Leonard Appel oral history interview

1980-02-08/1980-02-21

Appel, Leonard; Dove, Kay

Oral history interview with Leonard Appel conducted by Kay Dove on February 8 and 21,1980. Leonard Appel (July 27, 1912 - August 29,1994), born and raised in Denver, Colorado, attended the University of Denver, where he received an undergraduate degree and a law degree. He worked for the National Labor Relations Board in the late 1930s as an attorney in the Appellate Litigation Section. In 1942, he was drafted and for two years worked in the Labor Section of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor of the CIA.  During the war, he was based in Egypt and then Europe, gathering intelligence from labor union members who acted as informants.  In early 1946, he returned to the National Labor Relations Board, but was quickly recruited to join the 12-person U.S. Advisory Committee on Labor in Japan. While in Japan, Appel drafted legislation to protect women and children in the workplace that abolished child labor and established hours of work, conditions of work, and pay. He returned to his position at the National Labor Relations Board in the summer of 1946, but one year later was back in Japan on a two-year contract as a legal advisor to the Labor Division. General Douglas MacArthur did not support collective bargaining and the right to strike for government administrative employees (railroad and salt mine workers, specifically).  Later, however, he compromised and gave SCAP permission to set up a public corporation and draft a labor relations code specifically for the railroad and salt mine workers (the industrial sector of public employees).  Appel drafted the code, which included the right to organize and bargain collectively, but not to strike.

University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)

Oral histories

Japan--History--Allied occupation, 1945-1952

Japan; District of Columbia

Postwar Japan

Special Collections and University Archives

English

Collection may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. To obtain permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the University of Maryland Libraries at http://www.lib.umd.edu/special/contact/home.

Recording: 01:49:00 (audio cassette; mp3); Transcript: 25 pages (PDF)

This oral history interview is part of the Marlene J. Mayo oral histories. A guide to the full collection of Marlene J. Mayo oral histories is available in our archival collections: http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/42478.
Accession 2009-209-GWP
An interview transcript is available.

Filename: prange-087503