ASR 93, Winter 2026
Steve Kellerman died November 8 after a year-long struggle with cancer. He was 84 and died peacefully at home surrounded by family.
Steve joined the IWW in 1969, as one of the young workers who revived the IWW after it had declined post-World War II. He serving on the IWW General Executive Board and as an officer of the Boston GMB and regularly attended IWW conventions. As a result of a dispute over the erosion of union democracy, Steve (and the majority of Boston IWW members) left the IWW in 2016, forming the Boston Labor Solidarity Committee, which continues to hold educational events and join picket lines throughout the region.
A staunch opponent of both union and left-wing sectarianism, Steve was also a member of the Machinists Union and served a number of terms as a shop steward. He was an avid reader of labor history and wrote (less often than many would have preferred) for ASR, the Industrial Worker and other publications on labor history and contemporary struggles. His wife, Nancy, recalls that Steve always carried a book with him; “You never know when you’ll get a chance to read.” In 2022, he donated his extensive collection of IWW books, pamphlets and other materials to the University of Massachusetts Boston Labor Resource Center, where they will remain available to activists and scholars. Steve was a founding member of the Sam and Esther Dolgoff Institute (SEDI) and a trustee of the Hungarian Literature Fund, which supports the publication of labor literature.
While he spoke frequently at May Day rallies and educational forums, I saw Steve most often on picket lines, where he delighted in discussing the importance of solidarity with all comers – whether passersby taking a leaflet or workers considering making a delivery or customers considering entering the scabby establishment. He never talked down to anyone, young or old; after talking with him they usually came away with a new or different perspective on whatever the subject(s) had been. Over the years we picketed countless hospitals, purveyors of sweatshop goods, schools that were abusing part-time teachers, union-busting “social justice” organizations, and several Borders Books outlets – kicking off months of solidarity picketing from New Zealand to London that made it clear that there was a heavy price to be paid for firing Wobbly organizers.
You could count on Steve whenever there was work to be done – preparing copies of the Industrial Worker for the monthly mailing (indeed, we organized the first Borders picket while getting the papers ready for the post office), sending out labor history calendars for several years, and working labor literature tables wherever they would be tolerated (and some places they wouldn’t).
And he led a good life – with a long marriage to his partner, Nancy, two sons David and Andy, a lifelong Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Celtics fan, a lover of jazz and good food and wine, and his commitment to a Judaism that embraced all humanity, rejecting the vicious nationalism that permeates our world.
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