The team at the Power At Work Blog is deeply saddened by the passing of our friend and regular contributor Bill Spriggs. Bill passed away peacefully last night at the age of 68.
In the last several years of his career, Bill served as the Chief Economist at the AFL-CIO while continuing to teach and write as a member of Howard University's Economics Department, where he had previously served as department chair. Bill and I worked together in the U.S. Department of Labor under President Obama when Bill served as Assistant Secretary for Policy. It's sometimes perilous to work with friends, but not so with Bill. He was always even-keeled, smart, and tightly focused on adding value, even when we strongly disagreed. We began as longstanding friends and our friendship survived the experience.
But the jobs didn't make the man. The man fit the jobs perfectly. His life's mission was to fight for, study, explain, and advance the interests of working Americans. His mission included training and promoting the next generation of economists who could understand the economy from workers' perspective without getting lost in the numbers or abstract theories. Bill's work was always grounded in the real world, and designed to improve that world.
Bill's special passion was the workers who are too often left out of the conversation and left behind in our economy: black workers, Latino workers, women workers, and teen workers. He was relentless in making sure these workers were central to his analyses and advocacy, not peripheral or second-class afterthoughts. Bill appeared several times on this blog's monthly "Workers by the Numbers" blogcasts and the focus of his arguments was never in doubt. Watch him at work here, here, here, and here.
We extend our deepest sympathies to Bill's family, his colleagues at Howard University and the AFL-CIO, his students and mentees, and to his many friends and admirers. Rest in Power, Bill.