OTTAWA, Ill. – Voters in an Illinois county that went for Trump in the last election have been hoping that the site where the “Radium Girls” were poisoned and died horrific deaths in the 1920s and 1930s would finally be cleaned up are told now that because of Trump cuts it won’t happen.
Ottawa is the county seat of LaSalle County. It’s 46 miles west of Joliet, 83 miles from Chicago, and 74 miles from Peoria. And though Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris carried Illinois by 53%-43%, her Republican foe, Donald Trump, carried LaSalle County with 30,717 votes (58%) to 21,029 (40%) for Harris and 751 for other candidates.
Although all rural counties that went for Trump will get hurt by looming cuts in federal aid to local public schools, the ending of school lunch programs, pending cuts to Medicaid and the like, LaSalle County in general and Ottawa, in particular, has one big extra problem that scars the heck out of its people.
It’s a 17-acre Superfund site, right off the Fox River and U.S. 6.
Remember the book and the 2018 movie The Radium Girls? The story was told several years ago and in a play now running in Los Angeles. Radium watches—watches that glowed in the dark—were all the rage, decades ago. The glow came from radium, a radioactive element, painted on the watch faces by young women, aged 18-20, in a plant in Ottawa, Ill.
The girls were told that the substance they were painting on the watches was healthy and that if they ingested it they would end up with stronger bones and improved health. Between applications on the watches from the 1920s through 1978, the girls licked the paintbrushes clean before loading them up with radium again and painting more watch dials.
They ingested the radium. Victims suffered from “disintegrating jaws, horrible pain in their bones, death from hemorrhages and massive sarcomas”—cancers—”that riddled their bodies,” Wikipedia says, summarizing the book and the movie.
When the Illinois factory, which was later used as a high school, was eventually demolished, “Surface and subsurface soils in various areas of Ottawa were contaminated with radioactive wastes,” the Environmental Protection Agency’s official report about the site says.
“Some buildings in the Ottawa area are contaminated with radon. Soil samples, collected from the landfilled areas, were found to have elevated levels of the radioactive contaminant radium-226.” Areas were fenced off. At least one home was physically moved because the soil under it was too “hot.”
Factory long gone
The radium watch factory is long gone, and pieces of it—also infected with radium—were buried in 16 sites all over Ottawa. Fifteen have been cleaned up, EPA records show, and 32,000 cubic yards of radioactive soils and debris were shipped to a secure storage site in rural Utah.
But the old radium factory site itself, now a fenced-off landfill, hasn’t been cleaned up. It has 140,000 cubic yards of radium-contaminated soil and EPA says to clean it up, workers will have to toil ten feet deep. Only when all that contamination is removed can the site be restored.
Under a schedule the EPA’s Superfund section posted, the last cleanup was supposed to start by last September 30, at a cost of $90 million, and last for four years. The money came from the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But work hasn’t begun yet. Now it won’t.
Local union leaders—including one recently retired state legislator—say it’s been cut off by Donald Trump’s EPA.
Trump’s agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, is not only firing most of the agency’s headquarters workers, but he’s cut off grant money for such projects as Superfund cleanups. Before the cutoff of the Ottawa project, the Superfund cleanup total was scheduled to be $1 billion in Biden’s law for 22 sites nationwide. There is no list on the EPA’s website of which Superfund cleanup grants were yanked.
The contractor for the Ottawa cleanup is a non-union firm headquartered in Georgia, with a Chicago office. The Biden law providing the money gave priority to unionized companies for their projects. But the Ottawa cleanup began more than a decade ago, so it apparently escaped that requirement.
“The bid” to clean up the factory site “went to a non-union contractor whose bid was $20 million below the lowest union bid,” says Dan Mercer, President of the Illinois Valley Central Labor Council. “They started setting up” the site “but no work is being done. We called Sen. Dick Durbin’s office to make sure they were doing something.”
The Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contracts Compliance Policy is involved, too. It’s supposed to oversee federal contractors and ensure they don’t violate civil rights and equal employment opportunity laws.
Or it was. Trump’s minions issued a rule days after he took office this year and sent it to all federal agencies, removing the federal acquisition (procurement) rule banning discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender, religion, or other factors, Brent Barron, president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 648, told People’s World in a telephone interview.
Barron, who is also president of the union’s National Council of Field Labor Locals, and who lives in Chicago’s south suburbs, says that one big but unnoticed change affected one sentence in the procurement rules.
That sentence now specifically says procurement officers don’t have to take a contractor’s record on racial, sexual, religious, gender, or other discrimination into account in deciding if it gets federal work.
In other words, the change legalizes discrimination.
Have to monitor all programs
It also left the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs to monitor all those contractors. There are 1,000 in California alone and another 800-900 in Texas, says Barron.
And that’s where Trump’s puppeteer, multibillionaire Elon Musk and his supposed “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), comprised of 22-year-old computer nerds, enter the picture of peril, Barron adds. Putting it bluntly, DOGE’s planned slashes in the small agency are so severe that it would be incapable of overseeing very much.
“We’re talking of billions of dollars in government contracts,” he says. “Everything from a McDonald’s at a military base to janitorial services in federal buildings” to the Ottawa Superfund site.
The Chicago regional office of the OFCCP oversees contractors in Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, and 11 other states stretching westwards. It had 50-60 federal workers there and in sub-regional offices in Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. Now the regional office will have one chief, three deputies, and five investigators, in total.
“They supposedly got fully funded under the continuing resolution,” the temporary money bills Congress approved to keep the government going through the end of this fiscal year on September 30, says Barron. “But at some point, we expect they’ll implement the RIFs (reductions in force)” Musk and DOGE mandate. “That’s what’s coming for those who haven’t resigned already.”
The agency overall has—or had–800 workers to cover the whole country, Barron explains. Now it’ll be cut in half. But OFCCP still must oversee the contractors’ compliance, or lack of it, with civil rights laws. “It’s already taking 175 years to get to each workplace.”
There’s one other problem with such cuts, at least in Illinois, and probably in other states, too, Barron warns. Not only is Musk out to line his own pockets—and those of the corporate class—by cutting government workers and programs, but there will be nothing and nobody to stop outright graft.
“Somebody comes in” for a project like the Ottawa cleanup “and hires their friends,” Barron says. “I’ll put you on the payroll for $100,000 and you kick back $50,000 to me.”
But the ultimate aim is even more sinister, he warns.
“The gist of this is to make agencies no longer functional” by stripping them of workers and dollars. “So the American people would then say ‘Why do we need an EPA, an OSHA, and so on?’”
Which is a longtime right-wing goal. Grover Norquist, a radical right big wheel and head of the so-called “Americans For Tax Reform,” a lobby that opposes any and all tax increases and makes Republicans sign “no taxes” oaths, put it succinctly, 24 years ago:
“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
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