No Red X's
I read The Radium Girls by Kate Moore recently, and it did something I didn't expect: it made me grateful for every annual safety training I've ever sat through. It also made me go back and ask a harder question — did any of that training actually change how I moved through my own workplace?
Mostly, no.
About the book: The Radium Girls (Kate Moore, 2017) tells the true story of young women who hand-painted glow-in-the-dark watch dials with radium paint in the 1910s–20s, pointing their brushes with their lips on company instruction. Years later they developed crumbling jawbones, anemia, and tumors, while the companies denied any link. Their fight for legal recognition became a foundation for modern occupational safety law.
No Red X's
Every job I've had ran the training. Annual refreshers, procedure binders, a video in a conference room. I sat through all of it. But it arrived as procedure — steps, thresholds, PPE requirements — delivered the same way you'd teach someone to file a report. It never once said: that dust by the security room vents, the one you walk past without noticing. That smell on the open shop floor you stopped registering years ago. The hazards that were actually present didn't get a red X painted on them. They just sat there, camouflaged by routine, while the training talked about hazards in the abstract, somewhere else, to someone else.
We were too cavalier for our own good — but cavalier is the wrong word for what it actually felt like from the inside. It felt like nothing was happening. That's the trick familiarity plays. A knife with a red X on the handle gets respected. The same knife, handled every day without incident, disappears into the furniture. Nobody hands you the paint.
Eyes, Fingers, Toes
Unlike the Radium Girls, we weren't a uniform group of workers sharing one exposure, one employer, one clear villain. We were scattered individuals, each mildly under-cautious in our own way, across different jobs and different decades. That's harder to write about, and maybe harder to fix — there's no single company to name, no one settlement to point to.
But here's what I can say for myself: I wore my PPE. Every time. I valued my eyes, my fingers, my toes — the parts of me I could see, the injuries I could picture. Glasses on. Gloves on. Steel toes laced. That's the equipment the training made vivid, because the harm was vivid. A red X practically painted itself.
What I didn't think about nearly enough was my thyroid. My liver. My lungs. The parts of me that don't show up in a mirror, that don't hurt until they've already been hurting for years. The dust and the vapor didn't come with a red X, because they don't threaten anything I could watch get injured in real time. I was careful about the body I could see and cavalier about the body I couldn't — and nothing in thirty-some years of annual training ever quite closed that gap.
The Crosswalks Exist Now
What's striking, reading about the Radium Girls' plant, is how thoroughly that specific world is gone. Contaminated rags piled in workrooms, waste dumped in a washroom toilet, ventilation venting over a children's playground — none of that happens now, not because the industry got lucky, but because the company was forced to hear it, see it, and change. Regulation, monitoring, industrial hygiene as a discipline — all of it exists downstream of exactly this kind of failure. The crosswalk got painted.
But a crosswalk only works if you use it. The world didn't stop being dangerous when modern safety standards showed up; it just stopped being invisibly dangerous by default. The hazard data exists now. The exposure limits exist. The training exists — abstract as it sometimes is. What's still optional, the way jaywalking is still optional, is whether you actually treat the walk from your car to your desk, your bench, your dip tank, as a hazard zone instead of a formality.
That's the real difference between the Radium Girls' era and ours. They had no crosswalk to use. We do — and the failure now isn't a company hiding the paint. It's an employee, PPE on for the eyes and fingers, walking past the vent without a second thought because the light's green and it always has been.
The Scissor Lifts
And to be fair, some of it clearly did work. Walking the shop floors and assembly bays of one major jet engine company for over twelve years, I never once saw a stepladder. Not one. Scissor lifts were everywhere instead — and once you noticed it, it made obvious sense: thirty and forty foot ceilings, engine stands, overhead crane paths. Somebody had already run the numbers on falls from height and simply engineered the stepladder out of the environment. You didn't have to remember to be careful about height, because the option to be careless about it had been designed away.
That's what a real crosswalk looks like. Not a poster telling you to look both ways — a curb cut, a signal, a system that makes the safe choice the only convenient one. The fall hazard got that treatment. The dust, the vapor, the thing you breathe walking past the security room vent — that mostly didn't. Some risks got engineered out of the environment entirely. Others just got a line item in the annual training and were left for the individual to notice, or not, on their own.
A little knowledge is dangerous. So is knowledge that's real, current, and fully available — if it never gets localized to the room you actually stand in.
P.S. Take a CPR class. Learn what to do for a diabetic or hypoglycemic emergency, and for a choking victim, too. I took that training and the refreshers throughout my career and never once had to use it myself — but others who sat in the same classes did, and it mattered. That's a red X you can paint on yourself, in advance, for someone else's worst five minutes.
Herbert Roberts, P.E. is a licensed professional engineer with 32 years in aviation research and development across two companies, and has spent eight years analyzing accidents for attorneys under his P.E. license.
Leonard, thank you for this — and for the repost. I did not expect a comment with this kind of direct lineage to the actual case. Your father representing the Ottawa dial-painters, and then you spending a career on the other side of OSHA hearings, is a continuity I could not have hoped for a reader to bring to this piece.
Your point about subtlety is exactly the thread I was pulling on with the "crosswalks" and "scissor lifts" sections. The mechanical hazards got engineered out because they were visible and undeniable, in court and on the shop floor. Toxic chemicals and environments are harder to litigate and harder to train for precisely because the harm shows up years later, in a body part nobody's watching. If employers today are making the same arguments in a quieter register, that tells me the century between the Ottawa case and now changed the vocabulary more than it changed the underlying incentive.
I would genuinely value your read on which of those employer arguments have held up best against OSHA scrutiny, and which ones keep resurfacing no matter how many times they're beaten in a hearing room. That sounds like its own article.
As the son of the attorney who represented the Radium Girls o Ottawa, Illinois, I am glad to see you lift their story. The shop floor may have changed, but the lessons haven't. Decades later I, too, became a lawyer. Among others things I represented OSHA in a number of hearings. Employers today,make many of the same arguments, they may be more subtle, but work places remain dangerous places. And some of the hazards you raise have not yet been thoroughly addressed. Especially in the area of toxic chemicals and environments.