George Barasch was a United States union labor leader who led both the Allied Trades Council and Teamsters Local 815 (New York), representing a combined total of 11,000 members.
He was the first labor leader to create a union anti-crime department, and was instrumental in eliminating racketeering and organized crime from much of local union life in New Jersey and New York City in the early 1950s. His disputes with the United States government in the mid-1960s over control of union benefit funds ultimately led to the creation and enactment of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). In 1964, after observing the need for a unified national educational foundation to inform working men and women and pursue societal progress benefiting workers, he created the Allied Educational Foundation (AEF). The semi-annual AEF conferences served as a forum for high-ranking political figures, academics, legal scholars, and civil rights activists including Senator William Proxmire, Martin Luther King, Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, President Gerald Ford, Vice President Walter F. Mondale, labor columnist Victor Riesel, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Harrison E. Salisbury, and economist Leo Cherne. Barasch remained Chairman of the Allied Educational Foundation for 49 years until his death at 102 years of age in 2013.
George Barasch was born in 1910 in Russia. He immigrated with his family to the United States as a young boy and obtained his first job at age 14 with Ye Colonial Sweet Shop (Brooklyn, NY) in 1925. In 1928, while employed as a clerk at Davis Drug Store (Brooklyn, NY), he enrolled at St. John's University (originally in Brooklyn, NY). In 1931, Barasch worked as a clerk at B. & W. Pharmacy and soon after became an apprentice at Walgreens Drug Store. He graduated from St. John's University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Science in 1934, and enrolled in St. John's University School of Law in September 1935. During his employment with Walgreens "putting in unbearable long hours, sometimes as much as 15 hours a day," Barasch conceived of the idea of forming a union. By 1937 he had left law school, resigned from Walgreens, and secured a charter from the Retail Clerks International Protective Association to devote his efforts to the Drug Store Employee's Union of Greater New York by organizing drug store employees.

Source: Wikipedia.org