|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Many memoirs offer a snapshot of history, but with a wide-ranging career that has touched so many elements of U.S. life: Law, civil rights, politics — even baseball — William B. Gould IV has written a memoir about the hard work that makes history.
A labor lawyer and Stanford University law professor emeritus, Gould tells his family story alongside major career moments in his memoir, “Those Who Travail and Are Heavy Laden: Memoir of a Labor Lawyer,” published in late 2025. The book joins Gould’s 11 other books on topics that include job discrimination against Black workers in labor unions; labor relations in sports; globalization; and his work in resolving the 1990s baseball strike.
The tome melds memories and scholarly reflections, tracing Gould’s life and wide-ranging work across the decades. The detailed, deeply sourced book features some chapters that might resonate most with students of the law. But “Those Who Travail” is also personal and thoughtful, diving first into family history and later sharing stories as Gould and wife Hilda raise their three sons. The book also offers recollections from crossing paths with a number of familiar names, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert (whose groovy 1960s Christmas card is among the unique correspondence and photos reproduced in the book).
From childhood to his work around the U.S. and abroad, a constant, right alongside Gould’s dedication to labor and civil rights, is a love of baseball. His appointment as chairman of the National Labor Relations Board by President Bill Clinton — an appointment process itself that was hard fought, as the book documents — put him in his professional capacity right in the middle of his beloved sport.
Some of the most personal moments in the book are early chapters that delve into the Gould family history with warm, loving portraits, particularly of Gould’s father — a caring man who didn’t initially care for baseball who nonetheless took his young son to an hours-long double header, and a brilliant man who worked in pioneering research with radar, also helping to track the Soviet satellite Sputnik after its launch.
But there is also racism that Gould, who is Black, and his family faced, such as from some of Gould’s Stanford colleagues, particularly after his arrival on campus in 1971, or from his father’s bosses at Western Electric, who fired him after discovering he was Black.
Gould’s great-grandfather, the first William Gould, referred to as WBG in the book, was enslaved in North Carolina. The book recounts how in 1862, WBG, along with seven other men, escaped from Wilmington aboard a boat and were picked up by a Union vessel. WBG settled in Massachusetts and built a life as a community leader.
The title of the memoir is drawn from a biblical quote. Gould writes that at a formative time in his own life, learning of his great grandfather’s history, along with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, “solidified the overriding idea that I had begun to develop since childhood … that my life should somehow connect with the despised, the rejected and those who ‘travail and are heavy laden.'”
“Those Who Travail” offers insights into historic moments, and important gains in labor law and civil rights — some of which may again be in peril in the current times.
We spoke with Gould about his memoir. This conversation has been edited for length.
Embarcadero Media: Why did you decide to write “Those Who Travail?”
Gould: I felt that I had done something over the course of my life in a number of areas that are of interest to the public, acting as a labor arbitrator, a law professor, and someone who’s appeared in court quite frequently on on labor matters and job discrimination, as well as sports. I suppose the other factor is that now is the time to do it, since I’ve almost reached the age of 90.
Embarcadero Media: Early in your career, you worked with labor unions but sometimes represented employers. How did that affect your perspective on labor disputes?
Gould: I was very fortunate in getting that kind of opportunity. My very first, and I think, particularly important job in my legal career was with the United Auto Workers. I got a lucky break because I wrote a paper for a professor who had been with the auto workers, and had just gone into teaching when I was a student at Cornell Law School. He took an interest in me and recommended me to the United Auto Workers. That, professionally speaking, was probably the most important development in my work.
I was also involved in the negotiation of collective bargaining agreements with the really practical nitty-gritty of the matters that come before arbitrators chosen by labor and management or government agencies that have authority over those issues.
I got a sense of how important it is to keep in mind both the practical concerns of an employer that is looking for returns on its changes and objectives, and attempting to, for instance, promote technological innovations, and the competing concerns of workers who are looking to better their position in society. … I think it gave me a broad sense of what labor management relations is about and what labor law should be about.
Embarcadero Media: You were involved in some major political moments in the U.S. but also abroad, speaking on democracy in South Africa during apartheid and Poland during the Solidarity movement. How did those experiences shape your work?
Gould: I think that particularly the work in this country helped me as a teacher and a writer. I’ve always had the view that that law professors can’t really teach their subject unless they’ve been involved in it in a direct way, and have had exposure and experience, and I think that that that period of my life really assisted me as a as a writer, a professor, and someone who would advocate for change.
South Africa for me was both an experience that allowed me to take some of what I had done in the courtroom and in the classroom to audiences that were interested in democracy.
The Carter administration, on whose behalf I did it, thought that, and I thought that we had something to tell people that was useful. Of course, today it’s 180 degrees different. Now we have an administration that is trying to wipe away most of the gains in making the country more democratic in the ’60s and ’70s, and the ultimate irony is that the one group of refugees that they seem to be particularly interested in inviting are white Afrikaners who are opposed to the things that that Nelson Mandela was interested in changing.
So I look at it today with a fair amount of anguish and melancholy — melancholy about the steps backwards that have been made, but we were able to do something in that period.
Poland was perhaps accidental in many respects. … In 1977, Poland arose during the period that I was banned from South Africa, and I went up my own initiative to an international conference conducted by Solidarity … and as a result of that, made connections and contacts, which I preserved through subsequent meetings to Poland and other portions of Eastern Europe, even after Solidarity was banned, and I had a great chance to see it both before and after.
Embarcadero Media: You write very poetically about playing sandlot baseball as a child, and baseball is a theme throughout the book. It seemed you were perfectly suited when the Major League Baseball strike happened, and you were chairman of the National Labor Relations Board.
Gould: That was really, as they say, the mother of all strikes in sports. That was the longest strike, which brought about the first cancellation of the World Series in 1994 since 1904 and the first time that the World Series had ever been canceled as a result of the strike.
We, the National Labor Relations Board, became involved in it in the spring of ’95, and I cast the deciding vote as chairman of the Labor Board to support the obtaining of an injunction against the owners for not bargaining in good faith with the players. We voted to proceed to court and obtained an injunction from the judge as she was then — she is now (Supreme Court) Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and I wrote quite an eloquent opinion supporting our position. And as soon as we obtained that injunction, the players agreed to return to the field, and the owners agreed to accept them, and as a result of that, a comprehensive collective bargaining agreement was negotiated with the parties. And there were no further strikes or lockouts.
Prior to 1994, there had been strikes and lockouts just about every time the agreement between the parties expired, and they could freely use economic pressure against each other. Well, there were no further strikes or lockouts in the wake of the 1995 intervention by our National Labor Relations Board until 2022 — 30 years later, when the owners locked out the players. It appears as though there may be another dispute of this nature coming at the end of 2026 and 2027 when the contract expires between them. But in the interim, there have been no disputes until 2022, and the industry has increased its revenues tenfold. So in a secondary supportive way, I like to think that our efforts had something to do with promoting this period of peace and prosperity.
Embarcadero Media: You say in the epilogue that your position at Stanford affected your entire career. Why was it so instrumental?
Gould: Of course my career at Stanford has not been one unqualified success after success. I describe some of the disputes that I had with the various characters on the faculty and I encountered racism both in law school, in my judgment, and amongst the alumni.
But Tom Ehrlich, who was the dean (of Stanford Law School) at that point and who had a great interest in me from the beginning really jumped onto my side, and I think greater opportunities existed as a result of being there.
I could teach exactly what I wanted about my labor law course. I developed the first employment discrimination law course that was ever taught at Stanford Law School. I think that I developed one of the very first employment discrimination courses that was taught anywhere, and then in the ’80s was able to develop sports law courses as well.
I think that Stanford gave me a visibility and opportunity to write in prominent journals and to do the scholarship that is important for a professor to develop, and gave me the time to not only to write, but to act as an arbitrator, as I have since the ’60s, and and to ultimately go into government.
I’ve had the great fortune to to be able to have a life of balance between scholarship and action as a government official, a litigator and an arbitrator.
Those Who Travail and Are Heavy Laden: Memoir of a Labor Lawyer; WPI Press; $34.95 e-book or print.
