Author - John Kretzschmar

John Kretzschmar is a university-based labor educator who serves as the director of the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s William Brennan Institute for Labor Studies. He, with the help of organized labor, worked to create Nebraska’s labor studies program back in 1980.

The Institute exists to meet the educational needs of the sisters and brothers in Nebraska’s labor movement and is one of 40 similarly housed programs in colleges and universities across the US and Canada. Programs like this believe that organized labor is the central means by which employees improve their quality of life in the workplace and in their communities.

John grew up in Detroit and moved to Nebraska in 1976 after earning a Master’s of Social Work degree in community organizing from Detroit’s Wayne State University. At different points in his worklife he's been a member of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, the United Automobile Workers, and is currently a member of the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.