Jerome Wurf (May 18, 1919 – December 10, 1981) was a U.S. labor leader and president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) from 1964 to 1981. Wurf was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr., and was arrested multiple times for his activism, notably during the Memphis sanitation strike. He was present for King's "I've Been to the Mountaintop" oratory at the strike, the day before King was assassinated, and attended King's funeral.
Background
Wurf was born in New York City in 1919. The son of Jewish immigrants (his father was a tailor and textile worker) from Austria-Hungary, he developed polio at the age of four. As a young man growing up in Brighton Beach, he was inclined towards radicalism by his family's poverty and by communists he met. For some time he was a member of the Young Communist League; he subsequently left it for the Young People's Socialist League. He was a critical of both groups, but preferred the YPSL due to his dislike of Soviet totalitarianism.
HERE
He enrolled at New York University but dropped out to pursue radical organizing. He got his start in the labor movement by working cafeterias and organizing the workers, forming Local 448, Food and Cashiers Local of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), in 1943. Local 448 was becoming powerful when HERE leadership incorporated it into Local 325 (Cooks, Countermen, Subdispensers, Cashiers and Assistants), then fired Wurf. Wurf believed that hostile union leaders caused him to be systematically denied work in the following years. ) District Council 37 won many of the ensuing elections, making it into one of the large public employee local unions in the world.
Wurf broke with Zander over his allegiances to the AFL–CIO and to the Mafia. He also questioned Zander's growing authority over individual Locals through trusteeships. After the union's 1958 convention, he decided to seek its presidency. COUR won ten out of eleven seats on the executive board. After the announcement of his narrow victory, Wurf surrounded himself with bodyguards and sent three people to the union office in Washington to change the locks. He also moved to designate Zander 'president emeritus' and provide him with a full salary and expenses until retirement age. This program funneled around a million dollars to British Guiana between 1957 and 1964 for the purpose of supporting Forbes Burnham over Cheddi Jagan.
Constitutional convention
In 1965, Wurf called a constitutional convention for AFSCME in Washington. The convention passed amendments that increased representation from large Locals (allowing them more than five delegates, though only one for every additional thousand), decreased the central office's ability to control Locals through trusteeships, and required that union vice presidents be elected locally and not paid members of the "international" office. The convention did increase the powers of the union president, authorizing him or her to "employ, terminate, fix the compensation and expenses, and direct the activities of such office staff, administrative assistants, technical and professional assistants, field staff, organizers, and representatives as are required to carry out effectively the functions of his office."
Presidency
Wurf's election in 1964 began an area of growth and racial inclusion for the union.
Through energetic organizing and aggressive bargaining, AFSCME grew rapidly under his leadership from about 220,000 members to just over one million in 1981.
Wurf presided over strikes in New York (1965), Lansing (1966), Memphis (1968), Baltimore (1974) and more.
Wurf was a frequent dissenter to the policies of the AFL-CIO and its president George Meany.
Civil rights movement
Wurf was extremely active in the civil rights movement. He helped establish the first New York State chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the late 1940s. He was a close associate of Martin Luther King Jr., who was working in support of the Memphis sanitation strike when he was assassinated in April 1968. "Let us never forget that Martin Luther King, on a mission for us, was killed in this city. He helped bring us this victory," Wurf later said. Although Wurf did not back the strike initially, due to the violent atmosphere, he supported it after it went into effect.
After AFSCME presidency
Wurf died of a heart attack at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., on December 10, 1981.