In early June, hundreds of labor activists gathered at the Rutgers Labor Education Center for a conference marking the creation of the Tony Mazzocchi Labor Archive. Mazzocchi died in 2002, but his name is still legendary among older labor, occupational health, and environmental activists. And as the conference revealed, he remains a source of inspiration to those who strive for a working-class alternative to the political duopoly.
Over five decades that spanned the second half of the twentieth century, Mazzocchi rose through the ranks of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW), waging a relentless campaign on the occupational diseases that were maiming his membership. During a period when much of the labor movement bristled at antiwar activism, environmentalism, and feminism, Mazzocchi founded an antiwar group, spoke at Earth Day, and opposed corporate policies that barred fertile women from production jobs at industrial plants.
Scores of Mazzocchi’s activist heirs — some who knew him and many who did not — spoke movingly of how Mazzocchi shaped their own careers in political education, environmental justice, medical training, and public service. But there was one philosophy that unified all speakers, from the Spanish-speaking “train the trainer” organizers of the New Jersey New Labor coalition to former longtime Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) administrator David Michaels. This was the philosophy that guided Mazzocchi’s own work: that workers themselves should be whistleblowers, testifying to the conditions that they knew best, and thus guarding the health and safety of their workplaces.
It is not a coincidence that Karen Silkwood, one of the twentieth century’s most famous blue-collar whistleblowers, was compelled to her activism by a 1974 encounter with Mazzocchi. Silkwood, a laboratory technician in a plutonium fuel facility, died in the act of blowing the whistle on the health and quality control practices of her employer, Kerr-McGee Corporation. Silkwood crashed her car under suspicious circumstances while she was on her way to meet a New York Times reporter in Oklahoma City — a story dramatized by Meryl Streep in the 1983 film Silkwood.
The Blue-Collar Whistleblower
“Nobody here subscribes to the great man theory of history,” said Becky Givan, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers who helped to organize the conference. “We believe in organizing,” not in “elevating individuals or heroes.”
Mazzocchi would have agreed. He saw worker whistleblowers not as studies in courage or conscience but as tools for tilting the balance of power toward the working class, both on the shop floor and outside of it.
Mazzocchi’s efforts relied on scientific education, a network of journalists, and the belief that workers’ disclosures served the public interest, all of which required constant tending through law and social movements. In the 1960s and ’70s, many unions had grown bloated with bureaucracy and seemed more motivated to fight the Cold War than to organize the working class. Mazzocchi fostered rank-and-file activism, largely by politicizing workers around their own health. He was an architect of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. Its provisions bear the imprint of this distinctly democratic philosophy.
Disillusioned with the neoliberal turn of the Democratic Party, Mazzocchi founded the Labor Party in 1996. “The bosses have two parties,” Mazzocchi said. “We need one of our own.” For Mazzocchi, the crisis generated by global capitalism offered the labor movement a chance to “seize the terms of the debate” by forcefully advocating for the right to a job, public health care, and free higher education, campaigns stifled by a corporate-dominated Democratic Party. Mazzocchi’s accomplishments are ably detailed in Les Leopold’s biography, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor.
The conference opened with recorded remarks from Ralph Nader. Now ninety-two, the consumer crusader was Mazzocchi’s friend and frequent collaborator, whose own third-party run in 2000 was presaged by the Labor Party. Nader’s 1971 Conference on Professional Responsibility popularized the term “whistleblower” — though in a distinctly white-collar register. Nader called upon “employed professionals” like engineers, scientists, and analysts to publicize employer policies “which contravene the public interest, destroy the environment, and defraud the taxpayer.”
In Mazzocchi’s vision, the blue-collar whistleblower possessed even more transformative power. He sought not to vindicate a set of “professional ethics” or to balance the public purse but to intervene directly into the heart of capitalism: employer control over the conditions of production.
Worker-Centered Public Interest
The rates of disabling injuries and occupational illness rose throughout the postwar decades, particularly in the places where OCAW members worked: plants that made asbestos insulation, oil refineries that also produced benzene, paint factories that used lead, and petrochemical plants that made all manner of consumer and industrial plastics, including known and suspected carcinogens. In other words, cheap postwar consumer abundance was subsidized by the bodies of chemical workers.
“The mad rush of science has propelled us into a strange and uncharted environment,” Mazzocchi said in support of the passage of what would become the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. “We grope in the dark and can light only a few candles.”
The conditions of American work in the 1960s generated Mazzocchi’s core insight: the fight for worker health could be a powerful, coalition-building, continuously mobilizing force. The fight required collecting and disseminating information. It required workers themselves to intervene directly in production at times of extreme danger. It established a basis for alliances between workers and surrounding communities, united in a desire to protect themselves from the toxins that didn’t stop at the factory fence.
Information and education stood at the core of this political vision. But prior to the 1970s, workers suffered an extreme information asymmetry. Many were not even sure what they handled. It was not uncommon, for example, for an employer to obscure the labels affixed to the sides of fifty-five-gallon drums. Even before Nader issued his call to professionals of conscience, Mazzocchi politicized scientists in the quest for a worker-centered public interest.
The Sayreville Model
Glenn Paulson was one of these scientists. Paulson has had a fifty-year career in occupational and environmental health and hazards. But in 1968, he was an environmental sciences graduate student at Rockefeller University in New York. Over lunch in the faculty club, Mazzocchi relayed what had happened at the National Lead Company in Sayreville, New Jersey.
The plant had instituted a new process for producing a paint thickener intended as a safer substitute for lead. Two workers in the carbon monoxide area collapsed on the job. One later died, and the other suffered serious cognitive impairment. Mazzocchi wanted to tell his members what was poisoning them.
Mazzocchi invited Paulson to tour the plant. When they were turned away at the gate, Mazzocchi threatened to shut the plant down. The threat worked. Paulson described carbon monoxide monitors set to go off only at levels that would produce unconsciousness, or death.
Paulson also fielded questions from workers, who described what they smelled, sensed, and saw on the job. Workers at Sayreville won the right to a labor-management health committee, enabling workers to inspect safety monitors and initiate the shutdown of an active hazard.
The form of chemical consciousness-raising at Sayreville set a template for bringing workers and experts together in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Across the United States and Canada, workers and scientists learned from each other.
As support for an occupational health and safety law grew in Washington, OCAW released some of this testimony as Peril on the Job — a 1970 book that left a New York Times reviewer “uneasy, disillusioned, and a little angry.” The union arranged for some of those chemical workers who had testified at these conferences to speak in Congress in support of the new law.
The Occupational Safety and Health Act
When the Occupational Safety and Health Act finally went into effect in 1971, it bore the distinct imprint of a rank-and-file philosophy of whistleblowing: that workers armed with technical information could safeguard a shop floor and serve as tools for democratic accountability.
The law established that workers had a right to a safe and healthy work environment and imposed upon employers the duty to provide it. It also authorized the federal government to make these rights and responsibilities real. To do so, the government promulgated exposure standards, established a regime of inspectors who could issue citations, and deputized workers to enforce the law. Workers could request an inspection in cases of imminent danger and accompany the inspector on the plant walkaround. The law was also the first federal statute to explicitly protect such whistleblowers against retaliation for their disclosures.
The law’s success can be measured in the body count. When the law was passed, thirty-eight American workers died on the job every day. Today that figure stands at fourteen, despite the doubling of the US workforce. The AFL-CIO estimates that 712,000 lives have been saved since 1971.
But the act has failed as a tool for democratic revitalization. It has been chronically underfunded, silent on public sector workers, hobbled by weak anti-retaliation language, devoid of meaningful criminal penalties for corporate offenders, and has endured four decades of judicial attacks. As a result, it has never lived up to its potential to directly empower workers, as Mazzocchi had hoped.
The billionaire-backed Trump administration has taken a further hatchet to OSHA’s meager enforcement agenda, reducing the number of inspections and issuing fewer fines to violators. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the agency’s research arm, was an early victim of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). A thousand occupational health researchers, physicians and engineers spent months fighting their mass terminations before they were reinstated in January 2026.
As the conference drew to a close, the former deputy administrator of OSHA commented from the audience. Mazzocchi, he said, “never let a disaster go to waste.” From Karen Silkwood to tech industry workers fired for raising concerns about artificial-intelligence systems or warning about child sexual abuse material, whistleblowers change the public conversation away from the terms set by capital. As Mazzocchi understood, informed wage earners not only secure health of the workplace — they also secure the health of democracy.