Isadore Greenberg (1907-1985), Labor Lawyer – 52 Ancestors # 36

Since Labor Day was just celebrated in the U.S., work is the topic for the week.  It seems appropriate to feature my father-in-law for this post.  Izzy Greenberg was, for most of his working life, a labor lawyer.  Although he spent time doing many other jobs for clients like wills or housing, his passion was employment and fairness issues.  He had been raised by parents who were also passionate about employment and unions.  He grew to adulthood in the early Depression years, and graduated with a law degree from the University of Buffalo in 1932.  His first job out of law school was working for the Buffalo Water Department, as he said “a patronage job”.  He also hung out a shingle and opened a practice, taking whatever clients he could get.

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 created the National Labor Relations Board as an independent federal agency tasked with enforcing U.S. labor laws specifically with respect to unfair labor practices and collective bargaining.  The organization was hiring and a position as an attorney to do this sort of work was right up Izzy’s alley in terms of his interests and beliefs.  He set himself up to take the nation-wide examination for a job applicants to the NLRB and scored very well.  He was offered a position and about 1941 (or 1942) moved to the Washington D.C. area.  There are a couple of hazy questions here:  the NLRB was structured with regional offices so I don’t know if Izzy started at a regional office first, and I haven’t pinned down specifically when they moved to Washington.

Iz worked his way up in the NLRB, starting as an attorney and ending as a trial examiner.  He traveled a fair amount, all over the country, participating in hearings and then writing opinions.  An online search with his name and “NLRB” turns up a number of these opinions.  Unfortunately the main nlrb.gov site has been down recently so I haven’t been able to access the full set of his work.

As I wrote at the end of a post about Sarah, Izzy’s wife, he had been a member of the Communist Party as a youth and this involvement (although he had not been a member since the late 1930’s and may have been kicked out of the Party) brought him to the attention of the McCarthy investigation in the early 1950s in Washington.  Consequently, he was allowed to resign from the NLRB in the summer of 1952 and the family returned to upstate New York.  They settled in Syracuse after a short time and Iz once again opened a law practice.  He worked for the AFL-CIO for some time as part of this practice, thus continuing his labor law practice.