MORE THAN JUST A VICTIM

More Than Just a Victim

Veronica Johannesen was a city worker whose activism in her union, District Council 37, seemed to have little to do with political ambition. A decade ago, believing she and other union members were not being treated fairly by a DC 37 regime that was awash in corruption, she got involved in a reform group known as Members for Change, hoping it would lead to greater democracy.

While some positive changes resulted after numerous top union officials were removed and more than 20 of them were criminally convicted, the union continues to be governed by a system in which delegates who can be easily influenced by patronage elect DC 37's leaders.

During the past few years, we stopped hearing from Ms. Johannesen, and we assumed that perhaps she grew discouraged by the lack of progress and had lost the intensity that marked her.

That assumption turned out to be wrong; she apparently was preoccupied by troubles in her own home with a mentally ill husband, who twice within the last five years was arrested for abusing her. According to the Staten Island Advance, she ultimately opted not to pursue criminal charges and remained in the home with him. It turned out to be a fatal decision: the Advance reported Dec. 20 that John Johannesen called police to report that he had killed his wife, and they discovered her body in their home.

It was a tragic reminder of the scourge of domestic violence, and why the state Labor Department has proposed regulations to increase workplace safety with an eye toward preventing such incidents on the job. (In Ms. Johannesen's case, her troubles with her husband remained confined to their home; co-workers at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development told the Advance that they had never gotten an indication of her troubles away from work.) It would be a mistake to remember her merely as a victim, or to conclude that she was a passive one. She showed her determination and feistiness long before she joined Members for Change, when she pursued a Workers' Compensation claim a quarter-century ago after she developed asthma due to the rampant smoking of her co-workers.

More than half the employees in her office were smokers, its ventilation system was deficient, and the windows were kept closed, ironically, to keep out the smoke from a restaurant on a lower floor of the building. After she was diagnosed with bronchial asthma that had been aggravated by the mix of cigarette smoke and dust in the office, her physician recommended that she work in a smoke-free environment. That is something we now take for granted thanks to reforms over the past decade, most notably by Mayor Bloomberg, but back then her unenlightened superiors in the Koch administration rejected the request.

After twice being rushed to the emergency room for treatment of asthma attacks at the beginning of 1986, Ms. Johannesen brought a Worker's Compensation claim. She won her case, and the ruling was upheld by both the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals. The city's shameful argument that granting an award to her would "open the floodgates" was rightfully slapped down by Judge Joseph Bellacosa, who concluded that the facts clearly supported a finding that she was a victim of second-hand smoke and noted tartly that "cigarette smoke is surely not a natural by-product of the Department of Housing's" mission or her duties as an Office Assistant.

The message was clear: if the city did not take steps to provide a smoke-free environment, it had no one to blame but itself if the floodgates for damage awards were thrust wide open. Changes didn't come immediately, but they occurred soon enough to recognize the role Ms. Johannesen's case had played.

Her willingness to stand up at her job and in her union is how she should be remembered.