Pioneering working-class studies scholar, labor activist, and long-time Working-Class Studies Association (WCSA) leader, Jack Metzgar, passed away last Thursday, October 15.  Jack was central in helping form the Association out of the annual conferences held at Youngstown State University’s Center for Working-Class Studies, and Stony Brook University’s Center for the Study of Working Class Life.  In his decades-long connection with WCSA Jack served nearly every role possible in the association—he was its President, its Secretary, served on the Elections Committee, and edited its newsletter.  With Betsy Leondar-Wright Jack produced the “Talking Class” webinar series.   Jack created the WCSA’s “Book Notes” which highlights new scholarship and creative work in working-class studies; he organized conference plenaries to enhance conversation around books in the field; he often wrote for the

Jack’s Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (2000) embodied the best in working-class studies in its mix of memoir, political and class analysis, and labor history.  It won the Sidney Hillman award for top book addressing labor.  More recently he published Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society (2021).

Jack was a tough thinker and a generous soul who worked to bring young scholars into the WCSA. He was a welcoming presence at conferences, offering critical insights, laughter, and camaraderie year after year. He was a mentor to many in our field and an ally to workers.  As Jack recently acknowledged, the WCSA was a home to him and so many others. Jack’s family has asked that those wishing to honor his legacy donate to the WCSA.

Please read his family’s obituary for more information about our friend, colleague, and mentor’s life and commitments.  He will be so sorely missed.

Jack Metzgar, Labor Educator and Historian, Dies

Jack Metzgar, an influential labor educator and working-class historian, died with his family at his home in Oak Park, Illinois, on October 15, 2026. The cause was congestive heart failure; he was 82.

Besides teaching General Studies and Labor Education at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Metzgar co-founded the Midwest Center for Labor Research (now Manufacturing Renaissance) and long edited its nationally renowned labor education journal, Labor Research Review. Starting in 1982, the Review chronicled the fightback struggles of “Steeltowns” and other hard-hit factory communities, when the terms “Rustbelt” and “deindustrialization” were coined, well before NAFTA. Often featuring articles by labor dissidents, it profiled path-breaking labor organizing strategies that would later become accepted as best union practices.

He led Roosevelt’s Labor Leadership Program (for rising union leaders) until the University abandoned it in 1992; Metzgar ensured it landed safely at DePaul University. After retiring from full-time teaching, Metzgar continued to teach adult education classes part-time at Roosevelt’s extension campus.

Dr. Metzgar’s writings and classes focused on working-class sensibilities and values — on belonging rather than achieving. He co-founded and served as a past president of the International Working Class Studies Association. He also co-founded the Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies, a network of professors and nonprofits dedicated to “making class visible” in American studies.

He explored the tensions between working- and professional-class cultures in his 2021 book Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society (Cornell U. Press). His articles appeared in New Labor Forum, Dissent, Working USA, The Nation, and In These Times.

“Jack was such a gifted editor, helping labor activists best express themselves,” said Greg LeRoy, a Labor Research Review colleague. “He was so good at teasing out what people meant and showing them how to say things convincingly.”

“Jack was a serious scholar with a great sense of humor,” said John Russo, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University. “He was central in building Working-Class Studies as an academic field. More importantly, he was one of my best friends and colleague for over 40 years. This one hurts.”

“Jack was one of my closest friends on the faulty of Roosevelt University,” said Sam Rosenberg, Professor Emeritus of Economics. “He was strongly committed to educating the adult learner, both in labor studies and general studies.  We spent many hours reading and commenting on each other’s writings as well as talking about the day’s events.  He made me a better writer.  Jack, you left us too soon.”

John Newton Metzgar was born on October 30, 1943, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania into a family of Steelworkers. His father worked as a molder at U.S. Steel’s Johnstown Works, where he was also a United Steelworkers griever, or front-line union contract enforcer. His mother was a foreign language teacher in the Johnstown school district. He would later memorialize a formative time of his life there in Striking Steel; Solidarity Remembered (Temple U. Press, 2000), his book about the 1959 steel strike and the pivotal role it played in his family’s economic security. It won the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for best labor book of 2001.

He earned a B.A. at the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1968 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University in Chicago in 1975. Before college, he worked as a reporter for the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. During his academic career, he also held visiting positions at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the AFL-CIO George Meany Center in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Metzgar is survived by his high school sweetheart and wife of 62 years, Judith Ann “Judie” (Blair) Metzgar, their son Judd Gwynn Metzgar and daughter-in-law Gina (Tortorich) Metzgar of Chicago, and grandsons Max (Michaela Schlegel) Metzgar and Logan Metzgar of Columbus, Ohio.

The transformative power of belonging to a union was a deep personal value for Jack Metzgar. He recounted, In Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered, how his father, Johnny Metzgar, secured life-altering benefits:

From the time my father joined the union in 1936 until the 1959 strike, the average real wage of steelworkers increased 110 percent, through ten sets of negotiations and five strikes from 1946 to 1956. The steel companies fought every advance the union sought—and did so in a highly public way.

…The 1959 strike established paid pensions and health insurance for steelworkers, while earlier and later strikes won paid vacations, paid holidays, shift differentials, and supplemental unemployment benefits… None of these benefits—not a single one—was offered voluntarily by management. They were won through the threat or reality of production-halting strikes.

A memorial gathering will be announced shortly. 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. Donate at: https://workingclassassn.org/

 At the moment, the WCSA can only accept donations through the Member Portal. To do so, you will first need to SIGN IN or CREATE AN ACCOUNT. Once inside the portal, select (1) STORE, then (2) DONATIONS, and (3) ADD TO CART, as shown in the image below.

We are working on creating a public donation option that does not require an account. We will share those details as soon as they become available.