In Memoriam: Union Leader Alan Kistler

by Mike Hall, May 15, 2008

Alan Kistler, who held union cards as a hotel elevator operator, copy boy, cub reporter and steel mill laborer shoveling molten steel and spent 13 years as the director of the AFL-CIO’s Organization and Field Services, died May 10 at his home in Silver Spring, Md. He was 87.

Said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney:

All of us in the union movement mourn the death of Alan Kistler, one of the most respected, creative, and best-loved leaders in our movement for more than a half-century.

Kistler’s first union experience came at age 17 when he volunteered to walk the picket lines during several strikes in his hometown of Pittsburgh. In 1952, when he was an activist member of the United Steelworkers (USWA) at the Pittsburgh mill where he worked, USWA President Philip Murray recruited Kistler to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organizing staff.

After the CIO and American Federation of Labor (AFL) merged to form the AFL-CIO in 1955, Kistler joined the AFL-CIO Organization Department. From 1973 until his retirement in 1986, he was the department’s director.

For many years, he also served as president of the Human Resources Development Institute, where he led the AFL-CIO’s job training efforts. At time when industrial plants began shutting down and shipping jobs overseas, Kistler helped unions develop retraining, counseling and placement programs for displaced workers.

After his retirement, Kistler became the first mediator under the AFL-CIO’s system to settle disputes between unions. At a memorial service for Kistler this morning, Sweeney recalled:

Some of these disputes were pretty tough.…But Alan handled them all with incredible skill, sensitivity and integrity.

President Sweeney said that Kistler was deeply influenced by the Catholic Worker Movement and that was one of the reasons he was so committed to the labor movement.

One of the most important reasons for Alan was the social teaching of the Catholic Church about the rights of working people….One of the first things you’d learn about Alan when you met him, is that for him, the union movement was about morality and justice. It was about dignity and respect for God’s children who work for a living.

Sweeney also spoke of Kistler’s mentoring skills that helped develop hundreds of young activists, many of whom still work in the labor movement.

One of Alan’s biggest achievements at the AFL-CIO was helping to bring a talented, dedicated new generation into organizing…he managed them all with a resource that wasn’t anywhere in his job description. It was his warmth and kindness. 

To honor his memory, Sweeney announced at the service, the AFL-CIO is renaming the Organizing Institute The Alan Kistler Organizing Institute. 

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he served first as a city council member, then as mayor of Greenbelt, Md.

Kistler was a World War II veteran who served in the Army in Europe and put the GI bill and his union activism to work after the war at the University of Chicago. Said Sweeney:

Alan leaves behind a wonderful legacy: higher wages and benefits for three generations of workers at the University of Chicago Hospital who formed a union with his help when he was a student attending the university on the GI Bill; a new vision of joint organizing by unions in the same city; a creative strategy he pioneered with the Los Angeles-Orange County Organizing Committee that is still vital and thriving; a strong commitment to unions for professional employees in a time when some thought the idea would never succeed; and a better life for countless workers throughout America who forge our steel, teach our kids, mine our coal, and nurse us back to health.

Survivors include three children, Kevin Kistler, Mary Anne Winters and Margaret Brown, and eight grandchildren. His wife, Marie, whom he married in 1948, died in 1999.

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