Last week we went to watch a school production of Radium Girls. For those who don’t know the story, it’s about a group of young women in 1920s America who were slowly poisoned by their jobs. Many of the actual Radium Girls were teenagers, and so it was particularly powerful and poignant to watch my 15-year-old daughter’s classmates re-enacting scenes that actually took place a hundred years ago. What happened, during and after the First World War, was that factories in the US hired young women to paint watch and instrument dials with luminous radium paint. It was seen as a good job – well paid, clean, even a little glamorous, given the prestige of making important equipment for the war: glow-in-the-dark tools that would help the soldiers. Because the paint glowed, some of the women painted their nails and teeth with it for fun. Furthermore, to get a fine point on their brushes, they were taught a technique known as “lip, dip, paint” which encouraged them to shape the bristles between their lips, dip in the paint, and then apply. Over and over, all day long. Tragically, with every lick, they were swallowing radium. And, in time, the women began to fall seriously ill. Their symptoms included crumbling jaws, anaemia, bone disease and cancers. Many died young, and although the companies had reason to suspect the danger, they denied responsibility and fought the women in the courts. They even questioned the women’s characters, with suggestions that their illnesses were down to syphilis rather than the paint they’d been told was safe. It’s a pattern we’ve seen many times since: those with power dismissing those without it, and, all too often, men deciding whether women are to be believed. In the play last week, as in real life, all of the decision-makers on the company side were men. So too were the physicians examining, and dismissing, the workers’ symptoms.
But it was the women themselves who eventually fought back. Their legal battles, carried on even as they were dying, became landmark cases because they helped establish that employers can be held responsible for occupational disease. This paved the way for many of the workplace health and safety protections we now take for granted. The French writer Albert Camus, who would have turned 113 this Saturday, had a line for this kind of shared courage: “I rebel – therefore we exist.” For Camus, standing up to injustice was never a lonely act because it bound people together. The Radium Girls are a perfect example of this. None of them could have taken on the companies alone, but together they changed the law, not just for themselves but for generations of workers who came after them.
Thankfully, most of us don’t work with radioactive paint, and physical safety at work has come a very long way since the 1920s. However, “duty of care” doesn’t simply stop at basic health and safety clauses, because many of the risks people face at work today are psychological. In many ways, I’d say that psychological risks - much like radium - are also invisible. They build up slowly, and the damage often isn’t obvious until it’s serious. I hear about people’s unmanageable workloads a fair bit. I listen to friends and colleagues describe the constant pressure they feel they’re under at work, with too few people doing too much. In spite of these realities, I know plenty of folks who simply keep going. With laptops and phones, it’s far too easy to have your work follow you into your evenings, through your weekends, and your family holiday time. While remote and hybrid working does have benefits, it can also leave people struggling alone, with no one close enough to notice they’re not OK. And, just like the Radium Girls, many people still stay quiet about the stress and anxiety their jobs cause them, worried they won’t be believed. That worry isn’t unfounded either, particularly for women, who still too often find their exhaustion put down to “not coping”, and their symptoms taken less seriously, whether by managers or by doctors. Some of the damage, though, is baked into our everyday routines. Much like “lip, dip, paint”, some of our most harmful habits are simply how things are done: sending late-night emails, sitting in back-to-back meetings with no breaks, praising the person who never takes a day off. Take your pick.
A duty of care is a legal responsibility. However, the best leaders in any workplace treat it as something much more human. Unlike Ricky Gervais’s character, David Brent - the bumbling, self-obsessed office manager - a good boss will notice the warning signs, ask questions and actively listen to the answers. They’ll also make it safe for people to speak up, be quick to find solutions, and won’t be afraid to move away from doing things “how they’ve always been done” - all while modelling good practice themselves. In our increasingly digital world, where so much of how people are really doing is hidden behind a screen, these instinctive behaviours of the good boss are more critical than ever. Camus understood this part, too. In The Plague, his novel about a town gripped by an epidemic, the doctor at the centre of the story says that “the only means of fighting a plague is – common decency.” No grand gestures or heroics, just ordinary people paying attention and doing right by one another. A century on from the Radium Girls, the hazards have changed, but the core question hasn’t: are we paying close enough attention to the people around us? Watching those actors on stage last week, the poignancy I felt was also linked to knowing that in a few years those students will be starting their own working lives. I only hope the workplaces they walk into will be ones where someone notices, asks, and listens. See you next week! saigonsays is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell saigonsays that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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