Harry Kelber

Harry Kelber has spent his entire adult life in the service of the labor movement: as an organizer, union printer, labor pamphleteer, education director, professor of labor studies, international lecturer and weekly labor commentator on the Internet.

In the late 1930's, as a 23-year-old editor of a weekly labor paper and an adviser to CIO Regional Director Allan S. Haywood he was a front-line observer and active participant in the greatest and most successful organizing campaign in labor history.

Kelber, later a union printer, served as editor of the daily strike bulletin during the 1962-63 strike, which shut down New York City's daily newspapers for 114 days.

As the legislative and public relations director of the Physicians Forum, he played a principal role in organizing the nation's physicians to win social security coverage in 1965, despite the opposition of the American Medical Association.

In 1968, after earning a Doctorate in American Civilization from New York University, he created and directed Cornell University's Two-year Labor/Liberal Arts Program. Three years later, he helped to establish a four-year accredited Labor College in New York City, where he was senior professor until his retirement in 1984.

From 1985-90, he was education and cultural director of the 36,000-member Electrical Workers Local 3, I.B.E.W. In that same period, he was coordinator and pricipal instructor of the Trade Union Leadership Institute of the New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO.

Over a 25-year period, he has taught hundreds of trade union leaders and rank-and-filers in courses in union organizing, collective bargaining, public relations and labor law.

In 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was invited to conduct a week-long seminar for 145 top-ranking labor leaders of Russia and the Commonwealth States on the theme, "Democratic Unions in a Market Economy."

Kelber is the founder and editor of a newsletter, The Labor Educator, which since 1990 has advocated a series of reforms to revitalize the labor movement. He is a long-standing, dues-paying member of the New York Typographical Union, No. 6, CWA.

He is the author of Union Printers and Controlled Automation (Macmillan, Free Press, 1966); a novel, The Labor Leader (Picket Press, 1989) and an autobiography, My 60 Years as a Labor Activist (A.G. Publishing, 1996.)

Kelber posts a weekly column on the AFL-CIO LaborNET, which also appears on the Internet. His E-mail address is: hkelber@igc.org.