Anthony Mazzocchi (June 13, 1926 – October 5, 2002) was an American labor leader. He was a high elected official of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW), serving as vice president from 1977 to 1988, and as secretary-treasurer from 1988 to 1991. He was credited by President Richard Nixon as being the primary force behind enactment of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970.
While serving as OCAW legislative director in the fall of 1974, Mazzocchi mentored Karen Silkwood, a union activist and whistleblower employed in an Oklahoma plutonium production plant who became, in Mazzocchi’s words, a “union martyr”. In the 1990s, he was co-founder of the U.S. Labor Party.
Early life Anthony Mazzocchi was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York, on June 13, 1926, to Joseph and Angelina (Lamardo) Mazzocchi. Both of his parents were Italian immigrants from Naples. His father was a garment worker and union member. The family was very poor, and Mazzocchi slept in the same bed with two of his siblings. His mother died of cancer when Mazzocchi was six years old, and the family lost their home because of the cost of her medical care.
His future politics were shaped at a young age. His two sisters and a closeted gay uncle were members of the Communist Party. In 1949, Mazzocchi supported socialist candidate Vito Marcantonio in his bid to become Mayor of New York City. These early influences and experiences played a major role in forming Mazzocchi's radically progressive political views.
Mazzocchi dropped out of high school in the ninth grade when he was 16 years old. Lying about his age, he enlisted in the United States Army, and fought in Europe during World War II as an anti-aircraft gunner. He saw combat in three major campaigns, most notably the Battle of the Bulge, and helped to liberate Buchenwald concentration camp.Jim Hightower, "Going Down the Road: Tony Mazzocchi, 'Labor Guy'," The Nation, October 28, 2002. Mazzocchi served in the Army from May 1, 1943, to March 3, 1946.
After his discharge in 1946, Mazzocchi got a job as an autoworker for Ford Motor Company in Edgewater, New Jersey.Katherine Isaac, "A Union View of Worker Safety," Multinational Monitor, October 1997. Having read extensively while in the Army, he went back to school and graduated from vocational-technical school while working as a construction worker and steelworker in Brooklyn. In 1950, he took a job at a Helena Rubenstein cosmetics factory in Roslyn, New York, where he became a union organizer.
Union career In 1953, at the age of 26, Mazzocchi was elected president of the United Gas, Coke, and Chemical Workers' Union (UGCCWU) Local 149, having run on a pledge of equal pay for women. Within a few years, he had not only won equal pay for equal work for women but also negotiated a health insurance plan—one which included the first dental insurance coverage in the private sector in the U.S. During his tenure as president of Local 149, Mazzocchi also led numerous successful organizing drives. He merged several smaller locals into his own and conducted a number of organizing drives, until Local 149 represented workers in 25 companies. He was elected vice-president of the Nassau-Suffolk CIO Council from 1952 to 1955, and (after the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955) the Long Island Federation of Labor from 1955 to 1973.
Mazzocchi became increasingly influential within UGCCWU. He helped engineer the 1955 merger of UGCCWU with the Oil Workers International Union to form the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union. In 1957, he was elected to the International Executive Board of OCAW from District 8. He served until 1965, when he was appointed OCAW's Citizenship-Legislative Director.
Passage of OSHA and other political work In the 1960s, Mazzocchi was one of the first labor leaders to begin building strong ties with the environmental movement, an effort which paid off in the passage of major federal worker legislation. In 1962, he read Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring. Mazzocchi reasoned that if small doses of the chemicals discussed in Silent Spring caused harm, the workers who received large doses in manufacturing plants must be in medical danger.
Mazzocchi used this insight to begin building support in the environmental movement for worker health and safety. He began pushing the labor movement to support environmentalists.
Mazzocchi became a national staffer in 1965. That year, long-time OCAW president O.A. Knight retired. Secretary-Treasurer Alvin F. Grospiron ran for president, and Mazzocchi strongly backed his candidacy. The election was a bitter one. Knight had allowed the Central Intelligence Agency to use the union as a cover for covert operations, and had accepted large sums of money from the agency.David Langley, "The Colonization of the International Trade Movement," in Autocracy and Insurgency in Organized Labor, 1972; Hirsch and Muir, "A Plumber Gets Curious About Exporting McCarthyism," in The Cold War Against Labor, 1987. Because of his support for Grospiron, Mazzocchi was appointed OCAW's Citizenship-Legislative Director in 1965. He used his position to push strongly for health and safety language in union contracts, as well as for state and federal legislation on the issue.
In 1969 and 1970, he organized a series of public meetings in which OCAW and other union members testified about the chemicals they were handling and the health problems they were having. Scientists also testified about the danger of these chemicals. The public meetings gained widespread press attention. Mazzocchi also used the hearings to help educate workers on the legislative process, and trained them to act as lobbyists for federal health and safety legislation. The media attention and pressure from union members provided critical support for congressional attempts to pass comprehensive occupational health and safety legislation. In December 1970, Congress enacted and President Richard Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA). Nixon specifically cited Mazzocchi's leadership and grassroots organizing efforts as key in winning passage of the Act.
Because of his strong ties to the environmental movement, Mazzocchi was named chair of the first Earth Day rally in New York City on April 22, 1970.
Mazzocchi was also influential in Democratic politics. He campaigned on behalf of Adlai Stevenson in 1956, and became one of Long Island's most politically influential labor leaders. In 1964, Mazzocchi considered running for Congress. But, after being advised by party leaders that he was too radical for the electorate and would endanger the candidacies of other Democrats, he never undertook a campaign.
He did mount a campaign against asbestos hazards in the mid-1960s. Numerous studies had documented the health hazards of long-term exposure to asbestos beginning in the 1930s.Bowker, Fatal Deception: The Terrifying True Story of How Asbestos Is Killing America, 2003 After becoming legislative director for OCAW, Mazzocchi began a worker education campaign on the dangers of asbestos in the workplace. Workers with asbestosis, lung cancer, and peritoneal mesothelioma played a prominent role in the occupational health and safety conferences he organized as part of his OSHA campaign.
In 1971, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration promulgated the first national standards for workplace exposure to asbestos. But Mazzocchi believed the OSHA standard was too lenient, and worked to have the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health conduct additional research into the toxicity of asbestos. In 1976, NIOSH issued a revision of its toxicity assessment for asbestos. But under significant pressure from asbestos manufacturers, OSHA refused to issue a revised standard.
Mazzocchi continued to fight for a new asbestos standard, and in 1986 OSHA issued a temporary revised standard. Mazzocchi's efforts for a stricter standard continued, and in 1992 OSHA issued a final revised standard which cut in half the levels of asbestos exposure permitted under its 1986 rule.
He believed his most profound contribution was linking the scientific and public health communities with workers and unions to create the modern occupational safety and health movement. When speaking during the 1960s about the exposure of hundreds of workers to asbestos in Tyler, Texas, he said:
I wanted the whole country to know in detail what had happened at that factory, and to understand what had gone on there—the fruitless...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.
The Silkwood case Mazzocchi became a trusted friend and confidante of Karen Silkwood in the brief time he knew her before her tragic death. She was a technician at a Kerr-McGee nuclear fuel milling, conversion, enrichment, and fuel rod fabrication plant in Crescent, Oklahoma, about 30 miles north of Oklahoma City. Silkwood, a newly elected union representative, came to suspect that Kerr-McGee officials were falsifying records about the integrity of the plant's plutonium nuclear fuel rods. She and two other workers from the Crescent plant met with Mazzocchi in Washington, D.C., the week of September 26, 1974.Hannam, The Death of Karen Silkwood, 2000. Although Mazzocchi was preoccupied with his asbestos fight, he spent a day talking to the three workers. They knew almost nothing about the dangers of the radioactive materials they were working with, and Mazzocchi helped educate them about the hazards.
At this meeting, Silkwood confided to Mazzocchi that she believed Kerr-McGee was falsifying some of its quality-control records. Mazzocchi arranged for the three to testify before the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) regarding safety failures at the Crescent plant. Mazzocchi also outlined a two-point plan for the workers to follow. First, they would pursue the safety lapses with the AEC. Second, and more importantly, Mazzocchi asked Silkwood to collect more information about the quality-control problems. She was not to take any documents, but was to take notes on documents, record what she observed, and begin building a case. Mazzocchi believed that by leaking information to the press and following up with public testimony, he could create the same outcry for change that had proven so successful in the OSHA campaign. When Silkwood discovered in early November that she had been contaminated with dangerous levels of plutonium, Mazzocchi feared that Kerr-McGee might pinpoint her as the source of the information OCAW intended to leak to The New York Times.