6NEW WORKER-ORIENTED COUNTER-INSTITUTIONS

Workers are being stabbed in the back without a chance even to know what they work with. Without this basic knowledge, workers cannot participate in the vital decisions of whether or not to accept or continue employment, or whether or not to seek union or governmental action against an employer.

—Peter Greene, Sidney Wolfe, and Andrew Maguire, 1976

In their petition to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to set a general right-to-know standard, Peter Greene, Sidney Wolfe, and Andrew Maguire not only dramatized the meaning of toxic ignorance but also shed some light on the remedial options available to endangered workers. Beneath the surface of their request to OSHA lay an upsurge in grassroots frustration and anger and various attempts to channel that discontent into systematic, innovative organizing. The underlying premise of the petition was that workers were not hapless victims or potential victims of toxic ignorance. By the mid-1970s, rank-and-file workers and their professional allies were fashioning novel organizational weapons to battle against both corporate and government bureaucracies. For the most part, these were what the organizer Daniel Berman characterized as “new worker-oriented counter-institutions.” These institutions became the main structural components of a viable social movement. Whereas Maguire was a member of the US House of Representatives whose district in New Jersey had a large number of constituents who were exposed to ill-explained hazards, Greene and Wolfe both represented the Health Research Group, created by Ralph Nader in 1971. The petitioners were soon joined by the Philadelphia Area Project on Occupational Safety and Health (PhilaPOSH), an activist outfit born in 1975. After 1970, a national movement, not a handful of isolated individual advocates, led the fight for access to information about workplace hazards. At the center of the complex of counter-institutions was a network of local and state committees, coalitions, or projects on occupational safety and health, commonly known as the COSH groups. These organizations represented some of the earliest, perhaps the very earliest, of what are currently known as “alt-labor” formations. Like the worker centers that came later, these versatile movement organizations crafted a repertoire that combined service provision with political advocacy.¹

The prevailing atmosphere in the United States at the beginning of the 1970s promoted the birth and growth of movement experiments. The seminal influences of the African American freedom struggles, the surging wave of protests against the war in Vietnam, and the rise of the New Left had generated a proliferation of progressive initiatives for social and political change. The situation epitomized what the social scientist Sidney Tarrow has defined as a “cycle of contention”: “a phase of heightened conflict across the social system, with rapid diffusion of collective action from more mobilized to less mobilized sectors, a rapid pace of innovation in the forms of contention employed, the creation of new transformed collection action frames, a combination of organized and unorganized participation, and sequences of intensified information flow and interaction between challengers and authorities.” The ferment and the inclination to address social problems through militant activism helped to give birth to this occupational health movement. Besides the general forces operating at this moment, the ascendant environmental movement, activism among physicians and other health professionals, militant self-organization among rank-and-file workers, and the protest movement of coal miners afflicted by dust-induced respiratory disease especially gave impetus to the right-to-know challengers.²

By the end of the 1960s, the embryonic right-to-know movement already had its dominant framing principle, one well established in liberal and radical circles. Since the 1930s, progressive claims on the state and social order had been cast as petitions for political and social rights. In adopting this familiar stance, those seeking to establish an entitlement to knowledge about the risks they faced on the job drew added leverage and resonance from the growing demands for health-related rights, expressed in calls for universal access to health services, in calls for the availability of reproductive health services, and in other proposals as well. This would prove to be a useful ideological resource in shaping the discourse on this matter.³

As this movement was coming together, perhaps the most critical determinant of its viability was whether activists could forge cooperative relations among rank-and-file workers, union officials, and health professionals, including medical students and others in advanced professional training. In a moment that recalled the conscientious middle-class reform campaigns of the Progressive Era, the 1970s witnessed a rethinking of the potential for those in the professional strata of society with scientific and other types of conventional expertise to ally with and assist the working class. The class-bridging process encountered difficulties, but in numerous instances ended in a functional division of labor and mutual appreciation. The COSH groups were the organizational inventions that embodied that coalitional success. In not only their class-bridging capability but also their emphasis on educating workers at risk, these organizations followed in the footsteps of the pioneering, if short-lived, Workers’ Health Bureau of the 1920s. From the outset of their involvement, the COSH challengers insisted that rights to knowledge be linked to rights to act on that knowledge.⁴

As the letter by Greene, Wolfe, and Maguire plainly indicates in its demand for a formal rule from the national government, the emergent right-to-know movement reflected both a frustration with and a determination to continue to operate along the established pathways of the administrative state. The movement represented a synthesis of conventional legalistic, top-down actions and less conventional bottom-up disruptions. As such, it pursued a blended strategy that persevered in seeking reform within the technocratic strictures of the regulatory system forged by the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Hence, the developments of the 1970s simultaneously unfolded in hearing rooms in Washington, DC, and in workplaces and union halls across the nation.⁵

To a great extent, the search for creative alternatives to heavy reliance on the federal bureaucracy was led by the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW), whose members confronted a huge and ever-expanding array of toxic substances. Like the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC) and its successor, the United Farm Workers of America, OCAW embraced a social movement style of militant action on occupational health and safety that departed from the dominant conservative orientation of mainstream organized labor. To be sure, like the United Steelworkers (USW) and other engaged labor organizations, OCAW adopted a blended approach that combined conventional navigation of bureaucratic channels with more adventurous forms of advocacy.⁶

The key figure driving the OCAW's efforts was its legislative director, Anthony Mazzocchi. Mazzocchi arranged for Ralph Nader to address the union's convention in August 1967. In his characteristically unsparing manner, Nader condemned not only government and corporate inaction but also that of the labor movement. He saw unions like OCAW as “uniquely positioned” to make progress in this important area. Nader provoked the convention to vote to launch a health and safety program that would have political, collective bargaining, and educational components. This decision gave Mazzocchi the mandate he wanted, one that allowed him to fight to extend workers’ right to know and to act on knowledge gained.⁷

On the political front, OCAW pursued change related to the wider dissemination of occupational health information from a number of angles. Demands for strong enforcement of government regulations, however inadequate, formed one part of the organization's repertoire. In the late 1960s, the union had already used the meager leverage available against federal contractors subject to US Department of Labor (DoL) oversight under the Walsh-Healey Act. Because inspectors divulged their findings only to the employer, OCAW attempted (without success) to dislodge this information through the Freedom of Information Act. In the same vein, Mazzocchi decried the refusal of state officials in possession of facts regarding health risks to disclose what they knew. The union pressed for the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. At congressional hearings in 1969, Mazzocchi gave voice to the concerns of at-risk workers by entering into the record scores of their verbatim statements on the hazards they faced and the obstructions they routinely encountered in learning about them. Beginning at once when the act went into effect in 1971, this union worked for its fullest implementation. The first citation ever issued by OSHA following a workplace inspection came at an Allied Chemical plant in West Virginia where workers had OCAW representation to deal with their overexposure to mercury. In addition to its agitation for strong enforcement activities, union officials strove to help devise health standards with right-to-know provisions. Both Mazzocchi and colleague Steven Wodka frequently participated in standard-setting proceedings.⁸

When Mazzocchi testified in 1969 in support of federal responsibility for safeguarding workers’ health and safety, the tone of his advocacy was a measured one. Along with some other unionists, such as those representing farm workers, he refused to look to any government-centered regulatory system as a panacea. The OCAW expected to rely primarily on the self-help mechanisms operating through direct action in the workplace. Negotiation and enforcement of strong contract language constituted the centerpiece of the strategy. Yet in embracing self-help, Mazzocchi and his comrades departed from the common tendency of unionists to go it alone in the familiar arena of collective bargaining, failing to reach out to possible allies. Just as he had enlisted Ralph Nader in 1967, Mazzocchi turned to Nader's crew of activists to help build a knowledge base for negotiating and other tactics. At a 1969 discussion in New Jersey, he advised members of OCAW District 8 of the value of this resource: “I’m going to solicit the help of some of our friends—guys like Ralph Nader—who's been consistently on our side. He has recruited a bunch of young kids out of the universities, who’ve done more work on this subject in the last year than any thousand guys like myself and other people that I know. They’ve come out. They’re bright, they’re forceful, they can’t be bought off, at this point in life, anyhow, and they’ve been willing to go forward with the facts. And we in the labor movement have been missing out.” Also indicative of this receptivity to outside support was the presence of experts from medicine and science at the New Jersey conference and at other similar events.⁹

Connections with environmental groups, another outside force to which the union appealed, led to support in one critical engagement. In the bargaining round with the major oil companies in late 1972, OCAW pushed for advances on a number of health and safety issues, including production and distribution of information. One objective was to emulate a gain it had made earlier that year at a Kawecki Berylco plant in Pennsylvania, where the union had won the right to conduct its own air-sampling program for beryllium hazards. In the oil industry negotiations, all but one firm settled on terms that extended workers’ rights to obtain company-held information and to generate its own data through hazard monitoring. In January 1973, the union struck the holdout, Shell Oil, and launched a national boycott of its products. In an unprecedented move, eleven mainstream environmental groups rallied to the union's defense and actively promoted its consumer boycott. The formation of this alliance contributed to a resolution of this dispute that brought the establishment of a joint health and safety committee and gave OCAW access to Shell's morbidity and mortality records. The strike marked a breakthrough in relations between the labor and environmental movements. In the domain of contract administration, the union won a historic arbitration case in 1973 that guaranteed a right to know the actual chemical names of substances with which its members worked. This arbitrator's decision compelled pharmaceutical manufacturer Ciba-Geigy to hand over chemical names for the hundreds of substances present in its McIntosh, Alabama, plant.¹⁰

Besides the manifest consciousness-raising effects of its work in the political and economic realms, OCAW carried out a wide-ranging educational program. Together with Mazzocchi and others, the chemist Jeanne Stellman organized an ambitious ten-week training course for workers at Rutgers University. Stellman and the physician Susan Daum converted the material for the course into a book, Work Is Dangerous to Your Health, that provided workers with a comprehensive practical guide to the recognition, evaluation, and control of workplace hazards. Appearing in 1973 (under the imprint of Vintage Books, a respected New York publishing house), Work Is Dangerous to Your Health instantly sold tens of thousands of copies. Workers’ empowerment through self-help stood out as the volume's main theme. The authors emphasized that “it is the workers’ own interest to gain more control over their working conditions and to strive to change them. Uncontrolled and unpressured, industries and government will do little or nothing to eliminate pollution either within the workplace or in the general environment.” This perspective, as well as the material presented in the book, drew heavily on the authors’ experiences with OCAW. This was particularly the case regarding an awareness of the centrality of gaining knowledge and then utilizing the knowledge acquired. Stellman continued with this orientation after joining the OCAW staff. Both the union's own in-house publications and its other opportunities to communicate reinforced this message. In a 1975 interview with OSHA's monthly magazine, Mazzocchi expressed doubt that nonunion workers could obtain hazard information. He held that unionized workers needed to “extract the information through collective-bargaining agreements that give them the right to know what they work with and the right to act on that knowledge.” Mazzocchi told the interviewer that union involvement in OSHA's standard-setting process “makes workers aware of the problems they face.” This pioneering organization took a broad view of its educational role and the ways to fulfill it.¹¹

Anger and, beyond that, righteous indignation provide potent fuel for social movements, both in mobilizing those directly aggrieved and in attracting conscientiously sympathetic supporters. In the early 1970s, the germinating right-to-know campaign benefited from a series of muckraking exposés of corporate abuse and government negligence. Unsurprisingly, the first salvo of the barrage came from the OCAW. In 1970, Ray Davidson, the editor of the union's newspaper, published Peril on the Job: A Study of Hazards in the Chemical Industries. The book brought to life the daily working realities of exposure to hazards while in possession of limited information, no information, or misinformation about those often-lethal risks. Davidson discovered that the Manufacturing Chemists’ Association (MCA) had produced safety datasheets on fewer than one hundred substances, obviously a tiny fraction of the many thousands in commercial use. He also found it “very rare that a company makes any of the data sheets available to industrial workers. To do this would raise annoying questions and well might interfere with the flow of production.” When Jack Stagner, the chair of the safety committee at the Atlantic Richfield oil refinery in Houston, Texas, inquired about why management had painted over information on barrels and replaced it with meaningless code, he was told that if workers knew what the barrels contained, they would not handle them. At its plant in Texas City, Texas, the American Oil Company stopped releasing a hazard compendium. That move led Harold Hardage, an employee at the facility, to conjecture that the company was simply afraid to keep putting out dangerous facts. The deficiencies in employer-run training programs came in for criticism, especially for covering topics such as off-the-job safety risks instead of on-the-job health risks. Davidson brought to light the unwillingness of company doctors to diagnose occupational disease and their readiness to blame disorders on workers’ lifestyles. He also described the impossibility of obtaining reports filed by federal inspectors enforcing the Walsh-Healey Act. His suggested route to a satisfactory right to know was through the collective-bargaining process. Contracts could compel disclosure of identities of chemicals, results of all hazard monitoring, and findings of medical examinations.¹²

Whereas Davidson tried to win outsiders’ sympathetic assistance by vividly describing the chemical workers’ plight, his colleague from the United Auto Workers (UAW), Franklin Wallick, turned to guilt to motivate support from his readers. Wallick's 1972 book, The American Worker: An Endangered Species, castigated environmentalists whose sympathies too seldom extended to working-class human beings. “Only a few halting steps,” he declared, “have been taken by environmentalists to discover and do something about the vast and hidden workplace environment where millions are trapped by pollution which frequently exceeds the pollution which befouls our cities.” A refrain throughout the work was the unfortunate preoccupation with the problems of the ambient environment at the expense of addressing the working environment. For this imbalance, he blamed not only ecological activists but also oblivious journalists, who were interested only in publicizing dramatic catastrophes like mine explosions, not the more subtle ravages of chronic disease. Wallick applauded the UAW local branch whose latest contract secured the right to use its own equipment to measure noise levels. He looked forward to the day when locals had “air-quality or shop-environment stewards” to gather hazard data and use it to remedy problems. In all probability, his optimism about the potential for the sort of worker-student alliances being fostered by Nader came from his relations with Nader's Raider Gary Sellers, the first attorney Nader ever hired. Wallick reprinted Sellers's “Workers’ Bill of Rights,” which enumerated several information entitlements. Beyond the usual demands for access to hazard records and personal medical records, this manifesto sought “easy access to all epidemiological and environmental data collected by the company or its consultants.” It also aimed to empower workers to photograph or measure all hazards.¹³

Predictably, the 1973 report Bitter Wages: Ralph Nader's Study Group Report on Disease and Injury on the Job, written by Joseph A. Page and Mary-Win O’Brien, condemned the failings of corporate management and government bureaucrats and conveyed the message that those parties were hopeless. Regarding organized labor, Page and O’Brien struck a critical but somewhat optimistic tone, based on the behavior of the OCAW. Page and O’Brien urged other unions to follow the OCAW precedent of delivering hazard warning material via their newspapers. Given that only four of forty labor organizations surveyed kept any records on the occurrence of occupational disease within their jurisdiction, the reporters worried that “unions may have insufficient information to bargain intelligently.” They approved of the recent decision of the United Rubber Workers (URW) to sponsor its own research program, but they expressed disappointment in the general lack of institutional capacity to take on this responsibility. Few unions had a health and safety department; none of those surveyed had an industrial hygienist on its staff. Instead meager resources were inordinately allocated to maintaining a bureaucracy focused on injury, not disease, prevention. The authors contrasted invidiously that orientation with the OCAW's grassroots approach and prioritizing of occupational disease. The Nader's Raiders argued that “unions have an obligation to inform their members about the hidden dangers of the work environment.” Drawing on solid empirical research, Page and O’Brien presented a sharp challenge to the leadership of labor organizations. Beyond the unionized setting, they maintained that all employees “have a right to know the risks they are facing on their jobs.” Their analysis concluded that “the key to real progress lies in the cultivation of worker involvement.” It urged outsiders who came to assist at-risk workers to aim for “the fundamental goal of worker education and worker control.” From this radical point of view, the value of OSHA lay mainly in its establishment for workers and unions of novel rights to know and act, not in its policing functions. Giving the newborn federal system no grace period, the authors cautioned that “history teaches the folly of overreliance on bureaucracy.” Suffused with the polemical skepticism of established national institutions that characterized the Nader perspective in general, Bitter Wages reinforced both the imperative for self-help and the importance, albeit subordinate, of sympathetic outside expertise.¹⁴

In her account of widespread victimization published in 1974 under the title Muscle and Blood, the investigative journalist Rachel Scott discovered numerous instances of public health agencies’ obstruction of access to their unpleasant findings. In Montana, the administrator of the state occupational health program claimed that the results of a study of exposure to cadmium, lead, and other hazards at a lead smelter were secret. In Ohio, the Textile Workers Union got the state to investigate the ketone solvents that were causing neurological disorders among its members. But the Department of Health then refused to divulge the facts found. The union representing aluminum workers in upstate New York experienced the same impediment from state agents who examined the hazards that had precipitated a two-months-long strike. The alternative to the futility of dependence on government sources of information, as Scott learned from Mazzocchi, was to get the unions more involved with this issue and for unorganized workers to form unions.¹⁵

Expanding on work first appearing in the New Yorker, Paul Brodeur in 1974 brought out Expendable Americans: The Incredible Story of How Tens of Thousands of American Men and Women Die Each Year of Preventable Industrial Disease. The facts presented by the author fully warranted his sensational title. Concentrating primarily on the disaster caused by asbestos, Brodeur, like Scott, illuminated the deficiencies in state and federal protection of the workforce (as well as the irresponsibility of corporate management), with a strong emphasis on the withholding of vital information. He elucidated in florid detail the attempts by OCAW to prod public health officials to explore the hazards rampant at the asbestos insulation plant operated by Pittsburgh Corning Corporation in Tyler, Texas. His analysis of that situation and several others captured not just the key roles played by the familiar figures Mazzocchi and Wodka but also by shopfloor leaders.¹⁶

A series of dramatic events involving Steven Wodka became the subject of articles in Rolling Stone. In the countercultural magazine's issue of March 27, 1975, Howard Kohn discussed the highly suspicious death of Karen Silkwood on November 13, 1974, when she was apparently run off the road on her way to a meeting with Wodka and the New York Times reporter David Burnham. A folder of documents that Silkwood planned to present at that meeting disappeared from her wrecked car. Those documents would have supplied evidence that her employer, Kerr-McGee Corporation, was falsifying inspection records regarding the carcinogenic plutonium hazard at its nuclear fuel production facility near Cimarron City, Oklahoma. No mere victim of corporate violence, Silkwood was a fearless activist in the OCAW local at her plant. After her story also appeared in Ms. in 1975, she came to be seen as a feminist martyr. The National Organization for Women (NOW) declared the first anniversary of her death Karen Silkwood Memorial Day. A second exposé by Kohn in January 1977 dealt with the obstacles, amounting to a systematic cover-up, that blocked investigations of the Silkwood case.¹⁷

Bischloromethyl ether (BCME), a toxic chemical used in the synthesis of resins, became the subject of an in-depth study by the freelance writers Willard Randall and Stephen Solomon. They were alerted to the mounting toll in lung cancer cases at the Rohm and Haas Company factory in Philadelphia by a public announcement in 1974 by Nader's Health Research Group. Their digging into the human dimension of the more than fifty cancer fatalities and the employer malfeasance that caused them yielded first a lengthy article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1975 and then a book the following year. By focusing tightly on one hazard at one worksite, Randall and Solomon could delve more deeply into multiple dimensions of the manufacture of ignorance. They demonstrated how the Rohm and Haas Company impeded scientific research on the carcinogenicity of BCME. They described how the company prevailed on city health administrators to conceal the findings for their employees who participated in a lung cancer screening program. Randall and Solomon found that the firm failed to comply with an OSHA standard that mandated the posting of signs warning of a cancer hazard. They captured how workers and their families, despite these obstructions, came to believe that the frequent cancer deaths could not all be attributed to smoking, as management claimed. Among the many other chilling details they brought to light, the authors noted that employees had taken to calling the building where they made BCME “the Death House.” Published by Little, Brown under the title Building 6: The Tragedy at Bridesburg, Randall and Solomon's book, like almost all the other muckraking volumes, carried the presumption of credibility accorded works brought forth by highly reputable, well-established publishing houses.¹⁸

The disturbing, often shocking revelations of the 1970s muckrakers gave visibility to previously hidden tragedies of the workplace. They also posed the possibility that the tragedies thus far exposed were but the tip of an iceberg. The critiques all reinforced the themes of employer opacity and the consequent necessity of transparency. Perhaps most important, some of these works elucidated starkly the cost of secrecy in human suffering. Because these narratives were far more likely to reach relatively unendangered middle-class readers, not the members of the working class most at risk, in all probability they served primarily to encourage individuals in the health and legal professions to come forward to assist the embryonic workers’ counter-institutions.

In no small part, the search for alternative institutions stemmed from the mistrust of established ones. Like the muckraking writers, radical institution builders took it for granted that they could place no trust at all in corporate management and little in bureaucratized union leadership. As the 1970s unfolded, a great deal of skepticism also surrounded OSHA. From its inception, the agency existed under the control of Republican presidents, which raised doubts. The deep structural flaw inscribed in the law that permitted states to retain regulatory authority if they met (or appeared to meet) certain performance and resource benchmarks engendered further doubts, if not outright dismissal of the entire system. In the context of widespread social movement ferment, dissatisfaction with top-down bureaucracies fostered the clear-cut alternative of bottom-up organizations. New Left activists were especially excited by the spectacle of the black-lung insurgency, in which tens of thousands of coal miners engaged in a rowdy and effective three-week wildcat strike in 1969 over occupational disease grievances. Radicals of various stripes proceeded to craft a constellation of participatory organizations, the COSH groups, devoted to a diverse reform agenda, of which expanding the right to know constituted a foundational component.¹⁹

A series of projects arising under the auspices of preexisting progressive entities lay the groundwork for establishing full-blown organizations. In Boston, Urban Planning Aid (UPA), a group of planners who operated as radical community organizers, initiated its Industrial (or sometimes Occupational) Health and Safety Project in March 1970. On the right-to-know front, these activists attacked the failure of Massachusetts inspectors to share hazard data they had collected. Rather than foster overdependence on unresponsive government agents, the project worked with more than twenty local unions to train workers to function as inspectors who would develop their own hazard-reporting system. These shopfloor experts were encouraged to share their knowledge with at-risk coworkers and to use wider awareness as a lever for control of working conditions. Besides promoting the collection of hazard data, UPA assisted a local union in conducting pulmonary function tests for its asbestos-exposed members.²⁰

Moving to fill a vacuum, UPA produced publications full of practical guidance that propounded a straightforward message of the necessity of carefully collecting evidence to enable enlightened decision making. A 1971 pamphlet stressed that “it is important that each local and each International Union develop methods for gathering information about hazards.” This work also publicized the labeling requirements established in the newly enacted federal law, as well as the duty of employers to advise employees of hazard exposure levels that exceeded legal limits. A manual entitled How to Look at Your Plant began with this liberating declaration: “You don’t have to be an expert to inspect your workplace. The people who are best qualified to identify dangerous situations are the ones who have to deal with them every day.” This publication delivered a menu of tactics that union activists could deploy to force remedial action based on their discoveries. It presented a case study in which women at a fluorescent lamp factory dealt with mercury poisoning through a work stoppage that brought both additional hazard controls and access to employer-administered biweekly urine tests. The project's monthly newsletter, Survival Kit, offered a stream of suggestions along these lines. In December 1972, the newsletter announced that the printing pressmen's union at the Washington Post had done its own hearing tests on members and utilized the findings to win noise control measures. The same issue noted similar advances at a Massachusetts manufacturing facility after UPA loaned its noise meter to union grievance handlers. This emphasis on direct action at the worksite implied a lack of confidence in government protection. An editorial in Survival Kit in April 1974 made that attitude explicit: “OSHA lacks the personnel and the will to clean up workplaces adequately…. Better working conditions will not come without action on the shop floor and at the bargaining table. From the rank and file to international officers, workers need to be aware of threats to their health and be ready to do whatever is necessary to get rid of them.” The UPA factsheet on solvents urged that all containers bear meaningful labels and that this arrangement be contractually guaranteed. It said nothing about seeking help from either OSHA or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in gaining information. Frank Wallick cited this factsheet in praising the group's ability to make complex scientific and technical phenomena comprehensible to workers: “These kids up in Boston are living on food stamps and in cold-water flats. And they’ve taken all this high-powered stuff and they’ve reduced it down to the kind of information that anybody can understand.” In the same vein, by the mid-1970s, the project had studied enough union behavior to put out a guide with model contract language. This pioneering group's consistent advocacy of militant collective self-help exerted a potent formative influence on the movement.²¹

The Labor Occupational Health Project (LOHP) was, from its founding in 1974, another prolific source of agitational materials that promoted the right to know. Based at the University of California, Berkeley, a well-known launching pad for social justice initiatives, LOHP shared the anti-elitist predisposition of progressives at that moment. The founding director Donald Whorton declared at the outset that the purpose of LOHP was to help workers and unions to “develop their own organizational skills and capabilities” in a supportive, not directive, capacity. One of the first products of the project was A Guidebook for Local Union Health and Safety Committees by the staff member Bob Fowler, a former International Association of Machinists activist. The guidebook reprinted Gary Sellers's workers’ bill of rights manifesto, with its claims of entitlement to various forms of information. Subsequent publications by the attorney Morris Davis and the OCAW veteran Andrea Hricko offered tools for empowering individuals at various levels of the labor movement. At one conference in January 1976, which was attended by more than one hundred local unionists, Davis and Hricko led a session devoted to employee rights that covered entitlement to information. Hricko's overview of issues facing women workers addressed the importance of extracting hazard data and medical findings from management, as well as the methods for doing so. Her survey of issues facing women workers, Working for Your Life, published in 1976, worked through practical methods for obtaining such critical information. Both Hricko's illumination of a previously neglected array of problems and her advocacy of collective self-help reflected the feminist orientation of the burgeoning women's health movement. (Beyond Berkeley, the same feminist energy propelled Jeanne Stellman's 1977 overview, Women's Work, Women's Health.)²²

In the early 1970s, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was an unlikely launching pad for radical initiatives. Yet its Local 688, a sizable branch centered in Saint Louis and led by maverick Harold Gibbons, proved a most hospitable host for one adventurous project. In the summer of 1971, the local brought in Daniel Berman, a graduate student in political science at Washington University, to try an experiment in self-help at a plant that made steel pipe. Berman and his collaborators in the local gathered a body of data that identified and prioritized the hazards in the plant. This exercise involved training and unleashing a team of rank-and-file workers to produce the facts regarding the risks present and then surveying the factory's employees to determine their foremost concerns. Because the hazard recognition procedure both oriented and activated the workforce, it then facilitated a participative method for pursuing control measures such as improved ventilation. Local 688 turned to the traditional device of collective bargaining to control hazards, avoiding a resort to the policing power of OSHA. The aims of negotiations encompassed both entitlement to information and freedom to take self-protective action: “The collective bargaining agreement should require that the union know the chemical composition of all the substances its members work with, the containers be labeled with chemical composition information, and that the members be given the right to refuse to work with hazardous materials or under hazardous conditions.” Preliminary indications of the efficacy of this approach and of its promise of wider applicability led to a sweeping assessment about the forces for ameliorative change. In a report on their work released on August 24, 1971, Berman and his colleagues declared, “Industrial health and safety problems are not going to be solved by corporate benevolence, ‘safety contests,’ the incentives of Workmen's Compensation, inspections by government officials or by expensive ‘experts’ who make reports and leave. The system presented here is based on the supposition that working conditions can be improved only by the organization and self-education of the workers affected by those conditions, under the leadership of their unions.” In a pragmatic appeal to union leaders, Berman touted this program as a way to upgrade conditions inexpensively.²³

The experiment in St. Louis soon took Daniel Berman well beyond the jurisdiction of one Teamsters local. Berman secured a place on the program of the national convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), an organization composed primarily of liberal physicians. Formed in 1964 to assist the African American freedom struggle in the South, the group was broadening its agenda by the early 1970s. That MCHR chose to hold its semiannual convention in October 1971 in Lexington, Kentucky, was quite fortuitous for activists interested in promoting involvement in occupational health. The meeting witnessed not only Berman's presentation on the St. Louis Teamsters program but also that of representatives of the militant Black Lung Association of disabled coal miners. Building on the predisposition of Old Left elements within the organization to pursue struggles of the industrial working class, these messengers from the workplace battlefield prompted MCHR to commit itself to serious engagement in this problem area. Before the year was out, the organization had initiated its Occupational Health Project, which at once launched a newsletter and published a guide for members on possible opportunities to lend assistance to workers in need. Besides the straightforward potential for physicians to diagnose and treat cases of work-related disease, this guidance pamphlet suggested the value of agitation to get legislation enforced and improved. It urged those venturing into the internal politics of organized labor to ally themselves with rank-and-file workers. Placing medical expertise in an ancillary role, MCHR set as its goal “to provide the support to allow workers to determine their own health destiny” by performing research, creating practical publications, convening meetings, and raising public awareness of the importance of work-induced disorders.²⁴

Beyond encouragement to its individual members and local chapters, the project, operating out of the committee's national office in Chicago, set out on a course of action that would, more than any other factor, propel the mobilization process that culminated in a national right-to-know movement. The formative experience that gave direction to the incipient project was the organization of a conference in Chicago in January 1972, cosponsored with the University of Illinois and the UAW. Approximately two hundred workers, along with numerous health professionals and union officials, participated in the two-day event. Quentin Young, MCHR's national chair who had a number of progressive labor leaders in the Chicago area as his patients, facilitated union participation and supported this project in other ways. The opening session featured a tribute to Alice Hamilton, who had begun her immersion in the field while at Hull House, the settlement house located near the meeting site. Conference organizers allocated a sizable block of time for workers to describe the hazards they encountered daily. Frieda Jordan expressed outrage at the failure of hospital administrators to warn lower-status workers about the biological agents they faced when dealing with patients. “These people, and that means housekeepers, too,” Jordan insisted, “have a right to know what kind of illnesses they are exposed to.” Those revelations were supplemented by the presentations on hazards and their adverse health effects by medical specialists. The physician Donald Whorton, a member of the project leadership team, condemned employers who hid behind the assertion of trade secrets. The Teamsters Local 688 activist Art Button outlined the methods he and his comrades had devised to curtail threats to their well-being. The discussion of manifold hazards and creative abatement interventions generated a sense of urgency. The conferees set up a continuation committee that, in short order, launched the Chicago Area Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (CACOSH). This coalition of concerned health-care workers, union officials, and at-risk workers became the prototype for groups that formed thereafter, just as holding a sizable conference became the standard precipitating event for their formation.²⁵

Not every seed germinated. A meeting sponsored by MCHR's chapter in New Haven, Connecticut, in February 1972, did not bring forth a durable working coalition. At that session, Lionel Williams of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, pointed out, “What we as workers would like to have is some nuts and bolts information. Your polemics are very interesting but we can’t apply them to our situation.” A conference in Ashland, Kentucky, the following month featured the firebrand black lung activist physician I. E. Buff, whose stock in trade was flamboyant tirades against company doctors and corporate domination of the political system. True to form, Buff used this occasion to claim, “I’ve never met an honest politician.” Buff apparently had forgotten meeting Kenneth Hechler, a member of the US House of Representatives from his own state of West Virginia who had bravely defied the coal operators and contributed significantly to landmark black lung reforms. Despite cosponsorship by the area's Central Labor Council and the big USW local that hosted the event, this exploratory gathering failed to give birth to a COSH organization.²⁶

These stumbles came despite warnings and other facilitative work by MCHR's occupational health task force. In an editorial in the March 1972 issue of Health Rights News, the task force member Whorton announced that his team was trying to educate MCHR members about this issue. Reflecting the often fraught political environment of the moment, both within the organization and in progressive circles more broadly, Whorton pleaded for ecumenicalism: “We insist that the occupational health effort not become the basis of factionalism.” Those with diverse political tendencies were welcome, but they were asked to set sectarian squabbles aside. In the single decision that did the most to push their fledgling venture forward, the MCHR leaders hired Daniel Berman to run the project. Among the many information-generating chores to which Berman applied his considerable energies was the production of publications. He distributed copies of a description of the program that he and the Teamsters had invented in St. Louis. The first issue of the project's newsletter that appeared after his hiring highlighted the pathbreaking work of UPA, based on that group's assumption that “informed workers are their own best health and safety inspectors.” The issue also announced that a new pamphlet series on hazards would have workers, not physicians, as its target audience. The newsletter's coverage of the MCHR convention in April 1972 quoted Tony Mazzocchi on the need for unions to place right-to-know clauses in their collective-bargaining agreements. Berman also operated a national clearinghouse on relevant resources, marshalling scarce literature and materials and distributing resource guides. Franklin Wallick's book publicized this “work environment information center” and its holdings on collective-bargaining issues. Within a year of hiring, Berman had filled about 250 requests for literature. Regular mailings went out to a list that soon reached roughly two thousand names.²⁷

Berman repeatedly attempted to improve the chances that an educational conference would pave the way to the founding of a viable COSH organization. He gave local MCHR chapters detailed coaching on the planning of such events. Organizers needed to line up cosponsors—an MCHR chapter, “a friendly union,” and a local academic medical institution. They had to bring together diverse groups, including environmentalists, but to be sure to “allow workers to speak for themselves.” The suggested format called for a concluding strategy session that would, it was hoped, lead directly to the establishment of a COSH-type entity. At that session, Berman warned that “discussion should be led by the workers. Don’t push your own politics.” The first attempt to follow this blueprint succeeded, at least in the short run. The Pittsburgh MCHR unit enlisted the Allegheny County Labor Council, several of its affiliates, and the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh to join it in hosting an event in December 1972. A reporter from a management-oriented safety magazine bemusedly took in the scene: “Bearded MCHR docs and long-haired students mixed and mingled with eighty local union safety committeemen, shop stewards, and business managers.” Some conferees criticized OSHA as “slow, undermanned, underfunded, and politically incapable of strong action” and argued that progress was possible through collective bargaining. This attitude prompted a stern rebuttal from John Sheehan, the USW legislative director. Sheehan had worked hard to help secure passage of the federal law and feared that the already embattled agency would soon need strong backing in order to withstand impending attacks from the hostile business community. Notwithstanding this disagreement, the hierarchy of the powerful USW union did not stand in the way of the creation of the Pittsburgh Area Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (PACOSH) a month later.²⁸

The disenchantment with OSHA and embrace of private solutions was obvious in the issue of Berman's Occupational Health Project Report whose appearance coincided with the Pittsburgh conference. An editorial condemned the “extremely lax” enforcement of the law and maintained that “government stalling and inaction on health and safety issues has thrown the burden of cleaning up the shop environment back on the collective bargaining process.” The newsletter reprinted the recent demands formulated by a district branch of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters with MCHR assistance. These called for several rights to information of the union health and safety committee, including the chemical composition of all substances used or created in the workplace and copies of all existing data on working conditions. The Amalgamated Meat Cutters also sought to obtain rights for individual members to see all their company medical records. Some organizers feared that excessive criticism of OSHA and related leftist polemics would alienate mainstream unionists. In March 1973, Will Shortell of CACOSH explained how activists should proceed in forming relations with local unions. At the critical first meeting, he advised, “DO NOT go in depth into your own analysis of OSHA, or the exploitation of the working class, or socialism, etc.” Instead, activists should stress the value of practical educational services that would enable workers to understand hazards and try to control them. Shortell gave this summary of the approach taken in Chicago: “We avoid becoming involved in internal union disputes, and work with all worker organizations as long as that is feasible.”²⁹

Whatever lack of confidence he shared with other activists about OSHA's regulatory efficacy, Berman appreciated that the landmark statute established important entitlements. In an article straightforwardly titled “The Worker's Right to Know” in MCHR's Health Rights News in April 1973, he characterized these as “the most innovative new rights” set forth in the law. After enumerating the legal rights to access to hazard and medical information, he did, however, attach the qualifier that at present these were “mostly paper rights.” Retreating from a prior critique of experts, Berman observed that MCHR was now receiving help from the National Lawyers Guild. He concluded that “further progress on the worker's right to know about health hazards on the job can best be accomplished by coalitions of workers with legal and medical people, using the expertise of all three.” The newfound availability of legal aid prompted an interest in promoting lawsuits against company doctors who concealed diagnoses. In part, the prior minimizing of conventional professional expertise had been an attempt to make a virtue of necessity, based on the premises that experts were unsympathetic to workers and unaffordable to unions. Berman's repeated issuance of guides to resources from other organizations reflected in part the relative paucity of resources emanating directly from his own project. With its parent organization collapsing but one of its local chapters offering free office space, the Occupational Health Project, its director working without a salary, relocated to San Francisco in mid-1973.³⁰

The little project continued to have an outsized impact. This was evident in its contribution to framing the issue as one of democratization of knowledge to enable self-protection. The June 1974 issue of OSHA's in-house magazine carried a piece titled “The Worker's Right to Know,” which quoted Berman on the imperative to arm working people with the information necessary to abate the risks they endured. At a time when rights claims still got traction with relative ease in American political culture, this sort of assertion resonated. The article heralded the emergence of “a growing occupational health movement based on a loose alliance among young activists, old-line activists, and rank and file workers.” It went on to call attention to Berman's operation functioning “on a shoestring budget,” as well as to note the work of UPA and PACOSH's distribution of more than one hundred copies of Stellman and Daum's Work Is Dangerous to Your Health, among other movement activities that both spread knowledge and elevated the value of expanding such knowledge. Along the same lines, Donald Whorton's pamphlet on byssinosis, issued a few months later in the MCHR series, underscored the central message: “Workers who must expose themselves to the dangers of cotton dust must also know of its hazards. It is their right.” All these endeavors shaped the emerging discourse by recasting needs as rights. From this perspective, workers were not abjectly needy victims but rather righteous actors.³¹

Institution building remained the primary objective of the MCHR project, despite the time and energy absorbed by serving as a clearinghouse. This proved to be a challenging chore. In both southwestern Pennsylvania and northern California, incipient COSH groups failed to thrive. In Pittsburgh, as of 1973 the home of the MCHR national office, PACOSH antagonized cautious union leaders, especially in the USW, despite gaining the active support of a number of labor organizations. Daniel Hannan, no stodgy business unionist, was disgusted with the reckless shenanigans of I. E. Buff, whom PACOSH brought in for a speech in January 1974. Creating a crossfire, leftists criticized this COSH's devotion to reformist service functions as insufficiently revolutionary. Similar difficulties doomed the first incarnation of the Bay Area Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (BACOSH). Too many local unions kept their distance from a committee pervaded with leftist sectarianism. As local observer Berman put it in his postmortem assessment, “The quickest way to destroy a COSH group is for it to denounce all union leadership in the name of a self-appointed ‘rank-and-file.’”³²

Organizers had far better luck in the tristate area surrounding Philadelphia, where the MCHR crew set up an occupational health task force in February 1975. At the outset, one participant in this task force had been carrying out a project that did much to lay the groundwork for the founding of a COSH. For more than a year, Rick Engler, a fresh college graduate employed by OCAW, had been leading a participative study of the conditions in five oil refineries in the Delaware Valley. The project was Mazzocchi's idea. Together with OCAW District 8, MCHR activists hosted a well-attended public meeting on May 29, 1975, in part to attract medical and legal talent to provide technical assistance and to help develop an educational program. The success of a six-week course offered that summer led to the birth of the Philadelphia Area Project on Occupational Safety and Health (PhilaPOSH).³³

From its founding, PhilaPOSH understood the value of collecting and disseminating information. Engler's study of the oil refineries, released in 1975, plainly embodied this value. That document was suffused with his mentor Mazzocchi's right-to-know perspective as well his thoroughgoing militance. Engler bluntly asserted, “Workers have a right to know the identities of the substances they work with. Code names prevent this.” He attacked the recent exonerative work of management consultants because “no information is provided to the operator of a particular refinery process about his or her likelihood of getting a disease.” He wondered if the consultants’ findings of elevated rates of respiratory system cancer accounted for the American Petroleum Institute's refusal to publicize their study. In his analysis, workers’ enhanced knowledge made possible successful struggles to eradicate hazards, especially when local health and safety committees were contractually empowered. In early 1976, the first issue of the PhilaPOSH newsletter, Safer Times, put it simply: “To win a safe workplace, knowledge is a necessary first step to power.” The organization signaled its receptivity to militant tactics by reporting on an Illinois UAW local's use of a strike threat to extract from International Harvester the chemical names of all hazardous substances present in the plant. The project's guide to acquiring hazard information endorsed forceful methods: “When possible, direct action (strikes, slowdowns, other job actions) is the best weapon to use to obtain needed information. It is faster and much more reliable than NIOSH, grievance procedures, or the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board].” Where circumstances permitted, PhilaPOSH did not hesitate to promote an aggressive brand of activism.³⁴

The Philadelphia area organizers strove to convey a sense of crisis around the right to know. The announcement of an upcoming conference referred to “death at Rohm and Haas,” invoking the recently uncovered local cover-up of the carcinogen BCME. More than two hundred people came to this event in March 1976, where PhilaPOSH gave the regional OSHA administrator a hard time. Demands included opening the agency's library to the public in the evening and on weekends and having OSHA run regular educational sessions. Obviously, denial of opportunities to gain knowledge gained additional visibility in this confrontation, one in which the federal official made no immediate concessions. The experience thus served to reaffirm the necessity of self-help through union channels. Gaining the support of numerous progressive unions in the metropolitan area made this strategy viable. In this approach, PhilaPOSH saw CACOSH as exemplary. From the outset, Philadelphia activists sought buy-in from local unions, especially in the manufacturing sector. A critical self-assessment during the formative phase captured the tension involved in operating inside the house of labor: “Even though we work with existing trade unions, we want to so far as possible take a rank and file approach.” However, promoting rank-and-file demands for enhanced access to health-related information might place union leaders under unwelcome added pressure to address complicated, thorny problems at a time when hazard-filled unionized industries were increasingly plagued by layoffs and runaway shops. PhilaPOSH and its counterparts in other northern industrial centers often faced a delicate balancing act in difficult circumstances.³⁵

In winning the support of local unions in the Delaware Valley, nothing beat evidence of practical problem solving. Safer Times seized on successful initiatives that displayed an activated rank and file. An early issue detailed the work of the health and safety committee of the UAW local at an ITE-Imperial Corporation electrical manufacturing facility in Philadelphia. The committee investigated hazards, studied control methods, bought literature to start a library, and filed grievances. These actions forced the substitution of less hazardous chemicals for more hazardous ones and the installation of a new ventilation system. At the Kawecki Berylco plant in southeastern Pennsylvania, management refused to help a local union officer investigating a pattern of nosebleeds, rashes, and open sores. Rather than reveal the identities of the chemicals suspected of causing these ailments, the company blamed poor personal hygiene. However, the combination of assistance from PhilaPOSH and the employers’ fear of a strike brought about a contract that made gains. The International Chemical Workers local obtained a list of all chemicals used, the labeling of all containers, and an employee training program.³⁶

Despite a preference for confronting employers in the economic arena, PhilaPOSH did not abandon agitation in the political arena. Although quite critical of this weak bureaucratic weapon, the Philadelphia group never set aside the option of turning to OSHA for assistance. The most important political undertaking in which PhilaPOSH played a crucial leadership role was its advocacy of an OSHA standard creating a right to know. This COSH group joined the petition to OSHA filed by the Health Research Group and US Representative Andrew Maguire seeking a hazard communication rule. In no small part, this move stemmed from a failed attempt by Local 785 of the URW to require Lee Tire Company to release the chemical names of the substances to which it exposed its employees. Over the course of more than a year, beginning in early 1976, the URW branch used the grievance process and contract bargaining to try to force the company to supply this information, without success. After exhausting these avenues, Local 785 and PhilaPOSH pressured OSHA to extract this evidence, also without success. The lesson of this exercise in futility was the necessity for a specific regulatory mandate in OSHA's arsenal. But along with that realization came an awareness that a proposed regulation covering the identification of hazardous materials had long been stalled.³⁷

In the spring of 1977, plans for overcoming the impasse began to take shape. The idea of mounting a major campaign to advance this cause originated with Dudley Burdge of the Service Employees International Union. In May 1977, Burdge proposed starting a mass petition drive to turn up the heat on the federal agents in Washington, DC. Burdge argued that an OSHA standard on hazard information represented “the foundation stone without which no effective pro-worker health and safety program can be built.” He contended that such a standard was especially important for unorganized workers, who were “completely at the mercy of management” regarding access to the facts of their exposures. At that time, PhilaPOSH hired Jim Moran to coordinate the right-to-know drive. Moran had led his UAW local's efforts to pry loose information at ITE-Imperial and was later fired for his purported instigation of a wildcat strike. Moran was not alone in having a commitment forged by unfortunate personal experience. John Windfelder, a rank-and-file member of URW Local 785 who had come to PhilaPOSH with a list of meaninglessly codenamed chemicals and who had fought Lee Tire Company's adamant refusal to give out their real names, also became very active in the petition drive for a standard. PhilaPOSH legal advisers drafted a petition that called on OSHA to force employers to release chemical names, hazard-monitoring data, and employee medical records, and to post hazard warnings. To facilitate wider participation by workers, the petition also requested that OSHA hold regional hearings on the proposal, with the Delaware Valley as one site. The work of circulating petitions in workplaces was underway by July in the Philadelphia area.³⁸

To intensify the pressure on Washington, PhilaPOSH sought to extend the scope of the campaign. It invited the other COSH groups—from Chicago, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and North Carolina—to a meeting to discuss rights to hazard and medical information, along with other mutual interests. At a session on July 30, 1977, PhilaPOSH made its case for opening a national campaign for a standard. Dudley Burdge's pitch portrayed this as an important national issue that needed grassroots support. The right to know would give the COSHes a chance to work together for the first time. This was seen as a winnable issue given the generally hospitable attitude of the Jimmy Carter administration's OSHA, led by progressive toxicologist Eula Bingham. Although each group had to take the proposition back to its decision makers for authorization, the prevailing sentiment was that advocacy of informational rights represented a timely challenge worth at least exploring. All the organizations soon got on board. Bob Holt of the USW and CACOSH, reported, “It was the consensus of the board that this campaign is the ideal issue for our groups to work together on.”³⁹

A simple plan of action emerged from the meeting. Each group would print its own petition forms, with the PhilaPOSH form serving as a template. Organizers distributed these in workplaces, union meetings, and elsewhere. By mid-November 1977, PhilaPOSH held more than one hundred petitions containing about 2,500 signatures. For the North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Project (NCOSH), based in an area with little union presence, this meant soliciting signatures at street fairs and in chapters of the Carolina Brown Lung Association. The Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH) produced a flyer to recruit supporters who would circulate petitions, casting this drive as furthering “the right of working people to informed participation in all decisions affecting their safety and health.” Activists used their existing networks of union affiliations and relations to pursue formal organizational endorsements. In November, MassCOSH secured an expression of support from the Massachusetts American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). NCOSH won endorsements of sympathetic environmental and community organizations. PhilaPOSH delegations met with congressional members from Pennsylvania and New Jersey and got legislators to ask OSHA for both expedited standard setting and regionalized hearings. When New Jersey congressional representative James Florio expressed his support in October 1977, he made note of the elevated cancer rates in industrial centers of his state. Florio's declaration plainly indicated that the movement's framing of this issue as a matter of entitlement had taken hold: “The workers have a right to know what they are handling so they can deal with the risks involved.”⁴⁰

An effective division of leadership responsibilities operated from the outset. PhilaPOSH coordinated activities on the ground among the five participating groups. Jim Moran dispensed guidance and kept the participants informed of one another's work. Peter Greene of the Health Research Group, based in Washington, DC, took care of making connections and monitoring developments there. He reported at length on the performance of a top OSHA official at the symposium on labeling and warning systems held by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) in November. Venturing outside the Washington, DC, area, Greene spoke at the September PhilaPOSH meeting, where he stressed the national significance of the rights campaign. In a visit to the nation's capital in November, the COSHes met with Assistant Secretary of Labor Eula Bingham, who promised that a proposed standard was imminent. At the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, organizers collected signatures on petitions and convinced the association to endorse their initiative. By the end of the year, the COSHes and their allies had begun to build momentum for reform on a number of levels.⁴¹

This was the first occasion on which the COSH groups functioned as a unified force on the national stage, and it was the first time these activists managed to enlist the formal nationwide cooperation of organized labor. Creation of a national movement marked a critical turning point in the marathon fight for greater transparency regarding lethal risks in the American workplace. Although obdurate opposition by powerful interests and an increasingly conservative general political environment would foreclose any easy success, it was a major breakthrough to have established a matrix of movement organizations engaged in a concerted, sustained effort. The decades of scattered and often isolated voices calling for transparency were at an end, replaced by a determined and militant set of counter-institutions, capable of mobilizing a range of conscientious supporters. Just as Alice Hamilton, the grandmother of the movement, had initially needed the resources of Hull House (in a sense, another forerunner of the subsequent alt-labor organizations) and of the larger Progressive movement, the activists of the 1970s depended on the capacity of the COSH groups to attract and allocate various resources necessary to sustain their struggle.