Theodore Kheel

Theodore Woodrow Kheel (May 9, 1914 – November 12, 2010) was an American attorney and labor mediator who played a key role in reaching resolutions of long-simmering labor disputes between managements and unions and resulting strikes in New York City and elsewhere in the United States, including the 114-day-long 1962-63 New York City newspaper strike that crippled the city's traditional media.

Kheel was born on May 9, 1914, in Brooklyn and was named for U.S. Presidents Roosevelt and Wilson. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School. Kheel received a B.A. degree from Cornell University in 1935 and was awarded his law degree from Cornell Law School in 1937. At Cornell, Kheel was elected to the Sphinx Head Society. He took a position with the National Labor Relations Board in 1938 and worked for the National War Labor Board during World War II, mediating labor disputes as part of an effort to maintain productivity of materiel needed for the ongoing war. Kheel was hired by New York City after the war and became the director of the city's department of labor relations in 1947.

Leaving public service in 1948, Kheel went into private practice, but remained involved in the public sphere as a labor negotiator, including being named as independent arbitrator for New York City's independent transit companies. Mayor of New York City Robert F. Wagner, Jr. named Kheel as the city's transit arbitrator in 1956, a position he held for almost thirty years while resolving tens of thousands of labor issues.

Mayor Wagner called on Kheel in 1963 to help mediate the ongoing New York City newspaper strike, in which ten different unions and the publishers of the city's various newspapers had already been deadlocked for nearly three months. Kheel was asked to step in and was so confident of a quick resolution of the dispute that he brought a pair of champagne bottles with him to the negotiations planning to celebrate. However, he ended up spending several hundred hours engaging in "shuttle negotiations", eventually reaching a pact in which the typographer's union received a larger increase then other union workers. An analysis performed by The New York Times showed that the newspapers involved in the strike had lost a total of more than $100 million in advertising and circulation revenues and that the industry's more than 19 thousand employees lost $50 million in wages and benefits. Kheel would later play a role in coordinating negotiations that led to a resolution of the New York City teachers' strike of 1968, in which the New York City Public Schools were closed for 36 days over a period of months after actions started by the United Federation of Teachers.

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