Robert Gilbert; Expert in Labor Law

Returning to Los Angeles from his honeymoon a half-century or so ago, the young labor lawyer learned that one of his clients, the grocery clerks union, was on strike. He left the house for the negotiating table, and didn’t return for a day and a half.

“What do grown people have to talk about that can keep them at the table for 36 straight hours!?” demanded his new bride.

“I’m still trying to answer that,” Robert Wolfe Gilbert jokingly told a writer for the Los Angeles-based legal newspaper the Daily Journal four decades later.

Gilbert, one of the country’s most respected labor lawyers and a power in the Democratic Party who helped draft the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and create the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, died Sunday at his home in Valencia. He was 80.

An expert on international law, he co-chaired the American Bar Assn.’s international labor law committee for more than 20 years and was senior editor of the organization’s 1997 publication “International Labor and Employment Laws.”

“The methods used in solving labor-management problems should be used in world affairs--negotiations, good will and mutual respect,” he told a Whittier College Institute of International Relations in 1950.

The New York-born son of a popular songwriter who shuffled the family between New York and Hollywood, Gilbert represented a host of entertainment unions, including the Screen Actors Guild when Ronald Reagan was its president, the International Alliance of Stage Employees and the Motion Picture Industry Pension Plan.

When a contract dispute threatened producer David Wolper’s opening extravaganza for the 1984 Olympics that Fourth of July, Gilbert got a phone call. As he reached for his briefcase his now-late wife, Bea, protested, “But it’s a holiday.”

“I’m a labor lawyer,” he replied, “and the show must go on.” It did.

Gilbert also represented longshoremen and a variety of other workers as well, commenting in 1986: “I’ve represented everybody from deep-sea divers to airplane pilots.”

A graduate of UCLA and UC’s Boalt Hall Law School in San Francisco, where he edited the law review, Gilbert spent a year as lobbyist for the California Federation of Labor and then hung his shingle as a labor lawyer in Los Angeles in 1944. He practiced his profession for 50 years in that law firm, which retained his name, but changed with key partners until settling into the current Gilbert & Sackman in 1987.

Colleagues and opponents alike praised Gilbert’s oratory and his quiet diplomacy, considering him a legally knowledgeable realist who could tweak contracts just enough to get both sides to accept them.

From the outset of his career, Gilbert involved himself in Democratic politics, becoming a leading member of the Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee and president of the influential Hollywood Democratic Club.

His efforts locally and nationally prompted Los Angeles Mayor Norris Poulson to appoint him a commissioner of the Los Angeles City Housing Authority, President Lyndon B. Johnson to seek his help on the Civil Rights Act and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey to request his advice on the EEOC.

In recognition of his work in international, national and local law, the state Legislature designated Dec. 10, 2000, as Robert W. Gilbert Day in California.

Gilbert is survived by two sons, Frank and Jack.

Services are private. The family has asked that any donations be sent to the Mogen David for Israel (the Israeli Red Cross) in care of Doria Nappi, 5900 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1740, Los Angeles, CA 90036.