Pheww, it’s almost done. I’ve been tied up with my assignment for these last couple of hours. I really want to get rid of it as soon as possible cause right after I finish with this on Tuesday, I’m done for this class baby, there’s one more session the week after that, but it’s gonna be used for the other teams who haven’t presented their case. Good thing my team is volunteering to present on the first day.


The case that we’re gonna be talking about is the silkwood case. You guys prolly haven’t heard of it, I didn’t know it also until one of my team members suggested us to check it out since it’s related with business ethics a lot. So I said sure, why not. I’m sure other teams are gonna be talking about the case that happened nowadays, such as the Martha Stewart or the Enron case, we're taking a few steps back instead. Anyway, this saga happened in the 1970s. Karen Silkwood was a chemical technician at Kerr McGee nuclear company in Oklahoma who discovered numerous violations of health regulations in Kerr McGee’s worksite. The workers had experienced a number of unexplained exposures to plutonium and she wasn’t an exception. Not only that, the company had also falsified some inspection records and manufactured faulty fuel rods. So alarmed of the health risk that she and other workers faced, she decided to become an anti-nuclear activist. She realized that the dangerous situation was actually could be resolved if only the management wanted to heighten the company’s health and safety standards. But they just didn’t care about it.


So Karen decided to report it to the media, she then collected all of the evidences and gathered all the information to support her claim. Poor thing she didn’t know that her phone was bugged and her movement was monitored. One night, she had an appointment with a New York Times journalist to hand in the evidences so the journalist could print the story. But you know what happened??…she never arrived at the appointment’s place, because she died in a car accident on the way there. She was only 28 years old. Her accident arises many speculations since she was an experienced rally driver, and the accident was a one-car crash. And in addition to that, the document that she wanted to give to the journalist was found missing. I believe she was murdered.


Such a tragic story heh?..oh btw, there’s also a movie based on this story starred by Meryl Streep as Karen Silkwood, Kurt Russel and Cher. I watched it a few weeks ago. I'm glad Lolita mentioned about this story to me, cause it relates a lot with the class concept. It really is another proof of how cruel, greedy and corrupt America’s corporate world can be.