Public Employee Press

9/11 Act capped 9-year fight by coalition

President Barack Obama signed the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act Jan. 2, guaranteeing health care for the workers and volunteers who served with heroism in the hours and months
after the terrorist attack.

The law capped a 9-year drive on behalf of the first responders and cleanup crews - many of them sick and dying from the toxic dust they breathed at Ground Zero - by DC 37, other unions and New York political leaders.

In the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center, DC 37 went to work to protect members' health and rights. The Safety and Health Dept. worked with local leaders and field staff to demand air quality inspections, press agencies to ready emergency evacuation procedures, file grievances to improve safety conditions for workers at and near the disaster site and survey the health of those exposed to the toxic air.

Topping the agenda of DC 37 and Executive Director Lillian Roberts was the drive to fund medical monitoring, health care, and compensation for the victims of toxic exposures, those already showing symptoms and those who could still get sick.

The long, uphill battle

The uphill battle to pass the Zadroga bill paralleled the resistance individual responders encountered as they sought disability pensions to live on when illness left them unable to work. Sick workers and their survivors gave heartbreaking testimony at a congressional hearing held Sept. 8, 2006, at DC 37. Joseph Zadroga wept as he described the last days of his son, Detective James Zadroga, who worked at Ground Zero and died at 34 of 9/11-related respiratory disease.

On June 23, 2005, Local 2507 Emergency Medical Technician Tim Keller, 41, one of the first rescuers at Ground Zero, became DC 37's first to succumb to disease. City workers continued to die as New York's congressional delegation fought to enact a safety net, and ailing members traveled to Washington repeatedly with Safety Dept. Director Lee Clarke to press for the law.

Republicans in Congress blocked the original bill, but as pressure mounted nationwide, they relented and allowed a compromise $4.3 billion law to pass. "DC 37 is grateful for the hard work of U.S. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer and Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Jerrold Nadler, Eliot Engel and Anthony Weiner," said Roberts.