The Illusion of Individual Resistance

Though little remembered today outside of Oklahoma, Silkwood’s employer, Kerr-McGee, epitomized the US energy establishment. Ranked 129 on the Fortune 500 in 1975, with more than a billion dollars in assets invested in oil, uranium, potash, helium, asphalt, and coal, the company was a household name across the American Southwest, where hundreds of gas stations bore the company’s trademark blue and red “K-M.”

Silkwood spent her shifts working with plutonium pellets in a laboratory glove box, a sealed container with glove access points, at a plant thirty miles north of KM’s Oklahoma City headquarters. She ground and polished the pellets before they were assembled into fuel rods and welded shut. She believed that these welds were faulty and that their required quality-control checks had been doctored — a claim later confirmed by government inquiries after her death.

Her own multiple plutonium exposures — as well as those of scores of her colleagues — exposed the plant’s dangerous safety lapses. She was on her way to meet a New York Times reporter when her car crashed into a concrete culvert just outside her workplace in rural Crescent, Oklahoma.

A car wreck in the darkness. A secret rendezvous between an activist employee and a famous journalist. A thin, white, attractive twenty-eight-year-old mother of three, dead inside a mangled car. An irradiated woman, just back from Los Alamos where she had undergone specialized full body testing after her home was found to have been contaminated with plutonium: Karen Silkwood’s death was cinematic, even before Meryl Streep portrayed her on screen.

The deceptions of Watergate, the US war in Vietnam, and the Church Committee’s revelations of widespread illegal surveillance of US citizens — mostly leftists — by the FBI and CIA stood as vivid reminders that the most powerful institutions in the world engaged in criminal acts with impunity. For this reason, liberals cheered the individuals and organizations that exposed such criminality.

Figures like Daniel Ellsberg, who copied and leaked the Pentagon Papers, and Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke elements of the Watergate affair, were revered not only because they revealed the sordid inner workings of power, but also because their very existence provided reassurance that exposure worked as a tool for democratic accountability.

It is not coincidental that the early 1970s is when the term “whistleblower” first came into political parlance. Ironically, because “Vietnam,” “Watergate,” and COINTELPRO were so confusing, and the cast of characters involved so large, the names of individuals associated with exposing these conspiracies took on outsize significance. Narratives demand simplicity; it takes a hero to take down a villainous regime.

“Karen Silkwood” was created as a folk hero by a left political culture that, while deeply cynical about institutions, still clung to the idealistic belief in the power of individual action to challenge systemic corruption or wrongdoing.

Death, Deception, and Nuclear Dangers

In the summer of 1975, leaders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) based in Washington, DC, began to organize around Silkwood’s story, linking the mystery of her death to the activism she carried out in life. To draw attention to Silkwood’s story, her death became the tantalizing hook in NOW’s demand for a Ccngressional investigation. NOW framed this demand as part of a larger effort to address violence against women and the dismissive attitudes of male officials toward outspoken women — Silkwood included.

By establishing November 13, 1975, as Karen Silkwood Day, NOW highlighted the broader issue of systematic disregard for women’s voices. In a letter to chapter members, NOW wrote, “If we allow her death to go by unacknowledged, unprotested, and uninvestigated, we will all be that much more vulnerable when the going gets tough.” NOW’s Karen Silkwood Day activism spawned protests nationwide and tens of thousands of signatures on petitions.

But such hero worship has its costs. Advocacy around Silkwood’s death, and the posthumous fame that ensued, diverted attention from the underlying plant conditions she sought to spotlight and the multiple exposures to deadly plutonium she sustained at the end of her life.

In life, Karen Silkwood worked hard to focus her coworkers’ attention on the hazards of their jobs — jobs that had become more perilous over the course of her two-year employment as production pressures ramped up. Silkwood feared for her safety and that of her coworkers, who had been woefully misled by management about the dangers of the job.

The Kerr-McGee plant, where Silkwood worked, fabricated plutonium fuel rods for a government-owned experimental “breeder reactor” — a nuclear reactor that produces more fissile material than it consumes. During the high point of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo, dreams of energy independence were pinned on the success of the breeder, which President Richard Nixon described in 1973 as “our highest priority target for nuclear research and development.”

The Union Struggle for Safety

As Kerr-McGee faced pressure to fulfill its contracts with the government, the plant began to cut corners on worker training. Required radiation training went from forty hours to just twenty-four — and even then, new personnel often began work without any training whatsoever. Silkwood saw this dangerous combination of a high turnover rate, lax regard for safety, and the handling of a dangerous substance as a recipe for disaster.  Karl Z. Morgan, a pioneer in the field of medical physics, described the Cimarron facility as among the worst he had ever seen, betraying a “wanton disregard for the health and safety of its employees.”

Silkwood was especially alarmed by the inadequate training workers received. If inhaled, minute particles of plutonium can cause cancer, yet the word “cancer” was nowhere to be found in any corporate training material. Until Silkwood helped arrange a visit by two plutonium experts a month before she died, many plant workers did not realize that the material they handled was one of the world’s most powerful carcinogens.

“From human experience to date, we have nothing to worry about,” explained the plant’s former manager — a statement deliberately intended to reassure workers who were unaware of cancer’s latency period. By the time Silkwood became seriously contaminated — her home was found to have radioactive traces the week before her fatal car accident — she was quite worried. She feared she would die of cancer or have children born with severe disabilities. She even collected her used menstrual pads in hopes that Los Alamos scientists could analyze their radioactivity.

But Silkwood’s campaign, like those of many whistleblowers, was not purely altruistic. Her activism was also a labor tactic. As one of the three workers on her union’s collective bargaining committee — and the first woman to hold the position in the male-dominated workforce — Silkwood was deeply involved in union efforts.

As happened in many unionized workplaces in the 1970s, the Cimarron facility faced a decertification drive — an employee-initiated, management-supported effort to kick out the union. And anti-union sentiments were highest in the laboratory where she worked, where many of her coworkers resented her bitterly and considered her activism a running joke.

With the support of the Washington, DC–based leadership of her union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), Silkwood undertook what was to be a multipart plan. First, to fend off the decertification election, the union would prove its value through an education drive that highlighted the hazards of plutonium exposure and Kerr-McGee’s strategic campaign of ignorance.

Once the union narrowly avoided decertification, Silkwood was responsible for phase two of the plan: accumulating documentation that Kerr-McGee falsified quality-control records. The union hoped that the publicity surrounding these records would be “an exclusive bombshell to drop on the company” amid negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement.

Retaliatory Tactics

To some, these facts might make Silkwood less like a hero and more like a tactician focused on securing a better union contract. But we should avoid fixating on her supposed personal motives. A focus on the character attributes of a truth-teller rather than the context from which they emerge not only runs counter to the concept of whistleblowing — which is fundamentally about the disclosure of information that serves the public interest — but also plays into the hands of a retaliatory management.

This is why the most powerful whistleblower protection laws afford confidentiality. A boss has a harder time retaliating if he doesn’t know who blew the whistle, and an anonymous complaint keeps the focus on the behavior of the employer.

Karen Silkwood’s death eliminated the need for Kerr-McGee to use typical retaliatory tactics like dismissal, transfer, or blacklisting. Instead, it gave management free rein to engage in the most damaging form of retaliation: attacking a whistleblower’s credibility so as to divert from the unwanted questions she raises. Misogyny is a timeless tool for diminishing a woman’s credibility.

Because Silkwood died, she could not respond when Kerr-McGee suggested that she had been a drug addict who smuggled plutonium in her vagina, slept around, and abandoned her kids. When Silkwood’s family filed a lawsuit against Kerr-McGee, these insinuations became more overt in depositions.

In 1977, when corporate lawyers questioned Silkwood’s family and friends in sworn testimony, Kerr-McGee’s lawyer asked Silkwood’s father, “Did she ever become hysterical?” The same attorney probed Silkwood’s boyfriend: “Do you think Karen may have been what medical science classifies as a nymphomaniac?” The answer to both questions was “no.”

Bosses’ “Nuts and Sluts” Subterfuge

The flagrant misogyny of Kerr-McGee’s efforts at character assassination shouldn’t obscure the broader power dynamics at play. Retaliation against whistleblowers like Silkwood often appears to be an expression of revenge but is, in reality, a strategic way for management to discredit a whistleblower as troublesome and to discipline the workforce. By framing a complaint as resulting from an individual’s emotional disturbance rather than systemic corruption, employers shift attention away from structural issues and onto a whistleblower’s credibility.

Retaliation is fundamentally an affirmation of power, demonstrating the harm to one’s reputation, career, family, and sense of security that awaits those who confront authority. Although sexism was especially vivid in the Silkwood case, men who resist unethical and illegal workplace practices are also subject to these dynamics.

Indeed, dismissal, demotion, transfer, and blacklisting can be understood as techniques of emasculation insofar as work enables a man to provide for his family — and also highlights his dependence upon his bosses. Employment lawyers call these techniques of diversion the “nuts and sluts” strategy: casting doubt upon the message by focusing attention upon the messenger.

With this strategy, employers always have the upper hand, leveraging the real emotional toll of retaliation — which not infrequently results in depression, divorce, unemployment, and even suicide — as further evidence to undermine whistleblowers. John Barrett, a longtime quality-control manager at Boeing who publicly blew the whistle on defects on the Dreamliner, described the tension created by the hostile environment he faced at work and his efforts to concentrate on airplane safety.

“It has taken a serious mental and emotional toll on me,” Barrett said. “But you know I want to try very hard to keep the focus on the safety of the airplane. That’s what my story is about.” Barrett died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in March of 2024 during his deposition for a suit he brought against Boeing for wrongful termination.

Whistleblowers Are Workers Too

In the next four years, many more lives will likely be devastated by retaliatory power. President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to radically roll back environmental, health, and consumer protection rules and has expressed a desire to strip civil service protections from tens of thousands of civil servants, and he will very likely continue his long-standing pattern of brazen corruption. As a result, whistleblowing is poised to become even more of a defining feature of Trump’s second term than it was during his first — a term bookended by women who accused him of wrongdoing and were sexualized and shamed for their testimony.

If and when whistleblowers emerge, Trump’s opponents should avoid the trap of focusing on their personal character — something they failed to do last time. After former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before the January 6 Committee, Trump tweeted a broadside against her character (“total phony”) and her knowledge (“bullshit artist”). “This girl,” Trump later said in an interview with Newsmax, has “got serious problems, let me put it that way,” adding, “mental problems.” After her testimony, the former president and his allies floated stories attacking her character to Trump-allied media.

Meanwhile, Trump’s enemies rushed in to defend Hutchinson’s character. Republican representative Liz Cheney pointed out that many of Hutchinson’s “superiors, men many years older,” were “hiding behind executive privilege, anonymity and intimidation,” but “her bravery and patriotism were awesome to behold.”

Democratic House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi reflected, “It was almost angelic to see her with the confidence and the clarity of message, the clear patriotism.” Pelosi called Hutchinson “a gift to our country.”

Many more Americans can conjure up an image of Hutchinson’s youthful beauty, her resolute posture and crisp white blazer, than can recall the details of her testimony and their significance. (Among many other things, she testified that despite knowing his supporters were armed, Trump wanted them to march to the Capitol because “they’re not here to hurt me.”)

While the desire to lionize a truth-teller — especially one who has experienced life-threatening retaliation from the most powerful forces on Earth — is understandable, it risks reducing them to symbols rather than addressing the crucial role they play. It is an unstable basis for an enduring politics that takes whistleblowers seriously for what they are: labor activists whose jobs afford them a view into domains where employers hold nearly unchecked power.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Karen Silkwood’s death, we should honor her legacy by strengthening whistleblower protections while we still can. This means moving beyond character-driven narratives and recognizing whistleblowers not as sinners or saints, but as workers trying to improve their workplaces for themselves, and for all of us too.