He conjured up a labor movement.

• Author: Early, Steve
• Position: The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi - Book review

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

By Les Leopold. Chelsea Green Publishing.

540 pages. $24.95.

A s a thirty-five-year veteran of union activity in America, I can personally attest that Tony Mazzocchi was a visionary. Until his death from pancreatic cancer in 2002, at the age of seventy-six, Mazzocchi was the mensch of the labor left.

Les Leopold's compelling new book on Mazzocchi contains many reminders of his singular contribution to progressive union activism over five decades. Mazzocchi managed to juggle day-to-day union responsibilities with a tireless commitment to civil rights, labor-based environmentalism, job safety reform, single-payer health care, nuclear disarmament, and union democracy. He was a leading architect of the fight for a federal Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970--an accomplishment warranting Leopold's description of him as "the Rachel Carson of the American workplace."

Leopold's detailed recounting of Mazzocchi's career not only illuminates a model of charismatic leadership that empowered both rank-and-filers and friends of labor alike, but also addresses a question that labor leftists, young and older, still grapple with today: How can a trade unionist with strong anti-capitalist views--usually not shared by the workers he or she represents--make his or her politics relevant to workplace struggles in the absence of a mass-based leftwing party?

Mazzocchi was shaped by his childhood experience during the Depression, followed by combat duty during World War II. He came from a boisterous, pro-labor Italian-American family in Bensonhurst--a section of Brooklyn later known for its working class conservatism and mob connections. Mazzocchi's two sisters and a closeted gay uncle were communists, but his own radicalism never turned sectarian. According to Leopold, "formal Marxism and its terminology were far too doctrinaire for Tony." Instead, he was inspired by leftwingers with a popular touch, like East Harlem Congressman Vito Marcantonio, whose American Labor Party campaign for mayor of New York Mazzocchi supported. He "watched and learned how Marc carefully serviced his base, while also staking out radical positions. Not only did he care for 'workers' as a political category--he cared for his constituents personally," Leopold writes.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Mazzocchi took the same approach when he got a job at a Queens cosmetics factory in 1950 and became a union activist...