Sam Kagel emerged from humble beginnings in an immigrant family to become America's leading figure in the field of labor arbitration and mediation. Born in 1909 to Jewish parents who fled the Russian Empire for greener pastures in the United States, Kagel was raised in Jack London's old working-class neighborhood near the Oakland, California waterfront. As a young produce employee, he slipped watermelons to itinerant Wobblies, as the rebels of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were known, and read deeply in the writings of London, Frank Norris, Emile Zola, Anatole France and Upton Sinclair.

In the mid-1920s, Kagel attended the University of California, Berkeley. He worked his way through school giving out towels in the university's gymnasium until he was invited to read examination papers in economics during his senior year. Kagel graduated from Cal in 1929 and then became an economics graduate student and a teaching fellow there. When the labor economist Paul S. Taylor got him an initially temporary job advocating for unions with the Pacific Coast Labor Bureau (PCLB), the direction of Kagel's life was set for what would become an extraordinarily long and brilliant career.

The San Francisco office of the PCLB had been recently established under the direction of Henry Melnikow when Kagel went to work there in 1932. The bureau represented unions in negotiation, mediation and arbitration proceedings. Melnikow proved a mentor to Kagel, who stayed with the PCLB for ten years. He arrived, it turned out, just in time to be a participant in the labor upsurge of the mid-1930s, which started regionally with the West Coast maritime and San Francisco general strikes of 1934.

During the great 1934 strike, Kagel became an advisor to Harry Bridges, the celebrated leader of the Pacific Coast longshore union, and worked closely with Randolph Meriwether of the Marine Engineers' Beneficial Association (MEBA). Appointed an honorary MEBA member in June 1934, Kagel represented that organization on the Joint Marine Strike Committee. He also argued the workers' case before federal officials who were trying to mediate the strike.

Kagel was an eyewitness to the violence of Blood Thursday, July 5, 1934, when San Francisco police killed two workers and wounded scores of others. Then he watched the famous San Francisco general strike of July 16-19 that followed. When the coast-wide maritime strike was finally over, Kagel counseled Bridges while the latter prepared to testify before the National Longshoremen's Board, which arbitrated the dispute and handed down a landmark decision in favor of the waterfront unions.

In the aftermath of what has been known ever since as the Big Strike, Kagel became widely prominent in Northern California as the representative of a broad variety of unions. To cite one prominent example, from 1934 through 1939 he helped plan organizing drives and negotiated for the longshore union during its dramatic "march inland" into the San Francisco Bay Area warehouse, distribution, and production industries.

When the city's employers locked out all of their newly-unionized warehouse workers in 1938, Kagel played a central role as usual. Throughout the crisis, he consulted daily with Eugene Paton, the president of Warehouse Local 6, International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU). Ultimately the summer-long lockout was settled on terms satisfactory to both sides.

Shortly after the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Kagel was invited to join the federal government's War Manpower Commission (WMC) for the duration of the conflict. The WMC recruited labor for ship yards, war plants, and other production facilities essential to the military effort. As assistant director and then director of the WMC for Northern California, Kagel remained a high profile public official throughout the war years.

In 1945 when the war ended, Kagel decided to attend law school. At the same time he was engaged by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and San Francisco's clothing employers to act as Mr. Impartial Chairman, the name adopted for the apparel industry's neutral arbitrator. This appointment was another pivotal development in Kagel's life. He was now a labor arbitrator. By 1948 when he finished law school, he was taking arbitration cases on a regular basis.

That same year there was another major coast-wide longshore strike. In its wake the ship owners committed to a new bargaining agency, the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA). The PMA and the ILWU asked Kagel to become their coast arbitrator for the longshore industry. This was an important position that Kagel would keep from 1948 to 2002. Kagel, of course, was already well-known in labor circles by 1948. But in his new post he would become a living legend along the waterfronts of the entire Pacific Coast.

Over the next five decades Kagel's arbitration practice outside of the waterfront expanded exponentially. He would eventually handle thousands of labor cases in dozens of diverse fields such as nursing, the soft drink industry, pulp and paper manufacturing and the airline business. Kagel arbitrated important early agricultural cases involving the United Farm Workers (UFW) and mediated the ending of the 1971 West Coast longshore strike. He even evaluated the grievances of famous professional athletes and ultimately became the chief arbitrator for the National Football League (NFL).

In 2004 two years after Kagel retired as coast arbitrator for the longshore industry, Longshore Local 10 of the ILWU made him an honorary member at its yearly July 5 memorial honoring the martyrs of Bloody Thursday. It seemed a fitting tribute to a man who had spent 54 years on the job and seven decades in all working for justice in the turbulent world of labor relations.