Jack Metzgar, 82, an influential labor educator and working-class historian, died surrounded by family at his home in Oak Park on Oct. 15, 2026. The cause was congestive heart failure.
Besides teaching General Studies and Labor Education at Roosevelt University in Chicago, he 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.
He led Roosevelt’s Labor Leadership Program (for rising union leaders), until the University abandoned it in 1992, and ensured it landed safely at DePaul University. After retiring from full-time teaching.
His writings and classes focused on working-class sensibilities and values — on belonging rather than achieving. He co-founded and served as 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.
John Newton Metzgar was born on Oct. 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 BA at the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1968 and a PhD 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.
Jack 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 that he chronicled in his book, In Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered.
“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.”
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
A memorial visitation and service was held on Oct. 30 at Zimmerman-Harnett Funeral Home, 7319 W. Madison St., Forest Park.
