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Originally Posted by issybird
...For me, the bottom line is that at some point, and fairly early on as girls were picking pieces of their jaws out of their mouths, they knew. This is where I can't give them a pass; they continued to expect their workers to ingest radium. That by stopping pernicious practices they'd be tacitly admitting both to the truth and to culpability was the only moral position possible. For those individuals who decided that his own well-being was more important than the lives of the girls there is no excuse that holds.
...And yet, and yet. I can't help thinking that we ignore such stories at our peril. The Radium Girls in addition to being a compelling story in itself, strikes me as an effective if flawed means of getting people to think perhaps a little more critically at how the already disadvantaged are used and abused and about the power of corporations and government entities. I wish it were better, but in a way I think we have the luxury of picking it apart here as it's already preaching to the choir, so to speak. I don't advocate slanted means of persuasion, but I think the takeaway from this is reasonably true to the facts.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
...My main takeaway is that women in the workplace have been and continue to be exploited. The men in their laboratories had protective gear; the women, nothing--they didn't matter. Management lied and denied and put profit above all else. (Beyond the safety issues, I was outraged that the women were being paid for piecework, not a regular hourly wage.)
Last year I read a book about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (Triangle, by David Von Drehle). The bosses ignored basic safety regulations, even keeping doors locked (to prevent possible pilfering), and when fire broke out, more than a hundred women--mostly young immigrants--perished because of those locks. In court proceedings, the bosses attacked the credibility of the survivors, lied and obfuscated, avoided criminal conviction but ended up paying minimal damages in a civil suit. The specific circumstances were very different, but as I was reading about the dial painters, I kept thinking about the Triangle victims and how cheaply held were the lives of the women workers in both situations.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
To follow on from Catlady's reference to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, I have just been watching a documentary about the use of Benzene and N Hexane (I think that's what the second chemical was called) in the making of cell phones in China, including iPhones for Apple plus other manufacturers as well. Once again, lowly workers with little knowledge or support who then became ill some years later with leukemia in the case of Benzene, and with nerve damage requiring years of treatment in the case of N Hexane. The film was made under cover by activists in China.
Sadly, things don't change all that much - I suppose we just move them offshore from the more affluent countries to the developing ones.
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Well said! Your comments are big takeaways from this book for me.
We seem to have forgotten many of the hard-learned lessons of the early industrial age. As we were discussing this book, I note two events over the past week - the announcement of the proposed rail bypass for Lac Megantic and the start today of the Grenfell Tower hearings. We learned a long time ago how to run a cargo train safely and how to construct and maintain a fire-proof high rise; there are well-established standards for these things, and we used to have organizations to enforce them. But now we seem to rely on profit-centered organizations to self-police. That didn't work well in the past. I fear that relearning that is going to be a very painful and costly process.
I applaud the choice of this book; it was a great fit for the theme.