Lois Gray, Mentor to Unions and Women Who Work, Dies at 94

Lois S. Gray, who as a professor and mentor for seven decades delivered college-trained women, immigrants and members of racial and ethnic minority groups into the ranks of American organized labor, died Sept. 20 in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 94.

Bonnie Beavers, her niece, confirmed her death.

Gray joined Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in 1946, barely a year after it was founded. She started out as a member of the extension faculty, which reached out to employees and would-be union leaders to educate them in collective bargaining, job training and other programs intended to improve workplace conditions.

Over the next 57 years, she directed the school’s first extension office in Buffalo and its metropolitan district office in New York City.

As a researcher, author and editor of several books, and as a member of New York state employment and training task forces, she remained versed in the latest technological, competitive and political challenges facing both labor and management. Until her death, she met several days a week with students and faculty in the school’s Manhattan office.

“Lois blazed the trail for the university to venture into the tumultuous real world of industrial and labor relations,” said Lou Jean Fleron, who directs the High Road Fellowship program for undergraduates at Cornell in Buffalo. “She made education a tool for improving the workplace and advancing a democratic economy through collective bargaining and fair collaboration.”

Gray also personally donated $1 million to the school’s Worker Institute, which conducts research and offers education programs on labor issues, and funded an internship program in memory of her husband, Edward Gray, who was a regional director and member of the international executive board of the United Automobile Workers union. He died in 1995.

She is survived by her stepson, John T. Gray, three step-grandchildren, eight step-great-grandchildren and five step-great-great-grandchildren.

Gray’s grounding in social justice began when she was a child growing up in the 1930s on the fringes of the Dust Bowl, where her mother handed out food to migrant workers and her father’s sermons against racism provoked a Ku Klux Klan cross-burning on the lawn of the parsonage where her family lived.

Lois Faye Spier was born on Oct. 17, 1923, in St. Louis to Charles and Mae (Imboden) Spier. Her father was studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where the family moved when she was a baby. She was raised in Edmond, Oklahoma, near Oklahoma City, where her father was minister of the First Presbyterian Church.

She earned a scholarship to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she majored in drama. After her father enlisted in the military during World War II, she transferred to live closer to her mother and sister and graduated from Park College (now Park University) in Parkville, Missouri, in 1943 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. She also won first prize in a national debate contest in which she argued over government regulation of unions.

During the war, she was recruited by a military intelligence unit in Washington, then became a field examiner for the National Labor Relations Board in Buffalo, where she earned her master’s degree from the University of Buffalo. A year later, after she inquired about pursuing another graduate degree at the new Industrial and Labor Relations School, she was offered a position on the faculty.

In 1956, she moved to New York City to direct the extension school’s metropolitan program and earned a doctorate at Columbia University, where she studied under Nobel-winning economist Gary Becker. In 1976, she was named associate dean and director of extension.

Under her leadership, the school established the Institute for Women and Work, the Latino Leadership Center, an international worker exchange and off-campus credit courses for workers and union leaders.

She retired as a professor emerita of labor management relations.