Tony Mazzocchi Centennial Conference

The Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations hosted a two-day centennial conference around what would have been Mazzocchi's 100th birthday, June 4 and 5.

Background 

To understand the United Steelworkers Tony Mazzocchi Center (USWTMC) for Health, Safety and Environmental Education, you first must understand the man whose name it carries.

Tony Mazzocchi was born in 1926 in Brooklyn, N.Y., raised in a working-class neighborhood where he learned politics from his father, uncles and aunts, all union men and women. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade, lied about his age to enlist in the infantry at 16-years-old, and fought in three major campaigns across Europe during World War II. When he came home, he gave himself over entirely to the labor movement.

Over the decades that followed, Mazzocchi built a national campaign that led directly to the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act of 1970. He was the first union leader to forge a real alliance with the environmental movement, helping push through the Clean Air Act. He fought for single-payer health care long before it was a mainstream conversation, founded the Labor Party in 1996 because he believed working people deserved their own political voice, and never stopped organizing. He fought for the labor movement until he died of pancreatic cancer in 2002.

That legacy brought lots of labor activists, educators and union representatives to New Brunswick, N.J., this past June.

The Conference

The Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations hosted a two-day centennial conference around what would have been Mazzocchi's 100th birthday, June 4 and 5. The program dug into the themes he spent his life advancing: worker education, environmental justice, occupational safety and health, and independent labor politics — both as history and as living, unfinished work. The conference also launched the official Tony Mazzocchi Archive, now permanently housed at the Labor Education Center, which includes writings, artifacts, and an oral history project collecting the voices of people who knew him and workers whose lives he shaped.

Ashlee Fitch, Steelworkers Charitable and Educational Organization (SCEO) director and principal investigator for the USW Tony Mazzocchi Center, was among those at the table. On the first day, she joined four fellow panelists for a discussion on worker education, the work the center exists to carry forward.

The rest of day one focused on Just Transition, the concept Mazzocchi himself put into words: that moving away from harmful industries is necessary, but workers can't be left behind in the process. There were also breakout groups that held meaningful conversations meant to mobilize our communities and campaign, networking, debate and some talk about change.

Day two brought panels on occupational safety and health and closed with a dedicated discussion on the Labor Party — the party Mazzocchi built because he believed working people needed a seat at the table that was theirs. These panel discussions across both days were intended to help build the future and not just to come together to celebrate Mazzocchi’s birthday. 

Matthew Velker, a training coordinator at the TMC, attended both days and said, “It was amazing to be surrounded by so many people from different organizations that embrace Tony’s legacy just as we do.”

“Developing worker-trainers and providing workers with health and safety education is at our core,” Velker said. “It was inspiring to hear the stories and history of those that knew Tony and grew in their labor activism under his mentorship.”

It was, in the end, exactly the kind of conference Tony Mazzocchi would have shown up early for and been the last to leave.