Sidney Kessler obituary
My father, Sidney Kessler, who has died aged 89, was a leading academic with a significant record of public service in the field of industrial relations. With a handful of others, he helped to establish City University as a leading business school in the 1970s.
Sidney participated in a string of public bodies set up to support British industrial relations in the 60s and 70s, a period of considerable industrial strife. He played a leading role for the National Board for Price and Incomes (as part-time adviser, 1965-70), designed to manage pay policy; the Commission on Industrial Relations (on secondment as a full-time director,1971-74), established to facilitate union and employer efforts to reform collective bargaining; and the Standing Commission on Pay Comparability (as part-time adviser 1979-80), created in the aftermath of the Winter of Discontent, to resolve various public sector pay disputes.
Born in Whitechapel, east London, Sidney was the son of Isaac Kessler, a tailor, and his wife, Eva (nee Weisenfeld), who had come to Britain from Poland. Brought up in the Jewish East End, he was exposed to a leftwing political culture, with his parents active in the Workers’ Circle, an organisation set-up to provide welfare support to the community.
He attended Letchworth grammar school, in Hertfordshire, while he was evacuated to the town during the second world war, and City of London Boys, on a full scholarship. Securing a first-class honours degree in economics in 1949 from the London School of Economics, he took up a research assistantship at the National Institute of Economics and Social Research (1951-55), followed by a one year lectureship at Brighton Technology College.
His first permanent job, in 1956, came as head of the research department at the National Union of Mineworkers, a powerful union at the time with 700,000 members. Sidney made lifelong friends in the union movement and retained a strong connection to it. In 1964, he became lecturer in industrial relations at City University and in 1978 he was made professor.
Sidney became an arbitrator while at City, work for which he was appointed OBE in 1990. In 1992, he co-authored Contemporary British Industrial Relations, a book mapping the impact of the Thatcher governments on industrial relations. He was on the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service’s panel of arbitrators for 20 years and also deputy chairman of the Central Arbitration Committee. He retired in 1994.
He is survived by his wife, Irene, whom he married in 1954, his sons, Robert and me, and three granddaughters, Megan, Jodie and Eleanor.