A debt long overdue.(compensation to sick nuclear industry workers)

Nuclear weapons work made people sick--at last, workers may be compensated.

CLARA HARDING WAS USED TO telling the story of her husband Joe's bitterly slow and painful death from stomach cancer. Since his death in 1980, she had repeated it over and over again to government officials and representatives of Union Carbide--which for 30 years managed the Energy Department's uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Kentucky--all in an effort to get her husband's pension.

In 1971, Union Carbide, citing a leg injury Harding suffered at the plant, promised him a full-disability pension--if he would retire quietly. Harding, who after 17 years on the job was already suffering from several work-related ailments, agreed. The checks, however, never arrived, and Harding's medical insurance and pension were later rejected. "This left me 50 years old with no job, and a crippled leg," wrote Harding shortly before his death. "No Stomach. Bad lungs. No way to get a job, no way to make a living."

After Joe's death, Clara sold her house and began baby-sitting to make ends meet. In the meantime, she continued to fight for her husband's pension in court for several years, before finally accepting a nominal settlement. (Union Carbide and the Energy Department felt so threatened by the pension case that they sent more than a dozen lawyers and experts to confront Clara and her attorney in court.)

On September 21, 2000, Clara, by then in her late 70s and still baby-sitting, was ready to tell her story again, this time ti) members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims, which was debating whether to support a compensation program for workers who had become ill while laboring in the government's nuclear weapons complex.

Although the Senate voted to adopt the compensation program three months earlier as part of the 2001 Defense Authorization Bill, several House Republicans were speaking out against the measure, arguing that there had been no House committee hearings and that the program would be too costly. Leading the opposition was Cong. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who chaired the subcommittee.

Clara, along with several former workers, union representatives, and government officials--including then-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson--had been invited to testify before the subcommittee. According to Richard Miller, then the lead lobbyist for the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical, and Energy Workers International Union (PACE), the hearing proved to be a strategic blunder for opponents of the bill. Instead of providing the momentum to kill the bill, "the hearing inadvertently created a media platform for continued scrutiny" of the plight of the workers.