William B Gould IV has had a long and distinguished career as a labour lawyer and civil rights advocate. While he has been a Professor, and now Emeritus, at the Stanford Law School for over 50 years, his memoir has little to say on the machinations of university life at Stanford or his times at other universities. His major focus is on his involvement in the real world, the nitty gritty of labour law and industrial relations as a representative or advocate on behalf of the parties, a consultant, a mediator or arbitrator – including a stint as a salary arbitrator in Major League Baseball, a representative of the American government overseas explaining the operation of American labour law, and as a regulator being appointed as Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board from 1994 to 1998 by President Bill Clinton, and California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board from 2014 to 2017 by Governor Jerry Brown. He takes readers through major cases and developments, which have occurred in American labour law since the early 1960s.

The title for this volume comes from an extract of Matthew (11:28): Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you. It sums up Gould’s hope and belief that the law, and his work as a lawyer and scholar, should play a ‘positive’ (in both the popular and social science senses) role of helping those who are less fortunate. This stems from a combination of both his family’s history and his religious belief as a member of the Episcopalian Church. His great-grandfather, William B. Gould, was an escaped slave who joined the Union Navy and fought for the Union in the Civil War. In an era where slaves were discouraged from learning to read and write, he kept an extensive diary of his years in the Civil War. The diary was rediscovered in 1958, and Gould published an extensive account of it in 2002 (Gould 2002).

Gould was born in 1936. He had a happy childhood and often refers to the love and support he received from his parents and broader family. He developed a wide range of interests, was a voracious reader, and interested in current events. Parts of chapter two examine his reaction to the McCarthy era and the Brown v Board of Education decisions, which ended de jure (but not de facto) segregation in schools and across America more generally. Gould was not an outstanding student and did not obtain entry to an Ivy League university. After graduating from Rhode Island University, in the latter half of the 1950s, he decided to take up graduate law at Cornell University.

He had a desultory time in his first year at Cornell, with one exception. There was a compulsory first-year course where Kurt Hanslowe, who had previously worked with the United Auto Workers (UAW), taught a Legal Research course. He devised a research program that required students to examine the tension between labour law and anti-discrimination. A key issue was whether unions could apply a racially exclusive policy; that is, one that excluded Blacks. A court had found that this was quite legal, a position with which Gould strongly disagreed. He quickly came to see ‘the workplace [as being] critical to issues of racial justice’ (60).

His paper brought Gould to the attention of Hanslowe, who helped secure a summer internship for him with the UAW in 1960. After graduating from Cornell, he obtained full-time work with the UAW in Detroit, where he represented members in cases under The National Labor Relations Act 1935. In 1961, he decided he wanted to undertake further university research to improve his skills as a labour lawyer and writer. He applied and obtained acceptance at the London School of Economics (LSE). He found London to be gloomy, cold, and the food somewhat terrible; although it could not have been that bad as he met his wife Hilda there, to whom he has dedicated this book.

He attended lectures given by Otto Kahn-Freund on labour law, the doyen of British and European labour lawyers, and those of Henry Phelps Brown, Britain’s leading labour economist of that era, on labour economics. In Kahn-Freund, Gould would have found a soulmate. Kahn-Freund maintained:

While at the LSE, there was a change of guard at the UAW, which foreclosed Gould’s ability to resume employment with it on his return to the US. He obtained a job working in the head office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington, DC. In 1965, he obtained employment with a New York law firm to work on labour law matters. Here he represented both unions and employers (which was quite rare then - and now - in that law firms invariably represent(ed) one side of the industrial relations divide). He also acted as an impartial mediator and arbitrator. Something else happened, which determined the future direction of his life’s work.

The Civil Rights Act 1964 was amended to prohibit employment discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity), and national origin. The Civil Rights Act created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to administer and enforce the Act. The EEOC commenced operating in 1965. Gould was employed as a consultant and conciliator for the EEOC. He spent the next several years involved in the type of cases that had first piqued his interest almost a decade earlier, when he had been a student at Cornell.

In his subsequent research and writings, Gould proffered the view that ‘the seniority black workers had not been able to accumulate in the past due to exclusionary hiring policies placed workers at a disadvantage now’ (146). Gould published a number of articles on this ‘New Province For Law and Order’, and other matters in which he was involved and which enhanced his profile in both labour law and academic circles.

In 1967, he was offered a job in the law school at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he had spent time in his UAW days. He accepted.

Gould taught both constitutional and labour law at Wayne State. He was also encouraged to offer an employment discrimination seminar, something which had never been taught before. For the next several years, he combined writing, teaching, and arbitral work. He also wrote pieces for general readers in a variety of newspapers across the country. This is something he has done throughout his academic career.

For a time, Gould did some teaching at Harvard and bumped into Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was on leave from Rutgers Law School and contemplated taking up employment there. In late 1971, he received an offer from Stanford Law School, which he accepted.

The rest of Those Who Travail focuses on four major aspects of Gould’s career and interests. They are the different cases in which he became involved as an advocate, consultant or arbitrator; his overseas travel – especially to Japan and South Africa (he also visited Australia several times) – to learn about overseas labour law systems and provide information on the operation of the American system; his love of baseball (being a Boston Red Sox fan) and developing a ‘Sport and the Law’ course at Stanford which he co-taught with legendary sports journalist Leonard Koppett and Alvin Attles, a former player, coach, and general manager of the National Basketball Association’s Golden State Warriors; and his experiences as Chairman of the NLRB and California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board.

Through his connections with Leonard Koppett, Gould was encouraged to write for the sports pages of newspapers, both as a sports journalist and an academic expert on business and labour relations issues associated with professional team sports. This enabled him to meet up with and develop friendships with many players and officials. His most famous decision as head of the NLRB was finding that Major League Baseball had breached the NLRA in imposing a salary cap during a mandatory bargaining period, which played an important part in ending a 232-day strike in baseball in 1974/75 (380-388).

In 2023, President Bill Clinton sent Gould a letter congratulating him on being on the faculty of Stanford for fifty years.

There are two aspects of his involvement with the NLRB and the Californian Agricultural Labor Relations Board that are of special interest. The first is the machinations associated with the nomination process. Right wing and business groups were opposed to his appointment at the NLRB because of fears he would be involved in decisions antithetical to their interests. In this memoir, Gould devotes some time to the attempts to gather dirt on him to block his appointment. At one stage, he received a query from Senator Ted Kennedy’s office asking if he was a gambler. The story doing the rounds in Washington was that he was, and took bribes in arbitration cases to pay off gambling debts. As one of his colleagues commented, Gould is ‘known to love sports. He’s Black. Therefore, he must be a gambler’ (351).

The second aspect is how the operation of a regulatory agency can be nobbled to reduce its effectiveness, providing another wrinkle on the issue of regulatory capture. In the case of the NLRB, a continuing problem Gould experienced was Congress not ratifying the appointment of new persons to the Board when a vacancy became available. In terms of its key decision-making ability, it was simply understaffed. The second problem was the quality of people appointed to both Boards. With respect to the NLRB, Congress had developed the practice of appointing a member with a Republican background, and one with a Democrat background. Appointments seemed to be reserved, and/or a dumping ground, for apparatchiks from both sides of the aisle. A republican appointee rejected all decisions by the Board, and the Democrat had an inability to reach and sign off on decisions. And when it came to California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board, Gould’s biggest lament was that other Board members and the General Counsel lacked a background in labour law. He ruefully commented, ‘what they lacked in knowledge they made up for in self-confidence, which [he found] ‘at times dispiriting and disconcerting’ (445).

Those Who Travail and Are Heavy Laden: Memoir of a Labor Lawyer provides an account of William B Gould IV’s family history, his early life, education, broader interests, commitment to social justice, and his work as a labour lawyer and his extensive scholarship. In the process, and this is the memoir’s major contribution, it provides an insider’s account of major issues that have dominated American labour law and industrial relations over the last sixty or so years. William B Gould played an important role in these developments as an advocate, consultant, arbitrator, regulator, and a chronicler of those times.