Workers Win More Help After 5 Years
By Richard Powelson
Knoxville News Sentinel
November 7, 2004

It was historic nearly five years ago when Congress and the Clinton administration finally set up financial aid for former nuclear weapons plant workers who developed long-term illnesses.

But what they created had mixed success, and it was only a week ago that a revised law took effect with the potential to help thousands more injured workers or survivors who got no aid from the first effort. A large number of the affected who are seeking workers' compensation once worked in Oak Ridge.

Despite the promising turn of events, it is unclear when the Department of Labor will have new, faster regulations in place. Congress gave Labor up to 210 days to fully take over pending claims from the Department of Energy, which is continuing a review process criticized as extremely slow.

Sick workers or their survivors pursued federal assistance for decades and finally started getting much national attention in early 2000.

That was the year when then-Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., put them high on his priority list. He was chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and had heard from many struggling, sick workers, especially from East Tennessee. He held a public hearing in Washington so they could tell their sad stories and win over more senators to approve financial relief.

Ann Orick, former K-25 plant worker at Oak Ridge, that year described the "living dead" hoping for aid before death. Vikki Hatfield, daughter of a dying former K-25 worker, said he couldn't even get insurance coverage for pain medicine to ease his final days.

The Clinton administration three weeks later announced it wanted a law to pay $100,000 lump sums to more than 3,000 workers with specific work-related diseases.

Thompson and a few others pushed successfully in a Senate bill for $150,000 lump sums to those with certain diseases. The House agreed to the Senate's provision.

But the lump-payment program faced a big scare months later when the Bush administration took office and tried to move administration from the Department of Labor, which was the Senate's idea, to the Department of Justice, which had a spotty record on claims for injured former uranium miners.

Thompson and a few others convinced Bush's Labor Department to keep the payment program. Since then, the department has been praised for getting payments to more than 12,000 claimants over four years.

However, Labor's initial program, as dictated by Congress, covered only diseases from exposure to radiation, beryllium or silica. Workers with other illnesses had to seek workers' compensation through a very long, slow process in the Department of Energy. Nearly 25,000 had applied by this year, but a report in August showed only 31 had won benefits. That included 12 from Oak Ridge.

So, Tennessee Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bill Frist this year joined supporters of a Senate amendment to take the workers' compensation program from DOE and give it to the Labor Department.

A few people like Janet Michel, another ill former K-25 worker, went office to office to convince members of Congress to back putting the Labor Department in charge of workers' compensation claims.

Four House members from the state - Bill Jenkins, Lincoln Davis, Jim Cooper and Bart Gordon - worked with others on the change. East Tennessee Republicans Zach Wamp and John J. Duncan Jr. initially wanted to keep the program at DOE with improvements in processing, but they accepted the majority opinion when the legislation began flying to quick passage. President Bush signed it into law.

The main lesson in the sick workers' ordeal, however, is that the government must be more vigilant in planning safe environments for its contract employees.