Conference commemorates Karen Silkwood; ILR Press reissues book

Tony Mazzocchi, assistant to the executive vice president of Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union (PACE), speaks at the "Commemoration of a Critical Struggle -- Karen Silkwood in Retrospect," April 26 in the Statler Hotel's Terrace Lounge. Mazzocchi was a colleague of Silkwood's. Barry DeLibero/University Photography

By Linda Myers

Karen Silkwood's life as an advocate for worker safety was celebrated on the Cornell campus April 26. Silkwood died in 1974 at the age of 28, after blowing the whistle on dangerous practices at a Kerr-McGee plutonium processing plant in Oklahoma.

The event, "Commemoration of a Critical Struggle -- Karen Silkwood in Retrospect," marked a new edition of The Killing of Karen Silkwood: The Story behind the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Case, just published by Cornell University Press/ILR Press. The book, by Richard Rashke, describes how Silkwood was exposed to deadly levels of plutonium, and possibly even murdered, in retaliation for her activism. It inspired the 1983 movie "Silkwood," with Meryl Streep in the title role.

About 150 people, faculty, staff, students and members of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union (PACE) attended the event, which took place in the Statler Hotel's Terrace Lounge. Silkwood's union, Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, was the predecessor of PACE.

The commemoration, which was co-sponsored by the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, featured a talk by Tony Mazzocchi, a former colleague of Silkwood's who is now assistant to the executive vice president of PACE as well as a founder of the Labor Party. Mazzocchi spoke about Silkwood's role as a trailblazer who had the courage to demand safe working conditions for her fellow employees and noted that worker safety is still an important issue today. After the Occupational Safety and Health Act was passed in 1970, Mazzocchi was the first person to file an OSHA complaint. ILR faculty member and senior extension associate Lee Adler, who organized the event with Claudia Strednak, called Mazzocchi "the leading health and safety activist and leader in recent American union history."

Rashke's book, which was originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1981, relates how Silkwood was on her way to deliver documentation of fuel-rod tampering to a reporter from The New York Times when her car was run off the road by a never-identified vehicle. The documents she was to deliver were never found. As proof that she may indeed have been murdered, the book cites a summary report, recovered from an obscure FBI file, that graphically describes the car chase scene.

The new edition features a foreword by Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of Labor Education Research at the ILR School, and includes three chapters that explore what has been learned about Silkwood since the book's original publication and what happened to the various people involved. It also traces the long-term effects of the events around Silkwood's death.

Bronfenbrenner, who took part in the commemoration, wrote: "Karen Silkwood was one of those ordinary people who never intend to be a hero" and who suffered the consequences. The Atomic Energy Commission tried to brand her as "a sexually promiscuous, hard-living, drug-popping country hick," and this image was perpetuated in the Silkwood film, whereas the real Karen Silkwood grew up in a middle class home, was a straight-A student in high school and studied to be a medical technologist at Lamar College for a year, before leaving to marry and raise a family. She left her husband when he refused to halt an extra-marital affair, and she saw no other recourse to ending the marriage, Bronfenbrenner said.

Now, "25 years after her death, Silk-wood's life, death, heroism and the aftermath merit a hearing more than ever before," said Bronfenbrenner. While the 1970s, with the emergence of watchdog groups like Nader's Raiders to expose health and safety violations, offered some hope for the future, she stated, today's model of unfettered profits at the expense of worker and consumer safety shows us not "how far we have come but of how much we seem to have lost."

Other leaders at the Wednesday afternoon event included ILR Dean Edward Lawler, Boyd Young, international president of PACE, and Mario Scarselletta Jr., international vice president and director of PACE Region II, based in Glen Falls, N.Y., and chair of the conference.

The book The Killing of Karen Silkwood may be ordered from this web site: http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.