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Rutgers Labor Center to Celebrate Life and Legacy of Tony Mazzocchi

1981: Tony Mazzocchi, labor leader and organizer for the Labor Party. Photo: Bob Gumpert.

In the 1960s and 70s, conservative leaders of the AFL-CIO and many national unions viewed  militant activists in the civil rights, anti-war, environmental, and women’s movements with alarm. When student radicals started migrating from campus and community organizing to unionized workplaces, the labor officialdom did not welcome them.

But a World War II veteran from Brooklyn named Tony Mazzocchi did. Mazzocchi had risen through the ranks of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW), a CIO union which had a strong tradition of rank-and-file activism and internal democracy. He welcomed Sixties’ radicals into the ranks of labor and went on to personally mentor them. Many of these unofficial Mazzocchi students became effective organizers, grievance handlers, contract negotiators, strike leaders, and movement builders.

Mazzocchi was a role model and catalyst for activism on issues ranging from civil rights to labor-based environmentalism, job safety reform, single-payer health care, nuclear disarmament, and union democracy. His story is recounted well in Les Leopold’s 2007 biography, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor. As an OCAW local officer in New York, legislative director in Washington, and later the union’s national secretary-treasurer, Mazzocchi managed to juggle day-to-day union responsibilities with a tireless commitment to building workers’ political power.

A hundred years after Mazzocchi’s birth, and nearly a quarter century after his death in 2002, several hundred of his friends and allies, new and old, are gathering at the Rutgers University Labor Center on June 4-5, for an in-depth discussion of his life and legacy.

Tony’s path was unusual. After combat duty in the Army, he went to work in a Queens cosmetics factory and joined OCAW Local 149. As a union shop steward, organizer, and........

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