Professor Wagner served as director of the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations (now the School of Labor and Employment Relations) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, from 1958 to 1968. He continued as a professor until 1982, when he retired and was awarded emeritus status. Wagner played a central role in the development of public sector labor relations laws for the state of Illinois, including serving as the first chairman of the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board and in leadership roles on numerous state and regional federal commissions and boards on training, labor-management relations, unemployment, wage-price controls, civil service, and related matters.

Early in his career, Wagner served in the WWII Office of Production Management and as a regional director for the National Labor Relations Board in San Francisco and Cincinnati. In 1948, he served as the founding executive director of the Louisville Labor-Management Committee, the nation’s first area labor-management committee. In that same year, he was a founding member of the Industrial Relations Research Association (now the Labor and Employment Relations Association), which recently honored Wagner with its lifetime achievement award. He was also recognized recently for 50 years of service in the National Academy of Arbitrators (NAA), a rare accomplishment as individuals are only inducted into the NAA after they have already achieved prominence in the profession. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) provided Wagner with a Lifetime Membership Award in 1996, a particularly significant accomplishment for a labor neutral.

At the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois, Wagner launched one of the early doctoral programs in industrial relations in 1966. He was beloved by former students and colleagues alike and is seen as having provided the core “dna” for what is one of the nation’s top programs in labor and employment relations.

Born on September 11, 1911, in Newport Kentucky, Wagner earned A.B. and M.A. degrees from the University of Michigan in 1933 and 1935 respectively. He was a Rhodes Scholar (Magdalen ’36), earning a B.A. from Oxford University in 1937 and later an M.A. from Oxford in 1960. At the 100th anniversary celebration of the Rhodes Scholar program in 2003, Martin Wagner was the third oldest recipient in attendance.

Wagner is survived by his son John, of Orlando, FL, his daughter Martha Wagner Weinberg, of Brookline, MA, and two grandchildren, David and Katy Weinberg. His wife Nelle Nordstrom Wagner preceded him in death in 1997. A commemorative celebration of Martin Wagner’s life and accomplishments is on Saturday morning, September 12th in the Martin Wagner Education Center at the School of Labor and Employment Relations, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a memorial service to follow on that weekend.