Helstein, 76, Labor’s ‘Old Warrior,’ Dies

Ralph Helstein, a former labor lawyer who was president of the United Packinghouse Workers of America when their strikes for higher pay in the 1940s kept meat out of the nation’s markets, died Thursday after suffering a heart attack at his home. He was 76.

Helstein was international president of the Chicago-based union from 1946 until its merger with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen in 1968.

A subsequent merger of that organization with the Retail Clerks International Union created the Washington-based United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

“Ralph was a great intellectual in the labor movement,” said Robert Gibson, president of the Illinois AFL-CIO. “He had a brilliant mind, and he spent his whole lifetime working on behalf of the poor and underprivileged in our society.”

“He was an old warrior in the labor movement.”

In the 1960s Helstein was one of the few labor leaders to march in the South on behalf of the civil rights activities of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was credited with helping eliminate sex and geographic wage differentials in the AFL-CIO, in which he was an executive council vice president.

Helstein graduated from the University of Minnesota with a law degree in 1934. After practicing labor law in Minnesota, he joined the United Packinghouse union as general counsel in 1942. He was elected president four years later.

After the 1968 merger, Helstein was vice president and special counsel of the Meat Cutters until he retired as president emeritus in 1972.