What's the Beef?

Where to start when recounting a career spanning over sixty years which included some of the most significant disputes in the history of U.S. labor management relations? Horvitz starts with lessons learned at his famous father’s knee. The father, Aaron Horvitz, was a pioneering labor arbitrator whose name is known and respected by anyone who has ever been seriously involved in the field of labor relations.

The story takes off on its own trajectory when Horvitz engages as a young management player in dramatic and sometimes bizarre plant disputes in Bayonne and Perth Amboy, N.J., and Rome, N.Y., and then dives into the enormous labor problems arising from the introduction of containerization on the West Coast waterfront where he meets some of the most colorful figures in labor history and provides snatches of conversation and hilarious stories of their interactions. Horvitz then transports us to the East Coast and a stint in the Carter Administration as the nation’s top mediator only to find himself thrust into some of the longest longshore and coal strikes in recent history and a colorful but nonetheless near-disastrous dispute at the Metropolitan Opera. Ultimately, he finds himself up to the eyeballs in the deregulation and disruption of the airlines industry, airline mergers, and the convoluted problems caused by the outmoded cost structure of the nation’s railroads.

A gifted storyteller, Horvitz gives us a front row seat throughout his lively saga, remembers the most delicious details, and tells only the best stories. While a long term member of the management fraternity, he nonetheless includes an impassioned and articulate argument for the revitalization and restructuring of the now-diminished art of collective bargaining in the global economy.

Author Biography

Wayne Horvitz enjoys a high reputation in both labor and management circles, having spent a distinguished 60-year career in the business of bringing the two sides together. Initially a management negotiator in industry, he became an officer of Matson Navigation Company, later serving as Matson’s chief Washington lobbyist. He later served as chairman of the Joint Labor Management Committee of the Retail Food Industry, a tripartite group that stabilized labor relations in the retail food industry. As director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service during the Carter Administration, Horvitz worked on some of the most complicated labor stoppages in our history. He later spent 25 years as eminence grise to Jerry Grinstein, CEO of Western Airlines, Burlington Northern Railroad, and Delta Airlines, battling bankruptcy, pension and labor problems, and the turmoil brought on by airline deregulation.