Tony Mazzocchi (1926-2002) was the master of connecting mainstream workers to progressive causes in an effort to “make the bastards pay” and create a more just and environmentally sustainable society. His version of Frank’s Kansas was the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), a union largely comprised of hardscrabble white men who refined oil, produced toxic chemicals and manufactured thermo-nuclear weapons. * Until Mazzocchi (pronounced Mah-Zah-Key) arrived, leaders of this union worked closely with the CIA to subvert left-leaning oil worker unions in Latin America and the Middle East. They also formed an integral part of the national security state by aggressively promoting and cooperating in the nuclear arms race. The OCAW was the red, hot center of Cold War America and the potential antithesis of the emerging environmental movement. For a thirty-year period between the mid-1960s and the 1990s, Mazzocchi transformed this union into the most progressive mass-based labor organization in America. He united workers, the environmental movement and the public health community – hard hats, tree huggers and white coats – to change the face of the workplace. And most importantly, he turned workers into radical anticorporate fighters who believed in economic justice, racial equality, human rights and environmentalism. Mazzocchi grew up in a pro-labor, left-leaning, immigrant home in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn -an Italian working class area famous both for ethnic pride and prejudice. He learned on the streets how to argue politics, whether debating Mussolini supporters or Catholic anti-Semites. And he developed a deep devotion to the working people who populated his world. When Mazzocchi hit the shop floor in 1950, his key supporters behaved like the racists they were raised to be. But over the next several years, Mazzocchi developed an internal educational
*
Through a series of mergers, the OCAW is now part of the United Steelworkers, the largest industrial union in North America.
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process (including an extensive reading club) that transformed these workers into the core of what became the most progressive and daring local union in the country. Mazzocchi’s rank and file fought the mob, campaigned for open housing, and even collected baby teeth for studies showing the impact of nuclear fallout on children’s bones. As author Barbara Garson wrote in All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work (Doubleday, 1975), Mazzocchi’s local was “one of the best union locals in the country. It’s militant, it’s democratic, it has the highest pay in the industry and it has never given up the daily struggle on the shop floor.” Mazzocchi pushed the union beyond the boundaries of contracts and grievances in order to engage with the broader community. Mazzocchi worked closely with Martin Luther King and was often called upon to introduce him at rallies. In addition, Mazzocchi was a founder of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and was instrumental in promoting a ban on nuclear weapons testing. He also became the first trade unionist in America to understand that labor must become “green.” He soon made a startling discovery that had been all but overlooked by the most ardent environmentalists: workplaces all over America were full of toxics and posed a long-term health threat to both workers and neighbors. To transform these toxic-laden work environments, he created the modern occupational safety and health movement and led the campaign that that created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA, 1970). He also turned the plight of asbestos workers into a national cause. And by confronting scores of large corporations, he forced the cleanup of the workplace and, in the process, the protection of the surrounding environment. For Mazzocchi, the workplace safety, the public’s health and the natural environment were all of a piece. He was the Rachel Carson of the shop floor.
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Because of these experiences, by the mid-1960s Mazzocchi realized that the core of any progressive movement must include an alliance between unions and environmental groups. He recognized they were among the only remaining mass-based movements with the capacity to wield political clout – but neither by itself was strong enough to achieve long-term success. Mazzocchi tested his theory by building the first labor-environmental alliance during OCAW’s strike against Shell Oil in 1973. Not only did he use the alliance and the company’s disregard for environmental protection to win the strike, but also he created a pattern of “blue-green” alliance building that has endured to this day. He also invented our “common sense” about toxic hazards. By challenging corporations and rousing the public conscience, he used OSHA to create new laws, regulations and procedures that permanently changed working conditions for all Americans. As a result of his pioneering work, today fewer workers inhale toxic fumes, fewer lungs are filled with poisons, fewer skins are scarred from caustics and acids, and fewer bodies are maimed and mauled. Because of Mazzocchi, there is less suffering from work-related cancer, radiation sickness, emphysema and neurological disorders. The epidemic is not over, but Mazzocchi – more than any other individual – brought it under control. In one celebrated Mazzocchi-led struggle for workplace safety, the price of revolt was martyrdom. On November 13, 1974, Karen Silkwood died in a suspicious car accident in Cimarron, Oklahoma. She was on her way to deliver documents to New York Times reporter David Burnham – documents she claimed would demonstrate that her employer, Kerr-McGee, falsified quality control tests on plutonium rods for an experimental fast-breeder nuclear power reactor. The documents disappeared. While following Mazzocchi’s instructions, Silkwood gathered data for a campaign to prevent the company from “decertifying” the union as the bargaining agent for the workers. Ma zzocchi
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wanted Silkwood to document the appalling working conditions that led to an annual worker turnover rate of more than 60 percent and to what he suspected were intensely toxic exposures resulting from unsafe operations. Teenage boys and girls from the farms of Oklahoma -- just out of high school and eager to take union jobs -- were regularly contaminated with plutonium, the most toxic substance known to mankind. (A pollen-sized grain is sufficient to kill.) Employees were never told by the company that microscopic exposures could lead to cancer. Silkwood died trying to save her union and protect the health of her co-workers. The State Police ruled Silkwood fell asleep at the wheel while under the influence of sedatives. Kerr-McGee leaked stories that she was a “wild child” who slept around, abused drugs and – in a completely unsubstantiated claim – that she contaminated herself with plutonium to make the company look bad. But due to Mazzocchi’s advocacy, major news outlets got the story straight - that Silkwood was wide awake at the time of the crash, and was a serious union activist, not an alarmist. Mazzocchi’s persistent efforts cleared her good name and led to a dramatic clean-up of the nuclear industry. (His hard work also led directly to the celebrated movie, Silkwood (1984), starring Meryl Streep.) Mazzocchi also cleared a path for an army of medical professionals who were drawn to his working class brand of environmentalism. He became the inspiration for a generation of physicians and industrial hygienists who dedicated their lives to workers, to public health and to the environment. He is even credited by some with founding the field of occupational medicine – not bad for a ninth-grade dropout. As one young doctor who served with him put it, “He could bring together these ideas and make them relevant politically. But also, he made such a difference in us. He brought us into this real world and gave us something politically important to do.” †
†
From an interview with Dr. Sharon Itaya .
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Backed by these young doctors, Mazzocchi fought a series of landmark cases, including one on behalf of women workers at Union Carbide who had chosen sterilization to avoid demotions to lower-paying jobs with fewer chemical exposures. As a result of that fight, in July1982, Ms. Magazine listed Mazzocchi as one of its “Ms. Heroes” (“Men Who’ve Taken Chances and Made a Difference”). In a list that included the likes of John Lennon, Norman Lear and Alan Alda, Mazzocchi was credited with exposing “exclusionary fetal protection policies that restrict employment of women of childbearing age and for supporting union women in their campaign to fix the workplace, not the worker.” Little wonder so many progressives saw him as the unsung hero of the union movement. Labor sociologist Stanley Aronowitz said: “What Reuther was to building bureaucratic unionism, Mazzocchi was to building democratic unionism.” As liberal commentator Jim Hightower put it in The Nation, (October 28, 2002), “Tony was the epitome of what labor can be, the kind of labor guy you wish was in charge of every labor union, from the locals to the internationals.” And according to Ralph Nader, a longtime Mazzocchi friend and ally, Tony was “the most visionary, accomplished, and steadfast labor leader in the nation …When Tony speaks I listen, and someday the media may discover this honest, selfless, ever curious patriot.” (Crashing the Party, 2002, pg 196-97.) Mazzocchi was also the protagonist in Paul Brodeur’s award-winning New Yorker series on occupational health, and he was the key figure in Brodeur’s book, Expendable Americans (1974), which described the plight of asbestos workers in Texas. Mazzocchi was so central to the story that
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the New Yorker used the following quotation from him, placed by itself on a blank, full-page ad in the New York Times, to promote the series: “I wanted the whole country to know in detail what had happened at that factory, and to understand that what had gone on there – the fruitless Bureau of Occupational Safety and Health Inspections, the lack of enforcement by the Department of Labor, the whole long, lousy history of neglect, deceit, and stupidity – was happening in dozens of other ways, in hundreds of other factories, to thousands of other men across the land. I wanted people to know that thousands upon thousands of their fellow citizens were being assaulted daily, and that the police – in this case, the federal government – had done nothing to remedy the situation. In short I wanted them to know that murder was being committed in the workplace, and that no one was bothering about it.” About this statement, Brodeur wrote: “What I will always remember are the eloquent and angry words of Anthony Mazzocchi …. A blunt-spoken man, Mazzocchi had long brooded over what he considered the gross immorality that attended the plight of men who were either dying or being disabled early in life as a result of exposure to toxic substances such as asbestos, whose adverse health effects had long been known and ignored by the members of the medical industrial complex.” (Secrets, pg 153-54) Mazzocchi, one of the first trade unionists to oppose the Vietnam War, also took on a piece of the military industrial complex when he ran for president of the OCAW. His opponent, Robert Goss, was backed by the CIA and the leaders of the nuclear weapons complex, along with the largest oil and chemical corporations in America (who were stung by the success of his health and safety movement). In fact Goss was deeply entwined with the CIA. It is likely that he served as an agent, having spent nearly a decade working for a known CIA front group in Latin America (ORIT) – a group dedicated to the subversion of left-leaning unions. Yet in 1979 and 1981, Mazzocchi, the New York radical, was poised to win because of his hard-hitting campaign to reignite a progressive prairie fire not only within his own union but also
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within the broader labor movement. He warned that unless labor returned rapidly to its CIO roots, it would collapse. He called for an independent party of working people and urged a regime of investment controls to tame the runaway economy. He struck a deep cord that won him the allegiance of the vast majority of the union’s rank and file, many of whom were located in the Deep South and Midwest and were not predisposed to support an Italian from Brooklyn. However, in the OCAW’s delegate-style election process, the deck was stacked against him. Although he lost twice by razor-thin margins, he proved that mainstream working people were ready for a radical message not heard since the 1930s. After achieving so much success throughout his career, he was now perceived by many in his union and in the labor movement as a two-time loser, and was moved to the margins of OCAW for the next eight years. By the time he returned to win the number two spot in the union, his dire predictions had come true: The labor movement was in freefall and his union had lost half its members. The problem, he believed, was the utter failure of labor’s strategic partnership with the Democratic Party. Together these coupled and crippled institutions failed to modify labor law, to expand health care, to protect pensions, to control capital flight, to save decent-paying blue-collar jobs, or to improve the basic living and working conditions of most working people. Mazzocchi squared up to the fact that workers were leaving unions and turning against the Democratic Party. He knew they were right to be angry at the labor movement and the Democrats for failing repeatedly to fight for them. Instead of blaming alienated workers and abandoning them to the far Right, Mazzocchi’s answer was to build a new political home for them. Hard cold reason led him to call for labor to
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break from the Democrats slowly and carefully while building a new political party. As Mazzocchi would bluntly say, “The bosses already have two parties. We need one of our own.” So Mazzocchi founded The Labor Party. He came upon this idea long before Nader became a perennial third party candidate. In fact, Mazzocchi’s strategy for a new labor party was designed to avoid precisely the “spoiler” role Nader played. Mazzocchi offered a long-range plan to change the terms of debate in America – similar in scope to what the right had accomplished since the 1964 Goldwater debacle. Mazzocchi, who admired the discipline and simplicity of the Republican’s 1994 “Contract with America,” wanted to build a working class party that would last. To protect it from the folly of egocentric presidential runs, Mazzocchi urged that The Labor Party not run candidates – locally or at the state or national levels – until it could do so competitively with full labor backing and with the real possibility of winning, not just spoiling the race for the Democrats. His “party without candidates” was to provide working people with a political home – a place to create a platform of their own. He wanted it to serve as a vibrant educational formation to introduce new ideas into the rightward shifting American debate. Mazzocchi spent the last 20 years of his life working on this idea. He readily acknowledged it was a long shot. I just look at it as something that has got to be done. I think the chances of defeat are greater than the chances of success – appreciably greater ...What’s the …. expression? To have loved and lost is better than never to have loved? And not to have tried would have been more tragic than to have tired and been defeated. I mean the chances of defeat are overwhelming no matter what you do -- unless you count as success these little pin pricks in the wall of a system.”
Mazzocchi knew his course of action would alienate many of his liberal friends who respected him for his health and safety and environmental work. He knew he would not, at first, be taken seriously by labor’s leadership. He knew he would be largely ignored by the press. But he also
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believed he was the only person in America positioned to give it a go. This was what radicals were born for – and he would die trying. Although the Labor Party gained several hundred union affiliates in its first few years, and although Mazzocchi managed to bring together more than 1,500 labor delegates to launch a new party in 1996, it failed to grow substantially since then. The election of Bush, aided by Nader’s run, and the turn towards war after 9/11, made his difficult project even more challenging. Mazzocchi's time may yet arrive. There is growing unease about the Democratic Party and its inability to articulate a clear alternative economic and environmental message that can attract and hold working people. For many, it seems hopelessly entrapped by global corporate interests. Many are worried that its traditional working class base will never return. Although labor has responded, as usual, by redoubling its efforts to support the Democrats, the strategy seems doomed to failure. Even the centrist New York Times columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, is calling for a green third party to wean the country from fossil fuels. At issue for progressives is the fundamental question about what is “realistic.” As a radical visionary and organizer, Mazzocchi’s perception of what was realistic differed noticeably from what was considered “common sense.” After all, wasn’t it hair-brained for Mazzocchi to introduce CIO radicalism and militancy into a local union in the heart of the American suburbs during the height of McCarthyism? Supposedly, it was also delusional to expect that someone like Mazzocchi could capture power within a union riddled with CIA operatives and advocates of nuclear warhead production. Common sense said it was a pipe dream for anyone to think they could buck KerrMcGee, the Oklahoma State Police and the FBI to salvage the memory of Karen Silkwood and force the clean-up of nuclear facilities. And it was pure fantasy to expect workplace health and safety to
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improve in nearly every major corporation in America as a result of Mazzocchi's workplace environmental campaigns. Because Mazzocchi had the vision to stretch the common sense notion of realism, the workplace indeed changed for the better. This is the most pressing lesson of the Mazzocchi story: serious social change requires challenging and redefining the limits of what is realistic. To do otherwise is to accept the limits of the status quo, which to Mazzocchi meant losing before you started. No. Mazzocchi was certain that his dreams came much closer to working class reality than the nightmares caused by repeated failures of “realistic” political strategies. Perhaps we should take seriously Mazzocchi’s final challenge: “Show me the gains from your realism. Realism got us where we are now – all these compromises. Look where we were and look where we are now. So demonstrate to me where your realism has ever paid off.”
—Les Leopold
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