William E. Simkin; Mediator Pioneered Preventive Strategy

William E. Simkin, who championed “preventive mediation” as director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service from 1961 to 1969, has died. He was 83.

Simkin died Wednesday at his home in Haverford, Pa., the service announced from Washington.

The current director, Bernard E. DeLury, said Simkin was the “symbol of the peacemaker to the nation.”

As Simkin exited the service at the end of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s tenure, a colleague told the Los Angeles Times that Simkin had “raised the prestige of the service to the highest point ever.”

His major accomplishments were usually achieved anonymously. Certain that mediation before rather than during a strike benefited labor and management, Simkin greatly increased the number of “preventive mediations” outlined when the service was established in 1947. In the year before his tenure, the service handled 83 preventive cases, and by 1968, his last full year, the number had risen to 1,322.

Simkin was an established professional arbitrator when President John F. Kennedy and his labor secretary, Arthur J. Goldberg, persuaded him to take over the directorship.

He utilized the arbitration experience as head of the service, and was credited with preventing steel strikes in 1965 and 1968; assisting the automobile industry in devising amicable contracts with the United Auto Workers in 1967 and 1968, and mediating major contracts in the aerospace industry in 1962, 1965 and 1968.

Simkin said a mediator’s job included these levels: chairing a meeting between management and labor; dissuading either side from an untenable position, which he called “deflating extravagant positions”; suggesting possible solutions for issues, and putting together a package of proposals acceptable to both sides as a basis for an agreement.

“Voluntarism is the key word of the bargaining system,” he told The Times. “Mediation is a catalyst to bargaining, not a substitute for bargaining.”

After he left the service, Simkin became a lecturer at the Harvard Business School and wrote the textbook “Mediation and the Dynamics of Collective Bargaining.”

He also remained an active member of the National Academy of Arbitrators. In 1975 he helped to mediate division of about 2 million acres of land in northern Arizona, which had been in dispute for a century between the Hopi and Navajo Indian tribes.

Simkin is survived by his wife, Ruth, and two sons, Thomas and Peter.