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David L. Cole Papers

 Collection
Identifier: 5588

Scope and Contents

Includes notes (hand-written and typed), correspondence, reports, minutes, and related materials documenting Cole's career as a government official, lawyer, arbitrator and mediator. Also includes over 750 arbitration awards, decisions, and related documents (arranged, for the most part, alphabetically by name of company) for cases arbitrated by Cole, primarily in the textile, garment, steel, meat-packing, maritime, longshore, farm implement, and transportation industries.

Dates

  • 1940-1975

Language of Materials

Collection material in English

Conditions Governing Access

Access to the collections in the Kheel Center is restricted. Please contact a reference archivist for access to these materials.

Conditions Governing Use

This collection must be used in keeping with the Kheel Center Information Sheet and Procedures for Document Use.

Biographical / Historical

David Lawrence Cole was a graduate of Harvard University (BS., 1921) and Fairleigh Dickinson University (LL.B., 1924, LL.D., 1964.) Although he practiced law in Paterson, N.J. from 1926 until his death as senior partner in the law firm of Cole, Berman & Belksy, David Cole will chiefly be remembered for a distinguished career as a government arbitrator and mediator. In this field he served on numerous state and federal boards and in various governmental agencies. Cole was chairman of the New Jersey State Board of Mediation; a public member of Region 2, United States War Labor Board; and chairman of the Presidential Boards of Inquiry in the bituminous coal industry (1948) and in the longshore industry (1953, 1968). Cole was also a member or chairman of numerous Presidential Emergency Boards which settled disputes in the railroad and airline industries (1948-1958); the chairman of the conciliation service for the New York City transit service (1961-1965); director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (1952-1953); chairman of the New Jersey Governor's Committee on Public Utility Strike Service (1952-1953); member of the President's Labor-Management Advisory Committee (1961-1964); and member of the New York Governor's Public Employee Relations Committee (1966-1968), which established the New York State Public Employee Relations Board. Cole was also appointed as chairman of the President's Commission on Industrial Peace in 1973.

Beyond his public service, Mr. Cole was active as a counsel for employer groups in the textile industry (1926-1942) and as an impartial chairman for other labor-management contract disputes. He was also impartial arbitrator for the AFL-CIO Internal Disputes Plan (1954-1976), served as a visiting professor at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University (1954-1955) and was Kestenbaum lecturer at Harvard in 1962. Mr. Cole was the author of INDUSTRIAL PEACE (1963).

Extent

117.5 cubic feet

Additional Description

Subjects

Finding Aid & Administrative Information

Title
Cole, David L. Papers
Status
Completed
Author
Compiled by AR, CE, CB
Date
June 05, 2019
Language of description
Undetermined
Script of description
Code for undetermined script

Revision Statements

  • 02/23/2024: This resource was modified by the ArchivesSpace Preprocessor developed by the Harvard Library (https://github.com/harvard-library/archivesspace-preprocessor)

Repository Details

Repository Details

Part of the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives Repository

Contact:
227 Ives Hall
Ithaca NY 14853

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