Post-war Career
Aaron joined UCLA's Institute of Industrial Relations in 1946. He was appointed the Institute's director in 1960 and served until 1975.
In 1960, Aaron was elected a vice president of the National Academy of Arbitrators. He was elected president of the organization in 1962.
Throughout the 1960s, Aaron helped mediate a large number of labor disagreements, including disputes between workers and employers in the transit, railroad transportation, longshore, aerospace, health care, airline and agricultural industries. He helped negotiate the first contract between a county and a public employee union in California history in 1968. He later assisted the County of Los Angeles in drafting a public employee collective bargaining ordinance, and served as the mediator during the first contract negotiations between the county and its public employee unions.
President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Aaron to the National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress in 1965. As a member of the commission, Aaron studied the effect automation, computer technology and robotics had on patterns of employment, job training and unemployment. The commission's 1966 report called for higher funding of the Job Corps' vocational training programs and concluded that the disruptions caused by technological change would not be as serious as many feared.
The same year, Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz appointed Aaron to a national panel to study the need for reinstating the Bracero Program in order to ease a national agricultural labor shortage. Although the panel recommended relaxation of immigration rules to permit larger numbers of guest workers and Wirtz accepted the plan, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach overruled Wirtz just a month later and shut the bracero program down.
In 1970, Aaron mediated an end to a five-week strike by 14,000 members of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, AFT, against the Los Angeles Unified School District. Aaron's efforts helped end what is still (as of 2007) the longest teachers' strike in the history of California.
At the age of 68, Aaron helped mediate an end to a strike by pilots at Continental Airlines in 1983.
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