Thirty years later, on March 29, 1999, about 70 union and health and safety activists once again gathered in New Jersey to remember the 1969 conference and to celebrate the continuing fight for a safe workplace and a clean environment.
"This union--OCAW and now PACE--has an unparalleled reputation on health and safety issues. With its activism, OCAW changed the workplace forever," PACE President Boyd Young told the gathering.
PACE Exec. Vice President Robert E. Wages, activists from the New Jersey Work Environment Council, the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health and many others also spoke at the gathering, including some who were at the meeting 30 years ago. Many of the people who came to that gathering a generation ago are still health and safety activists, carrying on the movement that they helped create.
The 1969 conference wasn't just a unique meeting. It brought together people who had never worked with each other before: unionists, academics, experts in the medical and scientific community, and activists from the budding environmental movement. At the conference, and in eight subsequent conferences held around the country, workers testified about the terrible health effects they suffered from working under unsafe conditions with highly toxic substances like plutonium, benzene and asbestos.
Said PACE Local 2-149 president Mark Dudzic, who moderated the March 29 commemoration, "It was the kind of alliance that historically you hadn't seen since back in the days of the CIO."
As an activist back then, said Dudzic, "I met all kinds of crazy people--doctors, lawyers, industrial hygienists--who were interested in sitting down over a beer and listening to working people's stories, and then helping us find solutions."
The worker testimony gathered at those conferences was the ammunition that then OCAW legislative director Tony Mazzocchi used in the fight to draft and pass the Occupational Safety and Health Act. OCAW is widely acknowledged as a key force in the passage of OSHA in 1970.
The struggle didn't end there, however, as speakers at the March 29 gathering made clear. OCAW was committed to ensuring that OSHA was enforced. In 1973, the union successfully bargained an historic health and safety agreement with the oil industry. The only holdout was Shell Oil. OCAW let loose with a 6-month-long strike against Shell, the first-ever national strike over an environmental issue.
OCAW became known as the most environmentally conscious union; in fact, Mazzocchi was the keynote speaker at the first Earth Day in 1970. OCAW's bridges to the environmental and medical communities laid the groundwork for legislation giving workers the "right to know" about hazardous substances in the workplace and for workers' "right to act" to protect themselves from unsafe conditions. And the fight continues today, as PACE campaigns for "Just Transition" to ensure that workers and communities receive compensation in the transition away from toxic industries.
In the early 1970s, OCAW's commitment to worker safety and health encouraged Karen Silkwood, an OCAW activist, to expose the murderous safety violations taking place at the Kerr-McGee nuclear facility where she worked.
In collaboration with the union, Silkwood gathered information about Kerr-McGee's practices. In 1974, she was killed on her way to delivering the evidence to an OCAW staff person and a New York Times reporter. Ever since, she has been a symbol of workers' courage in the struggle for occupational safety and health.
At the March 29 meeting, Wages proposed the new union begin a tradition to mark the November 13 anniversary of Karen Silkwood's death as a "celebration of spirit and the willingness to fight a hard fight."
"it's been a long journey," concluded Mazzocchi, who is now spearheading efforts to build the Labor Party. "And the main lesson we have learned is, you can't do it on your own."
The PACESetter, vol.1 no.3, May 1999