Morris P. Glushien, 96; NLRB Official Quit to Become a Union Lawyer

In June 1947, just days after Congress voted to weaken the power of labor unions by passing the Taft-Hartley Act, attorney Morris P. Glushien resigned his position at the National Labor Relations Board.

Years earlier, Glushien had been appointed associate general counsel of the board -- a seemingly ideal position for an attorney who was concerned about fair labor practices.

Glushien “had serious doubts concerning the wisdom, the fairness and the practicability of the Taft-Hartley Act,” he wrote in his resignation letter. In good conscience, he could not help administer a law in which he did not believe.

Glushien spent the rest of his life immersed in labor issues, serving as general counsel of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, then having a career as a labor arbitrator.

He died of natural causes in a Los Angeles hospice May 19, said his daughter, Ruth Wedgwood. He was 96.

After resigning from the labor board, Glushien accepted an invitation from labor leader David Dubinsky to head the legal department of the garment workers union.

“Over the next three decades, he helped the American labor movement define its stance on key issues,” said Wedgwood, a professor of international law at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Baltimore.

During his time with the union, it became racially integrated, fought the relocation of garment factories outside the U.S. and advocated programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

In 1957, Glushien took union concerns to the U.S. Supreme Court when he argued the case of Staub vs. City of Baxley. In 1954, two garment workers union employees went to the Georgia town of Baxley to organize the workers of a nearby manufacturing company.

The women met with employees in their homes and discussed their joining the union, paying union dues of 64 cents a week and signing membership cards to petition the labor board.

But the act of meeting with employees eventually won the organizers a summons for violating a city ordinance that prohibited the soliciting of residents to join any “organization, union or society” which required dues without first getting a permit from the mayor and City Council.

The workers didn’t have a permit and were convicted. An appeals court upheld the conviction, but Glushien argued before the Supreme Court that “such a standardless ordinance could prevent even his 11-year-old daughter, who was sitting in the audience of the court, from going door to door to recruit new members for her Girl Scout troop,” Wedgwood said.

In 1958 the Supreme Court, on a 7-2 vote, sided with Glushien in a ruling that holds significance for political organizers, religious groups and charity workers who seek to solicit door to door.

That case and others were critical for labor organizing, said attorney Laurence Gold of the Washington, D.C., law firm Bredhoff & Kaiser, who formerly was general counsel of the AFL-CIO. “If those cases had gone the other way, there literally would have been no organizations in the South.”

Glushien was born in New York on Oct. 15, 1909, to immigrant parents who had fled Russia in 1905. The family -- including two other children -- settled in Brooklyn, where Glushien’s father worked as a tailor and his mother labored in the fur industry.

He earned a scholarship to Cornell University, where he received his undergraduate and law degrees. In the early 1940s at a labor movement party in San Francisco held by Jessica Mitford, Glushien met Anne Sorelle Williams, an artist and a former music editor with Columbia Pictures. They eventually married; she died in 1989. In addition to Wedgwood, Glushien is survived by daughter Minna Taylor and two grandchildren.

During World War II, Glushien volunteered for the Army Air Forces and was trained to decipher Japanese codes. When he disappeared one day after 5 a.m. KP duty at a base in Virginia, fellow soldier Wilfred Feinberg suspected Glushien of spending the day “goofing off.” Later he learned that his friend had hopped a bus to Washington and spent the day at the U.S. Supreme Court.

“They were arguing a case in which he had written a brief,” said longtime friend Feinberg, who is a senior judge on the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. “I thought to myself: ‘That’s the best story I ever heard about the United States Army in World War II -- a real citizens army.’ ”

For Glushien, working on behalf of labor was part of a larger concern. In a 1961 Wall Street Journal article, he described the garment workers union as “people banded together in a mission dedicated to improving their conditions and advancing the welfare of the nation and the entire world.”

Later in life, he earned prominence as a labor arbitrator respected by unions and business, said Samuel Estreicher, a law professor at New York University and director of the Center for Labor and Employment.

“It’s very hard for someone coming out of the union movement to be successful” in labor arbitration, Estreicher said. “It’s a strong indication of the way he was perceived as a person of integrity.”