Feminist, Labor Advocate, Social Economist,
Worker Rights Advocate, Optimist
July 10, 1952 –
May 1, 2005
Jan Stackhouse believed in people,
and she believed that people could make a
difference.
She believed she could make a
difference. Jan committed her life to helping
others find the power and voice to bring about
positive change, whether in the workplace or in
their personal lives. Her strong belief in
making a difference laid the foundation for a
lifetime of public service that continued until
her death on May 1, 2005 near Stockbridge, MA.
Jan Stackhouse was born in
Montevideo, Uruguay in 1952, the first of three
daughters of a US Foreign Service couple. She
grew up in Lebanon, Libya, Washington DC and
Israel, where she attended high school. After
graduating from Indiana University with a degree
in comparative literature, Jan moved with her
then-husband to New Haven, CT where he was to
begin graduate studies at Yale. Jan took a job
as a book department clerk at the Yale Coop, and
it was there in 1975 that her life took an
eventful turn. Dissatisfied with low wages and
capricious management, Jan and her fellow
employees organized themselves into Local 1173
of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers
Union; Jan’s union card identifies her as Member
No. 2. It was one of the first college stores in
the country to become unionized.
The experience was transformative,
giving shape and focus to her innate optimism
and urge for social justice. Jan threw herself
into the labor movement, and in short order, the
women’s movement as well: she helped unionize
other workplaces, organized a women’s center and
a shelter for victims of domestic violence, and
became active in many community organizations.
She also teamed up with progressive media
producers and began documenting the painful
demise of Connecticut’s factory-based economy in
the late 70s and early 80s, under the pressure
of forces that two decades later would be called
globalization.
The culmination of this phase of
her life was The Brass Workers History Project.
Funded by the National Endowment for the
Humanities and other institutions, The Brass
Workers History Project involved Jan, a local
media producer and a labor historian in a
four-year effort to to tell the story of the
rise and fall of a prototypical American
industrial region, the Naugatuck River Valley in
western Connecticut. This region had been the
worldwide center of copper and brass
manufacturing for over a hundred years, but was
in decline when Jan and her partners began
telling its story through oral history
interviews, in-depth journalism and archival
research. The results were Brass Valley,
a video documentary aired on Connecticut Public
Television in 1984 and later distributed by the
Cinema Guild, and a book of the same name (still
in print) published in 1983 by Temple University
Press.
In 1984, Jan moved to New York
City, to try her skills in a more challenging
arena and to formalize the managerial talent she
was developing. She was accepted into the MBA
program at New York University, graduated in
1987 and took a job with the New York State
Department of Economic Development under
Governor Mario Cuomo. Her focus there for the
next ten years would be employee ownership as a
strategy for worker empowerment and job
retention.
Though the program was a success,
Jan was ousted in an agency reshuffle under
Governor Pataki, and she joined a consulting
firm as its director of marketing, where she
stayed until 2002. When an opportunity to go
back to the labor movement appeared, Jan leapt
at it, becoming Director of Membership of SEIU
Local 1199, the Hospital and Health Care Workers
Union. At the time, she was one of a relatively
small number of union officials who had an MBA
and substantial experience in both the public
and private sectors. Jan reshaped and
streamlined dues collection, record keeping,
member services and other functions in the
237,000-member union. In addition, with the
mixture of supportive concern and managerial
acumen that was her professional trademark, she
succeeded at motivating her growing staff and
creating new career possibilities for them.
1199 was beginning to reap the
fruit of Jan’s effort when it was cut short by
her death on Sunday, May 1, 2005. She had been
spending the weekend at a friend’s house in the
Berkshires, and went for a walk alone. Shortly
afterward she was found dead near the roadside,
apparently killed by an assailant whose identity
is still unknown.