Sol Gorelick, 64 years a union activist

Sol Gorelick, jailed for nine days in 1965 as a leader of the Welfare Dept. strike that won full collective bargaining rights for all city workers, died March 23.

Sol will be missed by District Council 37, SSEU Local 371, the DC 37 Retirees Association and the central Brooklyn community he served as an activist in the successful struggle to save Coney Island Hospital.

During his final days in a stroke-induced coma, many churches in Bedford-Stuyvesant offered up prayers for his recovery.

Sol was a role model for trade unionists everywhere. He saw union battles and community battles as part of one lifelong struggle for racial, social and economic justice.

Sol was born in the Bronx in 1916 to Max, a laundry worker and socialist Zionist, and Gitta, a union garment maker. During the Depression, as other City College students debated the merits of communism and socialism, he studied chemistry.

Concerned about the unemployment and poverty around him, in 1940 Sol started what he thought would be a temporary job as a Social Investigator (now Caseworker) at the Brownsville Welfare Center. The pay was $1,200 a year for 5½-day weeks, and he immediately joined Local 1 of the United Public Workers union, a forerunner of Local 371.

From 1942 to 1945, he served in the Army Air Corps. He was assigned at first to the Manhattan Project that built the first atom bomb, kicked out because an officer said he “fit the profile of a Jewish radical,” and ended his military duty in the Pacific campaign.

Back in the Welfare Dept., management was investigating “all the alleged reds, including me,” the left-led UPW was redbaited and destroyed, and Sol led several temporary organizations to fight for employees’ rights on issues such as moving civil service lists.

He found his union home in Local 371, where in January 1965 he was jailed for refusing a judge’s order to call strikers back to work. Sol served in the 1960s as a vice president of DC 37.

After he retired from the city in 1980, he was elected vice president for health issues in the Retirees Association and led the DC 37 Community Association in Coney Island. There he was a driving force in bringing community groups together with the union to save Coney Island Hospital from privatization.

Susan Chin of the DC 37 Political Action Dept. met Sol and his wife Mildred at the Community Association. “Over the years, we grew so close that I called them my adopted grandparents. Sol was one of the greatest unionists and social workers. The day he died was one of the saddest for me,” she said.

He is survived by Mildred, two children, nine grandchildren and one great grandchild.

— Bill Schleicher