Celebrating Labor Day with this video honoring Tony Mazzocchi’s induction into the US Department of Labor Hall of Honor in June 2012. Tony Mazzocchi was an important US labor leader and workplace health and safety and environmental activist, who died in 2002. A dynamic labor leader with the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union (now merged with the United Steelworkers Union), his legacy lives on in todays workplaces and ongoing alliances between labor activists and environmentalists. His struggle to address the toxic exposure of tens of thousands of workers led to the passage of the US Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970. Mazzocchi helped push OSHA into being. He conducted a series of very public workshops/hearings in the late 1960s at which workers provided detailed information about the horrendous working conditions on shop floors all over the U.S. and Canada. As early as the 1950s, when the term environment was nowhere on the political radar, Mazzocchi learned about nuclear fallout and began integrating environmental concerns into his union work. His life is recounted in the 2007 biography, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi, by Les Leopold. This book won an Independent Book Publisher gold medal for best 2008 biography. Order a copy of this wonderful book at: chelseagreen/bookstore/item/manwhohatedwork or at your local bookstore.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 12:41:12 +0000
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