Irving Brown; Longtime AFL-CIO Representative

Irving Brown, the AFL-CIO’s director of international affairs from 1982 to 1986 and a labor representative on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board from 1942 to 1945, died Friday of cancer at his home in Paris, the union said here. He was 77.

Brown was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom last October by then-President Ronald Reagan, largely for his work in leading the resistance to communist takeovers of trade unions in Western Europe after World War II.

Praise From Kirkland

“We have lost a giant,” said AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland. “No other individual did more than Irving to protect and advance workers’ rights in every nation around the world.”

As the U.S. labor movement’s emissary to Europe after the war, Brown was instrumental in rallying support among unions there for the Marshall Plan to rebuild the continent.

Brown, son of a Teamster, was born in New York City and graduated with an economics degree from New York University before starting a labor career as an organizer for the Automobile Workers Union, a predecessor of the United Auto Workers.

He joined the American Federation of Labor as a national organizer in 1940 and was its chief representative in Europe from the end of World War II until 1962, after the AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

From 1962 to 1965, Brown headed the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions’ office to the United Nations and from 1965 to 1973 directed the AFL-CIO’s African-American Labor Center, which provides technical aid to unions in Africa.

He returned to the AFL-CIO’s office in Paris before Kirkland named him the federation’s international affairs director in 1982.

Brown is survived by his wife, Irena, and a son, Robert, who lives in New York City. A private burial service is planned in Paris.