The Memoirs of Wendell W. Young III ― A Life in Philadelphia Labor and Politics

Philadelphia native Wendell W. Young III was one of the most important American labor leaders in the last half of the twentieth century. An Acme Markets clerk in the 1950s and ’60s, he was elected top officer of the Retail Clerks Union when he was twenty-four. His social justice unionism sought to advance wages while moving beyond collective bargaining to improve the conditions of the working-class majority, whether in a union or not. Young quickly gained a reputation for his independence, daring at times to publicly criticize the policies of the city’s powerful AFL-CIO leadership and tangle with the city’s political machine.

Editor Francis Ryan, whose introduction provides historical context, interviewed Young about his experiences working in the region’s retail and food industry, measuring the changes over time and the tangible impact that union membership had on workers. Young also describes the impact of Philadelphia’s deindustrialization in the 1970s and ’80s and recounts his activism for civil rights and the anti-war movements as well as on John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. 

The Memoirs of Wendell W. YoungIII provides the most extensive labor history of late twentieth-century Philadelphia yet written.

Wendell W. Young, III (1938-2013) led Philadelphia's Retail Clerks Union (United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 1776) for over forty years. Beginning in the early 1960s, he was active in the city's Democratic Party, elected as a Northeast Philadelphia ward leader, serving as a delegate to five national conventions and as Philadelphia campaign manager for George McGovern's 1972 presidential race. In the 1970s and 80s, he played a pivotal role in forging a broad, city-wide coalition of progressive trade unionists, liberals and African American voters to challenge the urban populism of Mayor Frank L. Rizzo and the administrations of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. An advocate of social justice unionism throughout his life, Young was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and built alliances with the regional civil rights movement, neighborhood-based anti-poverty initiatives, and was a leader of the Citizen Labor Energy Coalition, a group that coordinated programs between organized labor and the environmental movement.

Francis Ryan is director of the Masters of Labor and Employment Relations program at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He is the author of AFSCME's Philadelphia Story: Municipal Workers and Urban Power in the Twentieth Century (Temple).