The Man Who United Labor and the Environment

By Will Tanzman, AlterNet. Posted January 3, 2008.

In the last 10 years, labor-environmental alliances have experienced an upswing. In 1999, thousands of union members and environmentalists came together to fight the World Trade Organization on the streets of Seattle. A coalition of labor unions and environmentalists created the Apollo Alliance in 2004 in order to promote a national program of "green-collar jobs" that will protect the environment and decrease the United States' reliance on imported oil. The Apollo Alliance was joined in early 2007 by the Union Sportsman's Alliance, a coalition of conservationists and unions with members who hunt, fish and enjoy the outdoors. In addition to these national efforts, a number of local organizations, coalitions and government agencies have kicked off "green jobs" programs of various sorts.

The work of these alliances is important because it addresses one of the most penetrating criticisms of the environmental movement: the charge that environmentalists ignore human needs. According to this critique, environmentalists are willing to throw thousands of workers out of jobs in order to save an owl that doesn't particularly matter in the grand scheme of things. The fact that many working-class Americans believe that environmental protection is not in their self-interest is a major obstacle for successful environmental regulation. Fortunately for both the environmental movement and workers, economic justice and environmental protection don't have to be mutually exclusive. Every worker deserves a good job, but there is no reason that job shouldn't be in the field of building renewable energy infrastructure, improving energy efficiency in houses and offices or running public transportation. The strength of the green jobs movement is that it is committed to promoting economic justice by creating precisely that set of jobs and ensuring that these jobs provide living wages and decent benefits.

Because of significant clashes between labor and environmental groups in the 1980s and '90s around logging, industrial emissions and auto-efficiency standards, many people are unaware of the long history of labor-environmental partnerships. Fortunately, a book was published last month that reminds us of some important moments in that history. The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: the Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi, by Les Leopold, is the inspiring story of a union leader who was a pioneer in labor-environmental coalition-building.

During more than five decades in the labor movement from the 1950s until his death in 2003, Mazzocchi was a key leader in the movement to make industrial production less harmful to workers, residents of the communities surrounding factories and the natural environment.

Leopold chronicles Mazzocchi's organizing in a variety of social movements and describes his personal life in some detail. Mazzocchi's involvement in the environmental movement is only one part of the book, but a part that is particularly relevant to the struggles in today's economy. Through the lens of Mazzocchi's life and work, Leopold provides a fascinating account of some of the early episodes in the history of labor-environmental collaboration, which can teach us useful lessons for the continuation of that work today.

Tony Mazzocchi joined the labor movement in New York in 1950 as an assembly line worker at a unionized cosmetics factory. Within a few years, he had emerged as a leader in the factory's local union, which soon merged into the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW). Like many of the progressive unions that organized during the 1930s and 1940s, Mazzocchi's local union fought for improvements in the factory, but the movement did not stop at the factory gates. Mazzocchi led his local to help organize unions in a number of other factories in the surrounding area, and he engaged his membership in a variety of local political issues, including support for the early civil rights movement.

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Will Tanzman is an organizer with Interfaith Worker Justice.

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