Jack Metzgar, a labor educator, historian, and writer who helped generations of workers tell their stories—and understand their collective power—died October 15 at his home in Oak Park, Illinois, with his family. He was 82. The cause was congestive heart failure.
For Metzgar, working-class history was deeply personal. Born into a steelworker family in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, he saw how union struggle transformed his family’s security and opportunities. His father, Johnny, worked as a molder at U.S. Steel’s Johnstown Works and served as a United Steelworkers griever, enforcing the union contract on the shop floor.
That experience shaped Metzgar’s acclaimed Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (2000), which explored the 1959 steel strike through his family’s life. The book received the Sidney Hillman Foundation’s award for best labor book of 2001. Its central lesson was unmistakable: the wages, pensions, health coverage, and paid time off that changed steelworkers’ lives came through organizing and strikes.
At Roosevelt University in Chicago, Metzgar taught General Studies and Labor Education and directed the Labor Leadership Program for rising union leaders. When Roosevelt discontinued the program in 1992, he helped secure its move to DePaul University. After retiring from full-time teaching, he continued teaching adult learners part-time.
Metzgar also co-founded the Midwest Center for Labor Research, now Manufacturing Renaissance, and served as a longtime editor of its journal, Labor Research Review. Beginning in 1982, the journal documented workers’ resistance to plant closings and industrial decline. It gave labor activists and dissidents room to examine organizing strategies that would later become widely accepted union practices.
“Jack was such a gifted editor, helping labor activists best express themselves,” recalled Greg LeRoy, a colleague at the journal. “He was so good at teasing out what people meant and showing them how to say things convincingly.”
Metzgar’s scholarship explored working-class culture, particularly the importance of belonging, mutual support, and solidarity. He co-founded and served as a past president of the Working-Class Studies Association and helped establish the Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies, a network dedicated to “making class visible.”
His 2021 book, Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society, examined the tensions between working-class and professional-class values. His writing also appeared in New Labor Forum, Dissent, Working USA, The Nation, and In These Times.
“Jack was a serious scholar with a great sense of humor,” said longtime friend and colleague John Russo. “He was central in building Working-Class Studies as an academic field.”
Roosevelt colleague Sam Rosenberg remembered Metzgar’s commitment to adult education and their years of exchanging drafts and discussing the day’s events. “He made me a better writer,” Rosenberg said.
Metzgar earned his bachelor’s degree from the New School for Social Research in 1968 and a doctorate in philosophy from Northwestern University in 1975. Before college, he worked as a reporter for the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. He later held visiting positions at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the AFL-CIO George Meany Center.
He is survived by his wife of 62 years, Judith Ann “Judie” Metzgar, their son Judd and daughter-in-law Gina, and grandsons Max and Logan.
A wake will take place Friday, October 30, from 1–4 p.m. at Zimmerman-Harnett Funeral Home, 7319 Madison Street, Forest Park, Illinois. Dinner will follow immediately at Jimmy’s Place, 7411 Madison Street.
In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to the Working-Class Studies Association, which supports scholarship, teaching, art, and activism related to working-class life and cultures.