Born in 1919, George Perkel, except for a few years in the early 1940s in Washington, D.C., has spent his entire life in New York City. He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1939 and received a Master's Degree in economics from New York University in 1952. He worked for the United States Department of Commerce, the War Labor Board, and the Edo Aircraft Corporation before joining the TWUA in 1947 as senior economist in the Research Department. He left TWUA in 1961 to become the Research Director for New York City's Department of Labor. When Sol Barkin resigned as TWUA Research Director in 1962, Perkel was hired to replace him. Perkel remained as TWUA Research Director until the merger with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in 1976. In the new organization - the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union - Perkel is Director of the Occupational Safety and Health Department, a position for which he was well prepared because of a shift in emphasis in the TWUA Research Department during its last several years of existence.
