Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The CIO 1935-1955 by Robert H. Zieger Review: The CIO 1935-1955. ROBERT H. ZIEGER’S The CIO: 1935-1955 will take its place on the labor history shelves next to Philip Taft’s history of the American Federation of Labor, and near the works of John R. Commons and Selig Perlman. Zieger’s work will be for many years the standard work and definitive history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. With a masterful command of the archives of the CIO, its affiliated International unions, and government agencies, as well as the large secondary history in this field, Zieger has produced a very readable and comprehensive institutional history dealing with all the major events, personalities and issues. At the same time, for the field of labor history, Zieger’s CIO represents a conservative turn both in form and content. This narrow institutional history is fundamentally an apology for the labor bureaucracy of the CIO, particularly Sidney Hillman, Philip Murray and above all Walter Reuther. Those who look for a critical perspective on the U.S. labor establishment are likely to find The CIO disappointing, for Zieger has written what is in effect the Whig history of the labor bureaucrats, one which demonstrates the inevitability and desirability of their long-term tenure. The fundamentally establishment character of Zieger’s book is unfortunate at a time when today’s labor movement is in such dire need of critical thinking. Traditions Disappeared. I believe that Zieger is correct in his view that labor unions are the most important institutions of the U.S. working class and that they belong at the center of labor history. But the genre of institutional history, at least when so narrowly conceived, tends to reify the working class, the labor movement and even the union as an institution. The CIO appears cut off from the surrounding society and historically from its own traditions. While in the opening pages Zieger mentions the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World as earlier struggles for industrial unionism, he fails to convey the importance of these earlier movements as models, even if failed models, and as examples for the CIO. There is no illusion to Debs and the American Railway Union, a crucial defeat in the process. Consequently, the reader of The CIO has no sense of the trajectory of U.S. working class history, or the sense of purpose and direction inherent in workers’ struggles leading up to the CIO. Similarly, because this is an institutional history, Zieger begins his book in 1935 rather than beginning with the Great Depression or with the three great precursor strikes of 1934: Toledo Autolite, the Minneapolis Teamsters and San Francisco longshore. An account and analysis of those strikes, with their respectively socialist, Trotskyist and Communist leaders, their working class militance and their character as virtual local civil wars, would have given the reader a different understanding of the CIO’s potential, achievements and failings. Zieger has divided the CIO’s history roughly into three parts: the 1930s, World War II, and the postwar period up to the 1955 AFL-CIO merger. The emphasis on the CIO as an organization often leads Zieger to pass over illuminating moments. He would have done well, for example, to stop for a few pages and describe at least one of the great sitdown strikes of the 1930s in order to give the reader the feel of the movement. Breaking the fundamental rule of story telling, Zieger tells is the strikes were "dramatic," but fails to show and make us feel their drama. Just as Zieger tends to pass over the movement, so too he tends to platy down the role of individual personalities. Zieger does not pause to sketch in a paragraph or two the character and temperament of the actors. One wonders why Zieger failed to make use of the psychological insights in Warren Van Tine and Melvin Dubofsky’s John L. Lewis or in Fraser’s Labor Shall Rule in order to craft a short profile of the principal figures. But because he didn’t, we don’t really see the important role played by Lewis’ bravado and swagger, by Murray’s insecurities and anxieties, or by Hillman’s exceeding ambition. We don’t really see this "fallible" men, ass Zieger calls them, transforming themselves into labor statesmen, and certainly that was also key to the creation of the CIO as an institution. An Organizational Synthesis. What Zieger is really good at doing, however, is showing the gradual organizational structuring of the CIO, the stages in the transformation of a mass movement into a corporate institution. Even specialists will learn a good deal from Zieger’s account of the CIO’s growth and solidification through the establishment of new structures, negotiation of contracts and the decisions of government agencies. Zieger in this sense is for labor history what Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. is to business history, that is, the purveyor of an "organizational synthesis" in the field of labor studies. And just as Chandler’s work never questions capitalism as a system and implicitly sings its praises, so Zieger tacitly accepts and praises the labor bureaucracy. "In this book," writes Zieger in the Introduction, "it is my aim to get the historical record of the CIO as right as I can." Zieger indicates that he wants to write "a reliable record of the past." And because it is written in the institutional history genre, the book gives the sense of being just such a straightforward, merely factual account of the CIO, an account deriving directly from the documents. Certainly CIO derives from studious attention to the documents. Yet Zieger’s history—in its apparent dispassionate style—is also a passionate partisan account. In his Conclusion, Zieger lists "six major contributions" of the CIO that made it a "positive force in American life." Those six, paraphrased here, are: * The creation of industrial unions. * The negotiation of collective bargaining agreements which brought to workers greater dignity, decency and a higher standard of living. * Organizing African Americans and playing a positive role in their struggle for civil rights. * Driving the Communist Party out of the CIO. * Helping to win the war against fascism. * Establishing the CIO PAC in the Democratic Party. Most readers will recognize this as the Reuther platform in the CIO. This is history written from the winners’ standpoint. Now, while there may be general agreement of the importance of the first three points, there is a good deal of debate about the last three. And as the discussion in the end notes makes clear, Zieger is involved in an intense debate over the nature of the CIO with a group of historians whom he characterizes as "neo-syndicalists" and "Trotskyists," foremost among them Nelson Liechtenstein, author of Labor’s War at Home. A Road Not Taken. Liechtenstein and the others (Art Preis and Martin Glaberman are mentioned, Staughton Lynd might have been) differ with Zieger on a number of particular points, but they differ most in method. They are interested in the road not taken. Liechtenstein’s Labor’s War at Home argued that in the course of World War II the workers’ leaders, such as Walter Reuther, led the labor movement into a collaboration with the corporations and government which ultimately weakened workers’ power on the shop floor and the autonomy of the unions as organizations. Ultimately the labor movement’s subordination to employer and state led to the bureaucratization of the new unions and the routinization of labor relations. But as Liechtenstein makes clear, there were important moments when it looked as if it might have been otherwise. Or to consider these matters from another point of view, David Milton in The Politics of U.S. Labor from the Great Depression to the New Deal contends that many of the original organizers and activists who built the CIO starred out fighting for three things: industrial unions, a labor party and socialism. Milton writes: "The goal of independent organization for which the unskilled and semi-skilled workers of the United States had devoted moire than half a century of sacrifice and bloodshed was finally achieved, but only by abandoning the historic and classic working-class objective of political and economic control over factories and the system of production. In other words, socialism and independent political action were traded off by the industrial working class for economic rights. This historical outcome was neither automatic nor inevitable; the outcome was decided by dispositions of power and the nature of specific political coalitions contending for supremacy." (Milton, 9-10) What’s missing from Zieger’s book is precisely that sense of a significant struggle among contending personalities, parties and forces which might have differently shaped the CIO. Critical Moments. Yet we should be interested in those crucial moments when the workers who created the CIO also—however briefly, incompletely or unsuccessfully) fought for workers’ control of the shop floor, talked about creating a working class political party, expressed reservations about another world war for big business, and dreamed of a more democratic and even socialist America. Each of those moments held the possibility of other and perhaps better outcomes, and it is precisely the debate about the choices that makes for both exciting and illuminating history. Zieger tends to omit or downplay the importance of the debates. Each of those critical moments was determined by the relative power of the government, the employers, the labor bureaucrats and the ranks. But Zieger does not give us a no of those powers contesting. Least of all does he give us a sense of the rank and file, perhaps because his attempts to understand the mentalite or the consciousness of rank and file workers in the CIO depends upon his frequent reference to public opinion polls by Gallup and others. While such polls have some validity and usefulness, they are only one source. One feels that Zieger might have made better use of oral histories, autobiographies, newspaper articles and social histories to get a feel for the often divided, contradictory or ambivalent character of working-class consciousness. Race, Gender and Redbaiting. While generally a Reutherite, Zieger does discuss the CIO’s strengths and weakness in its dealing with African American and women workers. He is particularly good at showing how the unions’ masculine ethos and style prejudiced them against women. He also gives a good account of the CIO’s strengths and weaknesses on the racial issue. Zieger’s account of CIO politics on race and gender nevertheless leaves something to be desired. One never has the sense of the way that these matters really intersect with the union’s larger political project. While arguing for the importance of these matters, Zieger seems to treat them as secondary to the tasks of building the unions, collective bargaining, political action and winning the war. Many readers, I imagine, will be struck if not shocked by Zieger’s apparent support for the expulsion of the Communists from the CIO. (The discussion is often in the footnotes: See 446, ns. 38 and 39; 450, n. 70.) Like Walter Reuther, Zieger argues that the labor left was right to drive the pro-Soviet Stalinists out of the unions. The problem historically is that Reuther turns out to represent not a socialist workers’ movement driving the Stalinists out of its ranks, but rather a corporate labor liberal driving his leftist opponents out of the union. The CIO’s purge of the Communists proves to be part of the Truman-McCarthy anti-Communism which casts a pall over all of American culture for over a decade. Zieger’s chosen institutional genre makes it difficult for him to incorporate these developments into his history. In explaining the rise of the "new men of power," Zieger’s institutional approach cuts off the unions from the development of U.S. political economy. The rise and stabilization of the CIO’s bureaucracy had everything to do not only with World War II, but also with the postwar prosperity. The CIO bureaucracy can only be described and explained by discussing U.S. capital’s imperial hegemony between 1945 and 1968. The bureaucracy’s success in maintaining control over the ranks is understandable only by analyzing the U.S. economy’s dependence on military Keynesianism, i.e. a permanent arms and war economy (to which anti-Communism was politically vital). Whom Do We Need? The CIO: 1935-1955 will strand alongside Taft’s AFL, but we will still recommend that students read Irving Bernstein’s The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-!941 and David Brody’s Workers in Industrial America to understand this period, and we will send them to Liechtenstein and all the other neo-syndicalists and Trotskyists who care about the workers’ road not taken. Zieger ends his book appropriately enough with a parody of Archie Bunker: "Mister, we could use a man like Walter Reuther again." Let me quote Ken Paff, national organizer of the reform movement Teamsters for a Democratic Union: "Where’s Debs now that we need him?" The CIO: 1935-1955. Robert H. Zieger has written an enormously useful history of the tumultuous career of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, one bound to be treated as the definitive account for years to come. His book displays a thorough familiarity with an earlier industrial labor relations literature, while opening up the subject to a new research agenda informed by more recent concerns with race and gender, the role of the state, and the importance of anti-communism for understanding the post-war evolution of the once insurgent labor organization. The dramatic and analytical structure of The CIO depends on Zieger's apt observation that the movement for industrial unionism was an heroic and expansive one, marked by a daring militance and social boldness; yet at the same time was just as much a story of institutional fragility, compromise and political equivocation. Moreover, the book addresses some of the key questions raised by the CIO's meteoric rise and more sedate settling-in: Did the ouster of the Communist Party-led unions after the war permanently enfeeble the new labor movement? Did the CIO's utter reliance on the Democratic Party entail sacrificing its birth-right of militant activism? Did the CIO's willing collaboration in the political economy of the Cold War destroy its autonomy? Zieger's history is always balanced. He notes that from the outset the CIO displayed both the idealism of a great movement of social liberation and the hard-headed realism of an organization charged with contractual responsibilities. He examines the diverse motives of the CIO leadership, ranging from visionary ambition to pragmatic power-brokering. He tries to give equal time to the even more diverse motivations and inhibitions of the rank and file, observing the amalgam of fear, caution, resentment, militancy, and radicalism that coursed through the neighborhoods of working class America. Such cross-cutting emotions helps account for the moody ambiguity of the CIO, its confrontational belligerence and modesty of objective. Especially in his discussion of the post-war CIO, Zieger is acutely sensitive to the larger political rhythms which so deeply affected internal CIO developments; although I do think he underemphasizes this larger, determining political framework in his analysis of the movement's early years. While a fair amount of what Zieger tells us about the CIO's first decade covers familiar ground, his analysis of the second and final decade of the CIO's independent existence is fresher. He pays due attention to the CIO's vexed relationship to African-American and women workers. Noting in the former case that while in many ways the CIO must be credited with great accomplishments in combating the discriminatory practices of earlier trade unions, nonetheless its record remained spotty as political cautiousness and ideological commitment to color-blind egalitarianism led it to avoid direct racial appeals which might have re-ignited the CIO's crusading organizational momentum after the war. Similarly, despite the growing demographic reality of women workers, the CIO remained far too muted about issues of gender, implicitly sustaining the patriarchal system of the "family wage." Zieger identifies the strike wave immediately following the end of the war as a critical moment, one that loudly proclaimed the formidable power of the new trade union federation within the precincts of basic industry, but just as clearly signaled its inability/unwillingness to venture beyond the narrowing confines of conventional collective bargaining. Zieger's analysis of the portentous failure of "Operation Dixie" to crack the anti-union South emphasizes the CIO's racial timidity and the toxic role of race and red-baiting. With its collapse the halcyon, crusading days of the CIO were over, a verdict confirmed by the turn to the right in national politics registered by the mid-term elections of 1946. Zieger's closing pages are devoted to a provocative interpretation of the institution's bureaucratization, of its loss of vision and political courage, of its complicit role in the fragmenting and segmenting of the labor force, of its chronic inability to organize among white collar and service workers. But in the end Zieger's account is always a judiciously fair one as he insists, despite all its shortcomings, on the real historic achievements of the CIO. Steven Fraser is Vice President and Executive Editor at Basic Books. He is author of Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor. (Hardcover - Free Press, 1992; paperback - Cornell University Press, 1993). The CIO, 1935-1955 by Robert H. Zieger (1997, Trade Paperback) С самой низкой ценой, совершенно новый, неиспользованный, неоткрытый, неповрежденный товар в оригинальной упаковке (если товар поставляется в упаковке). Упаковка должна быть такой же, как упаковка этого товара в розничных магазинах, за исключением тех случаев, когда товар является изделием ручной работы или был упакован производителем в упаковку не для розничной продажи, например в коробку без маркировки или в пластиковый пакет. См. подробные сведения с дополнительным описанием товара. The CIO 1935-1955 by Robert H. Zieger. In asserting that the answer to the crisis facing the workers’ movement is for the AFL-CIO to “play hardball,” Spartacist hearkens back to a mythical past of the American unions. This is based on an extremely one-sided and, therefore, false presentation of the origins and early evolution of the CIO. In reality, the seeds of the subsequent degeneration of the unions were already present in the political foundations upon which the CIO was established. It is certainly the case that the Congress of Industrial Organizations emerged in the second half of the 1930s as the product of a mass upsurge of the industrial working class. The Depression fueled a social movement with revolutionary implications. The socio-economic catastrophe generated not only explosive discontent, it undermined the confidence of tens of millions in the capitalist system itself. But it was by no means foreordained that this movement would be restricted to a struggle for industrial unions, rather than developing into a revolutionary, political movement, directed consciously against the capitalist system. That the upsurge never went beyond a narrow trade union form, institutionalized moreover in a labor movement based on the defense of the profit system and the political subordination of the working class to the capitalist parties, was the result, in the first instance, of the calculated actions of the CIO leadership, working in tandem with the Roosevelt administration and utilizing the political support of the Stalinist Communist Party. Those within the top leadership of the old American Federation of Labor who broke with their fellow bureaucrats in 1935 to establish the CIO— John L. Lewis, Sidney Hillman and others—set out to channel the rising militancy of mass production workers into an industrial union organization that would be loyal to the profit system and would obtain the official sanction of the capitalist state. They acted in response to unmistakable signs that the working class was beginning to move along a revolutionary trajectory, and that socialist forces were beginning to win a mass audience. The year before, general strike movements had rocked three major cities—San Francisco, Toledo and Minneapolis, and in each case socialists, Stalinists and Trotskyists had played leading roles. Roosevelt responded by pushing through the Wagner Act, providing legal sanction for the formation of unions and establishing the National Labor Relations Board to regulate the establishment of industrial unions and bring the force of the state to bear on their political character. There is no question that his administration encouraged Lewis and company in their effort to establish an industrial union movement that would be subservient to the basic interests of American capitalism. This was of a piece with his New Deal reforms, which represented a more far-sighted defense of the profit system, against the threat of socialist revolution, than many leading American capitalists at the time were capable of conceiving or accepting. The top CIO leaders shared this basic aim, and their ability to consolidate the CIO was ultimately dependent on the sympathy of the federal government under Roosevelt. A detailed analysis of the early years of the CIO is beyond the scope of this statement, but the most salient facts demonstrate the degree to which the consolidation of the industrial unions in America depended on the support of the federal government. Following the victory of the sit-down strike against General Motors in early 1937—which erupted largely behind the backs of the top CIO leaders and was, to a great extent, led by local militants and socialists—most of the major organizing struggles of the CIO met with defeat. The only significant breakthrough the CIO achieved in steel prior to 1941, was US Steel’s agreement to recognize the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in March of 1937, just a few weeks after the auto workers’ victory at GM. And this came not as the result of a struggle, but rather a corporate decision made by US Steel executives, who concluded that SWOC would serve as a stabilizing force in the mills. The drive to organize the second tier of major steel manufacturers, the so-called “Little Steel” firms such as Bethlehem, Republic and Inland, met with violent resistance from the employers and collapsed in the summer of 1937. By that point the CIO as a whole was foundering. The fundamental incompatibility of the right-wing political perspective and class collaborationist orientation of the CIO leadership with the aspirations and needs of the working class was already evident. In 1938, Leon Trotsky urged the Socialist Workers Party, then the Trotskyist movement in the US, to adopt the demand for the CIO to break from Roosevelt and establish a labor party, and to elaborate a socialist program of transitional demands for such a party. He did so precisely to give the SWP a tactical lever for freeing the mass movement from the stifling framework of reformist trade unionism. The new union movement had reached an impasse, he explained, and the upsurge of the working class would either take an independent political form, or it would be driven back and demoralized. Two years later he wrote: “The rise of the CIO is incontrovertible evidence of the revolutionary tendencies within the working masses. Indicative and noteworthy in the highest degree, however, is the fact that the new ‘leftist’ trade union organization was no sooner founded than it fell into the steel embrace of the imperialist state. The struggle among the tops between the old federation and the new is reducible in large measure to the struggle for the sympathy and support of Roosevelt and his cabinet.” [ 1 ] Prior to 1941, the real membership of the CIO never reached the 2 million mark. At the beginning of that year the United Mine Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the two previously established unions that had formed the backbone of the CIO at its founding, accounted for some 40 percent of dues-paying members. The total number of workers actually brought into unions under the auspices of the CIO had rarely reached a million. The United Auto Workers, SWOC and the United Rubber Workers had a combined dues-paying membership of under 200,000, fewer than the Amalgamated Clothing Workers alone. The year 1941 saw the real consolidation of the CIO. The labor federation and its affiliates won union contracts at Ford, the Little Steel companies, the major electronics manufacturers and other vital sectors of industry. Union security provisions, such as the automatic dues checkoff, made their appearance, as did no-strike clauses, binding grievance procedures and other measures designed to contain the militancy of the rank- and-file. But this growth and consolidation underscored the reliance of the CIO on the support of the government, and further institutionalized the statist character of the new unions, because it was directly bound up with the preparations of American imperialism to enter World War II. The Roosevelt administration supported the union victories in early 1941 and cultivated the CIO leadership, because it saw the CIO as a necessary and critical force for mobilizing the industrial working class behind the war and imposing the labor discipline which the war would require. The CIO leadership, for its part, eagerly sought and gratefully accepted the more aggressive backing of the federal government. It argued that union recognition and the establishment of contracts were vital to stabilizing the home front and securing the interests of American capitalism in the global conflict. Already in 1940, the UAW’s Walter Reuther presented a plan for union collaboration with management and the government in the expansion and coordination of war production and in May of that year, Roosevelt appointed Hillman to the National Defense Advisory Commission. Throughout the war the CIO’s basic role was to enforce labor discipline. Immediately following Pearl Harbor, both the CIO and the AFL voluntarily adopted no-strike pledges and agreed to enforce wage controls. The CIO, through its participation in the National War Labor Board, collaborated with big business and the government to police the working class, whose militancy remained at a high level, as reflected in the scores of strikes that erupted in defiance of the no-strike pledge. The CIO presented itself as the epitome of patriotic support for the war effort and, more generally, the “American way of life.” President Phillip Murray and other CIO leaders published tracts calling for the permanent establishment of corporatist relations between the unions, the employers and the state, including the formation of industrial councils and other joint labor-management structures. In return for its role in suppressing the class struggle, the CIO demanded the extension and institutionalization of union security measures, such as the closed shop, firm contracts and, above all, the dues checkoff. It argued that these were necessary to strengthen the union apparatus in holding the workers in check. “The union,” declared one CIO tract of the period, “assumes the responsibility to see that no stoppages of work occur, that all workers adhere to the contract machinery to settle grievances peacefully, and that wages and other vital cost factors are pegged generally for the life of the contracts.” [ 2 ] Without a union shop and the dues checkoff, the argument continued, union officials would be forced to accommodate themselves to dissident workers, whose withholding of dues would serve as a form of blackmail. On this corporatist foundation CIO membership rose dramatically in the course of the war, as did the treasuries of the CIO and its affiliated unions. The bureaucracy consolidated its grip over the mass of workers on the basis of its newfound wealth and the official sanction of the state. With the emergence of the Cold War, the CIO threw off its lingering radical pretensions and aligned itself firmly behind the anti-communist crusade of American capitalism. The purge of left-wing and socialist elements, on the one hand, and the participation in US efforts to subvert radical and pro-Soviet labor organizations around the world, on the other, were the logical outcome of the political orientation of the CIO from its formation. Robert H. Zieger (1938-2013) Robert H. Zieger, distinguished professor of history emeritus at the University of Florida, passed away unexpectedly at his home on March 6, 2013. He is survived by his wife, Gay Pitman Zieger, a retired college instructor and artist; and his son, Robert Zieger, daughter-in-law Shiera, and granddaughter, Persephone. Born on August 2, 1938, in Englewood, New Jersey, to a union family, Zieger was a prolific writer and preeminent labor historian who twice won the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award. Through his academic outreach and organizing, he encouraged generations of students and fellow academics to explore the history of workers, work, and unions, and also worked widely in the interdisciplinary field of labor studies. Labor studies scholar Robert Bussel, at the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon, aptly summarized Zieger's scholarly work: "His books on the CIO, the twentieth-century American union movement, and race and labor are models of lucid prose, rigorous scholarship, and balanced treatment of complex historical issues." Zieger's path-breaking and comprehensive study, The CIO, 1935-1955 (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995), will remain the standard for many years to come. His last book, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865 (Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2007), cogently synthesizes a huge literature on black labor and places the problem of racial division and exclusion at the center of American labor history. The book sharply critiques racism within and outside of unions, and calls for a reckoning with the nation's continuing failure to address the legacy of its history of racial oppression and inequality. Georgetown University historian Joseph McCartin, characterizing Zieger as "one of America's wisest and most accomplished historians," wrote that the book "offers the best introduction now available to the long and difficult history of African Americans' struggle for opportunity and justice both in the workplace and the labor movement. "Zieger not only wrote American labor history, but also promoted it as a field of study. He organized North American Labor History conferences in Detroit when he taught at Wayne State University in the 1980s. He opened up new terrain in southern labor studies in the 1990s and beyond at the University of Florida, organizing multiple conferences and editing three collections of southern labor history: Organized Labor in the Twentieth- Century South (Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1991); Southern Labor in Transition, 1940-1995 (Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1997); and Life and Labor in the New South (Univ. Press of Florida, 2012). Zieger's other books include a biography, John L. Lewis: Labor Leader (Twayne, 1988), and two textbooks: America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) and American Workers, American Unions (Johns Hopkins, 2002, 3d ed., with Gilbert J. Gall). Bob's constant explorations into various epochs and facets of history prompted much new work. Various scholars, including myself, will always have special regard for the way Bob helped to create the field of labor studies and welcomed us into it by creating venues for our research and writing. Bob's many associates remember him as a tough-minded but fair editor, but also as "an indefatigable friend," in the words of Paul Ortiz at the University of Florida. Historian Alex Lichtenstein at the University of Indiana remembered Bob as "one of the least pretentious people I have ever met, inside or outside of academia . what I will always cherish about Bob is his bedrock political and intellectual integrity. A man with a strong belief in social justice, he never sought to impose his views on others. "Zieger was a model scholar, teacher, and activist citizen, and a joy to study with, according to one of his graduate advisees, Alan Bliss. Amidst his extensive research and writing, Bob took special delight in organizing, both inside and outside of academia. He helped to successfully organize the United Faculty of Florida and served as a faculty delegate to the North Central Florida Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Retired historian and close friend Otto Olsen in Gainesville recalled Bob as "a workhorse in the local labor union movement, not only serving on a variety of boards and committees but doing the manual work of clearing up and putting chairs away after meetings. He would even serve Corinne and I at the periodic union sponsored spaghetti dinners." Always appreciative of public education, Robert Zieger held a BA from Montclair State College in New Jersey, an MA from the University of Wyoming, and a PhD from the University of Maryland. He began teaching in 1964, at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and in 1973 began teaching at Kansas State University. He subsequently taught at Wayne State University, where students and union members alike enjoyed his labor history courses. He began teaching at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1986, and was appointed distinguished professor in 1998. Robert Zieger's sudden passing caused a great deal of mourning among friends and the many scholars who worked with him on projects. Tami Friedman, at Brock University, Ontario, Canada, one of the scholars who wrote an article for Bob's last collection on southern labor history, remembered him as "a model scholar and collaborator, a careful and conscientious editor and reviewer, and a kind, thoughtful, generous human being." Friends and scholars are urged to contribute to the Southern Labor Studies Association's Robert H. Zieger Prize for Southern Labor Studies, c/o Evan Bennett, History Department, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431. For more extensive remembrances, see the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) website. To reach the family, please contact Alan Bliss.