Jack Getman Retires

When our list of faculty moves went up last month, one item left of the list was the retirement of Julius (Jack) Getman from the University of Texas after 28 years on the faculty. The American Statesman did a nice story on Jack's career. Here's a part:

A sort of Johnny Appleseed of labor law, Getman has through the decades sprinkled proteges all over the country. Many of them followed Getman into academia. Many of them chose their professor’s specialty even if they’d planned on practicing another kind of law before they took Getman’s basic labor law class which, 2011 graduate Elliot Becker recalled, “some of us called ‘Story Time with Grandpa Jack.’”

“I don’t know where I’d be without him,” said Becker, who this fall will go to work in the general counsel’s office of the National Labor Relations Board.

“I didn’t go to law school thinking I wanted to do labor and employment,” said James Brudney, who teaches labor at Fordham Law School. “It was the exposure to him and the subject that converted me. He has a remarkable blend of realism, sardonic humor and remarkably perceptive insights analytically about the real world.”

While Getman may be sympathetic to workers and the labor movement, he’s not a dogmatic radical who has never missed a Pete Seeger concert.

“His perceptions of the struggles that ordinary shop floor workers had to go through made him sensitive to both the positive aspects of (union) leadership and the risks that leadership might separate from the rank and file,” Brudney said. “He’s obviously sympathetic to unions, but that has not restrained him from offering substantial and powerful critiques.”

Jack's book Restoring the Power of Unions was also the subject of the Section on Labor Relations and Employment Law program at the AALS annual meeting in 2011, which coincided with the UNITE HERE boycott of the conference hotel. The presentations were published in volume 15, issue 2 of the Employee Rights & Employment Policy Journal. 

h/t Michael Murphy and Harris Freeman

MM