Obituary

George Brooks, professor emeritus in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations for more than 30 years, died Jan. 27 in Vienna, Va. He was 91.

Brooks had a lifelong interest in the labor movement and was one of the first staff members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He joined the Roosevelt administration in Washington, D.C., in 1935 after earning a B.A. from Yale University in 1930 and an M.A. in economics from Brown University in 1932. Under Roosevelt he held successive positions with the National Mediation Board, the NLRB and, during World War II, the War Production Board. He left government service in 1945 to become director of research and education of the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulfite and Paper Mill Workers.

He joined the faculty of the Cornell ILR School's Department of Collective Bargaining, Labor Law and Labor History in 1961. At the ILR School he initiated such popular courses as Labor Union Administration and became one of the school's most high-profile instructors. In 1993 he joined the school's Cornell Center in Washington, D.C., where he continued to teach student interns until his formal retirement in 1998.

"He was a wonderful raconteur and one of the legendary figures in the history of the ILR School," said Professor David Lipsky, former dean of the school. "His views were often controversial and considered unorthodox by many of his colleagues, but his students appreciated his stance as an occasional maverick -- they loved his lack of orthodoxy. His courses were enormously popular with them and well remembered by alumni."

Lipsky noted that Brooks often invited well-known labor leaders, such as the former Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union's Jack Sheinkman, to campus, greatly benefiting the school and its students. "He was generally pro-union but an ardent opponent of the union shop, which he viewed as anti-democratic," Lipsky said. "He believed that workers should always have the freedom to join or not to join the union that represented them."

During his career, Brooks published numerous books, papers and articles on the U.S. labor movement, including "Unions of Their Own Choosing" in The Atlantic, July 1958, and "Union Democracy as a Deterrent to Corruption and Organized Crime" (with ILR extension associate Sara Gamm), which was part of The Edge: Organized Crime, Business and Labor Unions, a publication produced by the President's Commission on Organized Crime in 1986.