A review of William B. Gould IV, Those Who Travail and Are Heavy Laden: Memoir of a Labor Lawyer (WPI Press, 2025)
By Stephen F. Diamond*
In the summer of 1961, William B. Gould IV arrived at the United Auto Workers’ Solidarity House as a young lawyer fresh out of Cornell Law School, hired into the union’s legal department. The UAW was then, arguably, the most powerful industrial union in the world, led by its progressive founder Walter Reuther. Its legal department had a reputation to match. Private-sector union density in the United States, however, had peaked at just under thirty-five percent only seven years earlier — a high-water mark it would never approach again.
The dismantling of the New Deal labor order the UAW had helped create was already well underway. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the employers’ counterattack on the Wagner Act, had been law for fourteen years. Operation Dixie, the post-World War II effort of the CIO to organize the South, had collapsed by 1953. Cold War purges had stripped many unions of some of its most militant organizers. The 1955 AFL-CIO merger papered over internal tensions that led Reuther’s UAW to break with the Federation in 1968. And the racial exclusions written into New Deal legislation remained intact: agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from the Wagner Act and the Social Security Act to secure Southern Democratic support.
Bill Gould’s more than 60 year legal and academic career, then, began near labor’s peak and survived during its long structural retreat. His rich memoir records a lifetime spent working inside institutions whose foundations had, in retrospect, begun to weaken long before he entered them. In Those Who Travail he records his effort over six decades to expand what was possible and preserve some of what remained.
An African-American Lineage
The book’s title comes from both Matthew and the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer: “Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.” Gould’s great-grandfather, an escaped slave who served in the Union Army, would likely have known the passage by heart, and Gould himself absorbed it as a young choirboy: “These words soon became integrated into my view of the Church, and the need to protect the masses, our people, and all who were ‘heavy laden[,]’” Gould writes. “And subsequently they fused, in my mind, with the Court’s Brown [v. Board of Education] ruling condemning segregation. If I have been able to make any contribution to workplace fairness, its origin and impetus are to be found in these experiences.” (52) Gould, then, became a labor lawyer heavily influenced by the Episcopal tradition his family had followed since Reconstruction. He entered the labor movement just as its Black civil-rights wing (including figures like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin through organizations like the Negro American Labor Council) was demanding that largely white-led industrial unions (including the UAW) live up to the movement’s promise, arguing that race and class were the same fight.
Gould’s strategic skepticism
From Solidarity House, Gould’s path was far from a straight line into academia. A formative year studying under Otto Kahn-Freund at the London School of Economics—which helped shape his skepticism about the American legal system’s over-reliance on labor law—was followed by early stints at the NLRB in Washington, D.C., and in private practice in New York City. He joined the law faculty at Wayne State, where he would remain near to both the UAW and a large Black workforce. His ties to Detroit would remain strong even after his appointment as Stanford Law School’s first Black faculty member.** Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he soon found himself acting pro bono in a decade long court battle against Detroit Edison on behalf of a class of black workers challenging discriminatory treatment. The $4 million in punitive damages eventually awarded, The New York Times said, “was believed to be the largest yet made for punitive damages since the Civil Rights Act of 1964” had been passed. While the appellate court reversed, a Supreme Court holding meant to rein in Title VII claims shifted the matter from a class action to individual hearings. Fearing significant costs to litigate hundreds of claims individually Edison settled, netting millions for Gould’s clients.
The reversal, though, marked an important shift: federal courts began narrowing Title VII just as Black workers appeared, finally, to be gaining a stable place in industrial America. Gould’s first book, Black Workers in White Unions (1977), remains an essential account of what produced that outcome, including segregated locals, exclusively white craft unions, and seniority systems that only hardened past discrimination. These were features not bugs, as we now say about so much of high tech’s malware. Gould tells a revealing story about asking a union lawyer involved in a Seattle Building Trades dispute that Gould explored as a possible precedent to use in Detroit. Gould wondered how the consent decree issued there — the first comprehensive antidiscrimination order against the construction trades — was working. “Fine,” came the reply.” “Are many Blacks getting jobs?” Gould asked. “No.” “This was the problem,” Gould concluded. (188)
Gould resists the liberal temptation to treat his own rise as proof that the system worked. He is candid that doors opened to him because “the cities burned in the 1960s,” and that they later closed again. (xvi) The material on his post-George Floyd assignment from San Francisco Mayor London Breed — racial audit of the city’s municipal workforce — one of the book’s most poignant, because it shows an eighty-five-year-old labor lawyer being asked in 2021 to do for one city’s payroll what he had been trying to do for the country since 1965. For Gould this assignment recalled earlier efforts in the wake of the 1960s civil rights movement when a similar albeit national study warned that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.” (459) A change in the black letter law had not been realized in the world at large. This is Gould’s argument across six decades: law is “only a factor,” and lawyers and legal academics who think otherwise have been misled by their own subject matter. The real terrain is the political economy beyond the courtroom.
That argument structures the long central chapters on the NLRB. Gould arrived as chair in 1994 with a reform agenda centered on the Board’s underused injunctive power found in Section 10(j) of the National Labor Relations Act and on rebuilding an agency damaged by the Reagan and first Bush years. He encountered a Gingrich Congress that treated the Board as a political target, an employer bar led by a new generation of union busting law firms that had learned to weaponize the Board’s own delays, and a Democratic White House whose commitment to labor was, by his account, intermittent. His pages on the Caterpillar and Detroit Newspapers strikes show what is now widely recognized: the Mackay Radio permanent-replacement doctrine had evolved from a Depression-era oddity into a license for employers to turn every economic strike into a war of attrition unions could not win. Gould’s chairmanship coincided with the years in which private-sector union density slid below ten percent and kept dropping; today it sits at roughly six. He was an unusually able administrator of a statute that no longer fit the economy it had been written to govern.
Baseball runs through it all. Gould has been a Boston Red Sox fan since childhood and a Stanford sports-law teacher who brought Willie Mays into his classroom and prizes the baseball glove Mays sent him after the visit. His single most visible act as NLRB chair was the 1995 intervention that helped end the players’ strike: the injunction his Board authorized, issued by then-District Judge Sonia Sotomayor, sent the owners back to the bargaining table and the camps back open. Baseball was one corner of the American economy where union labor retained real leverage across Gould’s lifetime, because players cannot be easily replaced and certainly not permanently. It is among the few labor regimes the employer counterattack failed to break, and Gould played a key role in keeping it intact.
The California chapters — on his chairmanship of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board in his eighties during Jerry Brown’s third and fourth terms — recount a period of Gould’s career that few seem to know about. Yet, he is the only person to have served as chair of both the NLRB and its California cousin, the Agricultural Labor Relations Board. The ALRB was created to bring farmworkers, whom the Wagner Act had excluded as part of the price of its passage, under a state labor regime. Gould arrived four decades after Brown signed the law and found that “the dream had become a nightmare”: a “moribund” UFW “with no interest in organizing the unorganized,” an industry artful in using delay to demoralize organizers, and a state government whose attention had shifted elsewhere. That Gould and the board pushed through mandatory mediation and related enforcement measures was a real achievement. That this counts as one of the most consequential labor-law reforms of the past quarter-century shows just how far the movement has receded.
Looking ahead
The 2023 strike wave that Gould describes with measured enthusiasm—the UAW under Shawn Fain, the Teamsters at UPS, the writers and actors, the hotel workers—arrived, as he notes, without any of the labor-law reform his generation had pursued for seven decades. The Labor Law Reform bill of 1978, the Workplace Fairness Act, the Employee Free Choice Act, the PRO Act: all were defeated at the same Senate chokepoint, because the Democratic Party could no longer assemble either the votes or the donor base. The labor liberalism Gould embodies — patient, lawyerly, faithful to the New Deal compact and to the party that administered it — was a legacy nonetheless worth defending. These institutions made American working people, including many if not all Black workers, into something close to equal citizens for a few decades in the middle of the twentieth century. No doubt Gould would agree, however, that a legacy is not a strategy. The employer class that imperfectly accepted the New Deal settlement has unequivocally abandoned it. Thus, the task of resurrecting a new democratic institutional framework against that same employer class falls to the rank-and-file insurgencies Gould introduces here with appropriate, if brief, respect.
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*Associate Professor of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law.
**It was at Stanford that I first met Gould in the mid-1980s while I was a union activist. His marvelously chaotic office, filled with hundreds of papers and books strewn about in an order that only Gould seemed to understand, triggered in me a wish to transition from the labor movement to legal academia.