regrettably, "whistle-blowing" has acquired a pejorative meaning for many that diminishes its significance in OH&S. Yet it is the last resort for OH&S activists under present conditions. As Bronfenbrenner, herself an acknowledged OH&S activist, states: "Today's heroes take on business and government at a time when capital has never been more globally connected and more effective in advancing its interests at the expense of workers and communities. With ever-expanding free trade legislation placing multi-national investment interests above national sovereignty, the citizens of every nation are vulnerable to the dismantling or outright disregard of workplace... protection legislation. Multi- national corporations have even more sophisticated leverage against those who dare to challenge them" (p. x).

Karen Silkwood's defiance is, according to Bronfenbrenner, "our first line of defense against corporate power" (p. xii). And with predictable consequences. The dominant structure of K-M governance, a modern version of the divine rights of kings and their prerogative writs, deprived her of her civil rights through surveillance, wiretapping, and the bugging of her apartment. Karen lived in a feudal state, not a human community, ruled by a violent power more massive and dominant than naive students of OH&S and industrial relations have yet to acknowledge. She was troublesome property, ultimately disposed of without any "official" charge of murder in America's heartland.

Rashke deconstructs and reconstructs the Karen Silkwood story from 11,000 pages of trial transcripts, 6,000 pages of pre-trial depositions, 2,000 pages of FBI documents, and 1,600 pages of Congressional transcripts. The information and the menacing tone in these documents obstruct any attempt to fictionalize Karen's story, and we see the banality of so many bureaucrats: comfortable and educated people who want us to forget that this young woman was forced off the road and killed in order to prevent her meeting with the Times reporter about plutonium fuel rod tampering at Kerr-McGee.

Rashke's account of the massive documentation on the Silkwood case stands up to critical review and reveals the widespread superficiality of the OH&S establishment and its distortion of the facts: a collusion between the corporate elite, regulators, and their varied and diverse professionals and experts that permitted both the corporate elite and regulators to adopt a posture of "neutrality." The book also penetrates below the surface of practices that enable the collusive OH&S establishment to fashion the thinking and practices that shape OH&S policy instruments: standard setting, enforcement and compliance, and prosecution--the ultimate sanction.