By Gowri Kashyap
On April 10, 1917, 18-year-old Grace Fryer started work as a dial painter at the United States Radium Corporation. It was four days after the US had joined World War I, and Grace wanted to do all she could to help the war effort. She had no idea that her new job would change her life — and workers’ rights — forever. This is the story of how a catastrophic incident lead to life altering regulations in the workplace.
Hundreds of young women were employed in clock factories, painting watches and military dials with luminous radium paint. Dial painting was considered "the elite job for the poor working girls"; it paid more than three times the average factory space.
At work, the girls were told to use “lip, dip and paint” routine, wherein they were instructed to slip the paintbrushes in between their lips to create a fine point. Every time they would slip the paintbrush into their mouth, they would ingest a small fraction of the toxic glowing paint. At the time, it was believed that the small amount of the paint ingested was, in fact, beneficial to health, bringing about some colour in their cheeks.
In time, the dial painters came to be known as the “ghost girls” as they would literally glow after their shifts. Radium’s luminosity was alluring and the working women made the most of it by wearing their best evening dresses so that they’d shine in the dance halls at night. They would even paint the glowing paint onto their teeth and cheeks for an illuminating smile.
In 1922, one of Grace’s colleagues, Mollie Maggia had to undergo removal of several of her teeth, due to a grotesque infection that was spreading. To her dentist’s shock, when he prodded delicately at her jawbone, it broke against his fingers. He then proceeded to remove it, "not by an operation, but merely by putting his fingers in her mouth and lifting it out."
She was literally falling apart. And she wasn’t the only one; by now the other workers were having trouble with their jaw and suffering pains in the feet. One by one, the radium girls all saw the same dreadful fate – following the others into their glowing graves. And nearly 100 years later, their graves are still glowing.
The case of the radium girls was the first wherein an employer was made responsible for their employees’ health. It led to life-saving regulations and, ultimately, to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which now operates nationally in the United States to protect workers. Before OSHA was set up, 14,000 people died on the job every year; today, it is just over 4,500.
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