Thread by @DaultRadio

So here I will give you a full-throated endorsement of Kate Moore’s amazing book, The Radium Girls, to answer horse shit like this. #Thread

https://twitter.com/bobsachemano/status/1023218506957897728

(First of all, H/T to @Stonekettle for the original exchange that brought the comment to my attention)

Here’s the tl;dr of The Radium Girls:

Women who painted luminous dials with radium paint were encouraged by the compan(y/ies) to “lip point” the brushes, exposing them in a short time to lethal doses of radium

Some became sick very quickly, some took years, but the effects were ghastly, incapacitating, and irreversible

Their teeth fell out. Their jaws came apart in pieces. Their mouths were filled with sores that would not heal, which ozzed pus continually. They developed bone cancers that led to amputations of their entire limbs.

At first, they went to dentists and doctors, and the medical experts had no idea what they were dealing with - because no one disseminated information on the dangers of radium exposure (even. though. the. dangers. were. known)

The compan(y/ies) at first told the women workers that radium would actually increase their vitality and health.

As a result, some women played with it, or used it as a tonic, in addition to the lip-pointing of the brushes.

Over a decade and a half, as more women kept dying in horrible ways, the evidence began to mount that it was exposure to radium that was the cause.

The response of the compan(y/ies) was to 1) impugn the reputations of the women, 2) suppress scientific data that showed the connection between radium and illness, and 3) hire their own “experts” to create reports that cherry-picked data to their benefit

When the cases finally began to go to court, the compan(y/ies) would settle, instead of exposing themselves to a judgement that would establsh culpability.

When there were finally judgements against the compan(y/ies), they appealed on technicalities, counting on the delay in the hopes that the claimants WOULD DIE before they were required to actually pay damages or medical costs.

I keep saying “compan(y/ies)” because as soon as they actually had to start paying damages, they dissolved the original company, and opened new ones, with the same practices, under new names, that released the owners from legal responsibility under the judgements.

And this is not ancient history. Years later, the Ottowa, IL building where one factory operated was used for a meat packing company. Workers died, and those who consumed the meat got disproprtionally high rates of cancer.

Radium Dial company, and its various incarnations, even did things like TAKING OUT FULL PAGE ADS to reassure the workers that the experts and the courts had declared radium inherently safe.

Throughout this multi-decade horror show, the compan(y/ies) relied on legal loopholes for shielding. But even more then this, they depended on the ignorance of their workers regarding the dangers of radium, chemically and radiologically.

In one sentence, this is what OSHA dies: It standardizes the availability of information to workers about the hazards they face in the workplace, so they can make INFORMED decisions about balancing ongoing income versus ongoing risk.

Is OSHA intrusive?

Given evidence that a company like Radium Dial would rather spend millions of dollars to keep the truth from workers and the public, rather than admit one shred of culpability...

Hell, yes, I want OSHA to be intrusive.

Is OSHA bad for business?

If your business subsidizes the fatal poisoning of your workers to maximize profits....

Hell yes, I want OSHA to be bad for that kind of business.

And if you think I am blowing all of this out of proportion, or that this kind of thing cannot happen now, I simply encourage you again to read Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls. It will open your eyes, and you will see the bright, shining, deadly light. /thread