By Illinois Public Radio/KWMU
Chicago, Ill. – U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) is using his star power to advocate for a group of Illinois workers.
Hundreds say they were exposed to radiation on the job in the 1950s and 60s. Obama calls them veterans of the Cold War, and he says workers who helped make nuclear weapons, and who got sick years later, deserve more from the government.
Congress created a program in 2000 to compensate those workers. But Obama says the help has been slow and inadequate. Even elected officials can't get information, he says. "If a United States Senator cannot get timely answers to reasonable questions," Obama said at a hearing Tuesday in Naperville, Ill., "I'm hard-pressed to imagine how a 70-year-old retired worker is gonna obtain the information he needs to effectively present his claims."
Obama says more than 35,000 Illinois workers have claims on file, including former workers at Dow Chemical in Madison and Granite Steel Industries in Granite City.
Tests by the federal government found that most of the workers weren't exposed to enough radiation to qualify for compensation.
The topic is similar to compensation that Cold War-era workers at two St. Louis-area Mallinckrodt plants sought. Sen. Kit Bond helped secure a faster claim process for those workers.