Labor Research Association (U.S.)

Son of an attorney, Robert Dunn (1895-1977) was born in Pennsylvania. After graduation from Yale in 1918, he worked in New England for the Amalgamated Textile Workers Unions as an organizer and economic researcher. In 1920 Dunn helped established the New England Civil Liberties Union. A close friend of Roger Baldwin’s he also served on the national American Civil Liberties Union’s Executive Committee from 1923-1941. In the 1920s Dunn focussed his attention on events in the Soviet Union, traveling there in 1922 (as research director for the Quaker Relief Committee, along with Anna Louise Strong and Jessica Smith) and again in 1927 (as part of the First Trade Union Delegation, which helped bring about the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and Soviet Union in 1933). In 1927, Dunn co-founded the Labor Research Association (LRA) and served as its executive secretary until 1975. Still active today, the LRA collects data on labor for trade unions and regularly publishes that information, statistics, and related news, in LRA Online, its informational website. Other organizations Dunn was associated with or worked for, include: the Civil Rights Congress and the American Fund for Public Service. In addition, Dunn wrote extensively in the field of labor economics and wrote or co-wrote 12 books, including The Labor Spy (1924), American Foreign Investments (1926), and Company Unions Today (1932). In 1925, Dunn married Stanislava Piotrovska, a graduate of Columbia Teachers College. They had one son, Roger Williams Dunn, born in 1930.

From the guide to the Labor Research Association/Robert Dunn Photographs, 1888-1960, (Tamiment Library / Wagner Archives)

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