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Tom Kochan
Professor
- MIT Sloan School of Management
- Digital initiative of Future Work - Sloan Professor
Other Affiliations : Industrial Relations, University of Wisconsin ' Ph.D. '73, Industrial Relations, University of Wisconsin ' M.S. ' 71, University of Wisconsin ' B.B.A ' 69
Thomas A. Kochan is a professor of industrial relations, work and employment. He is the George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he has been a faculty member since 1980.
He is author of the books Restoring the American Dream: A Working Families’ Agenda for America and Shaping the Future of Work.
In 2010, Kochan led the formation of the Employment Policy Research Network (EPRN), an online think tank on the subject of employment, a project of the Labor and Employment Relations Association, supported by the Rockefeller and Russell Sage foundations. The EPRN web site launched in January 2011 with 100 researchers from 35 universities, including MIT, Harvard, California-Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Illinois, Michigan State, Pennsylvania State University and UCLA.
He served as Chair of the MIT Faculty from 2009 to 2011. He came to MIT in 1980 as a Professor of Industrial Relations. From 1988 to 1991 he served as Head of the Behavioral and Policy Sciences Area in the Sloan School.
He has served as a third-party mediator, fact finder, and arbitrator and as a consultant to a variety of government and private sector organizations and labor-management groups.
He was a consultant for one year to the Secretary of Labor in the Department of Labor’s Office of Policy Evaluation and Research.
Kochan focuses on the need to update America’s work and employment policies, institutions, and practices to catch up with a changing workforce and economy. Through empirical research, he demonstrates that fundamental changes in the quality of work and employment relations are needed to address America’s critical problems in industries ranging from healthcare to airlines to manufacturing.
