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Peter Kellman (b. 1945) is an anti-war activist, author, and American labor union leader and activist. more...

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He is president of the Southern Maine Central Labor Council, and a member of the executive board of the Maine AFL-CIO.

Among a number of other positions he holds, Kellman is also a researcher with the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD). POCLAD is a project of the Council on International and Public Affairs (CIPA).

Early life

Kellman was born in New York City in 1945. His parents and their friends communists, and friends of the family were similar "fellow travelers": communists, socialists and trade union activists. The Kellman family moved to Maine, where Peter Kellman grew up and attended school.

In 1965, two years after graduating from high school, he became active in the civil rights movement and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC sent Kellman to Alabama, where he helped coordinate the Selma to Montgomery marches in support of black voting rights. Afterward, he helped build the Selma Free Library. When SNCC decided to form local political parties in Alabama independent of the Democratic Party, Kellman was one of the volunteers sent to build the nascent organizations (working in Sumter County, Alabama).

Returning north after his work for SNCC, Kellman became involved in the American peace movement, where he helped organize the first anti-draft rallies in 1967 against the Vietnam War.

Returning to New England, in the late 1960s and 1970s Kellman worked as a construction worker, air conditioning repairman, painter and shop floor workers in a rubber mill.

Labor movement activism

In 1976, Kellman was working at a Converse shoe factory in North Berwick, Maine making sneakers. Kellman, who worked in the rubber mill portion of the factory, tried to form a union along with his 500 co-workers. The organizing effort was unsuccessful. But the effect the company's anti-union effort had was a radicalizing one, and Kellman became more and more interested in the labor movement.

Kellman later became a painter, and was elected steward in the local painter's union.

Kellman also became involved in the anti-nuclear movement. In 1977, he worked with the Clamshell Alliance to build public support to oppose construction of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in New Hampshire and oppose all nuclear power in New England.

In 1979, Kellman took another job in a shoe factory. He was elected president of Local 82, Shoe Division, of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, AFL-CIO in Sanford, Maine.

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