The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor

By Les Leopold, AlterNet. Posted April 9, 2008.

American progressives perpetually worry about the limitations of the Democratic Party and the historical rejection of third-party candidates in presidential elections. "Party within the party" approaches have led at times, to breakthroughs, if and when the thrust is part of a mobilized movement. The strategy has been demonstrably most successful in the 40-year takeover of the Republican party by its right-wing constituencies. In those 40 years, the Republican electoral victory has gradually softened Democratic electoral leaders progressivism, creating by now, two corporate parties vying for dominance and agreeing that The New Deal and Great Society overdeveloped wage worker influence on the party and the economy.

Tony Mazzocchi saw this trajectory in development. He had worked effectively within the Great Society ethos to propel worker safety and public health concerns into national policy. Les Leopold's biography of Tony tells the story well. The excerpt from the book which follows is about Tony's evolving electoral focus and his growing commitment to creating a party of and for working people to contest the two corporate parties. Tony recognized the writing on the wall as political discourse transitioned from ridiculing Reagan's voodoo economics (George Bush Sr.'s phrase) to Clintonesque regard for it as "revelation" of free market verities. And this, of course, through the magic dust of false premises, phony data, and seriously diminished active concern for people's lives as a bottom-line evaluation of societal health.

Of course third parties remain problematic. But Tony's conception of his Labor Party Advocates was not simply a political party. Instead it was a political space for teaching and learning, for building a new working-class belief in its own capacity to expect more and do something about getting it. No less, as Tony saw it, because democracy depended on it. Thinned out expectation of decency and dignity at the base of society would eventually topple the whole American experiment.

In pursuit of this political space, Labor Party Advocates was to build membership but run no candidates for at least 10 years. Tony envisaged persistent and wide-scale teaching and learning campaigns among rank-and-file workers, their families and communities. I would see Tony at the Tabard Inn in D.C. talking to advocates across sectors, eating and talking with colleagues with an ever sharp eye on who was coming and going, and who he should catch on their way in or out. In New York he helped conceive the role of the Labor Institute and the Public Health Institute as close partners with union locales to create rank-and-file education programs to break the insidious link festering in the disinformation that claimed healthy environments mean fewer jobs.

To Tony's mind, the worker's mind was a terrible thing to undervalue or to waste. That the neo-laffer curve distracting worker concern for the environment is no longer legitimate in political discourse owes a lot to Tony Mazzocchi's vision and infrastructure intelligence. Furthermore, the far-reaching growth in the last decade of coalitions, alliances and integrated strategizing between community organizers and labor organizers is exactly what Tony had in mind. It may not add up to a third party. In the end, all this could save and recommit this nation's human and capital resources to peaceful, equitable and just uses. From this work have come the local victories (as Laura Flanders reported last year in Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians), for living wages, for community health benefits, for truly progressive candidates winning local and state offices, and against ballot assaults on gays, education and abortion. -- Introduction by Colin Greer

Excerpt: The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi

OCAW secretary-treasurer Tony Mazzocchi, at age sixty-two, was hell-bent on pursuing his backlog of ideas and projects. Bring on the coffee!

Mazzocchi had always wanted OCAW members to have their own college. A decade earlier, he had nearly persuaded the union to buy a campus in Denver. Now he started a university without walls called the Alice Hamilton College (in honor of Alice Hamilton, 1869-1970, the first woman professor at Harvard and a founder of occupational medicine).

Mazzocchi also thought that the health and safety movement badly needed a peer-reviewed professional journal to explore worker-oriented safety, health, and environment issues. He pressed OCAW to start and fund New Solutions, ably edited by Charles Levenstein, then a professor at the Work Environment Department, University of Massachusetts-Lowell.

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Colin Greer is President of the New World Foundation.

Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and Public Health Institute in New York, and author of The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007).