Nathan Witt - Private Sector Career

Private Sector Career

After leaving the NLRB, Witt joined with Harold I. Cammer (founder of the National Lawyers Guild) to form the law partnership of Witt & Cammer. Later joined by Lee Pressman to become Pressman, Witt & Cammer, the firm became one of the most prominent left-wing labor law firms in the country. He briefly represented the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (which would later become the United Steel Workers of America) in 1941. In 1955, he left the firm to become legal counsel to the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. When the union merged with and became a division of the United Steel Workers in the 1960s, Witt was retained as associate counsel for the new division.

Witt was involved in numerous labor union disputes and labor-related free speech cases in the 1940s and 1950s. He represented members of the College Teachers Union (a predecessor to the modern Professional Staff Congress union at the City College of New York) when they were accused in 1941 of being communists by the Rapp-Coudert Committee. He briefly served as legal counsel to the International Fur & Leather Workers Union in 1944 in a major due process case. He was the lead attorney for the Seamen's Joint Action Committee, a CIO-backed insurgent group which allied with three CIO longshoremen's unions to challenge International Longshoremen's Association president Joseph Ryan. He also represented several members of the Teachers Union who had been accused of being communists in 1950 and 1952. (At the time, the Teachers Union was a local union representing New York City public schools teachers. It had been ejected by the American Federation of Teachers for being communist-controlled, and in the 1950s was part of the United Public Workers of America. It would later rejoin the American Federation of Teachers in the early 1960s and merge with another local to become the United Federation of Teachers.)

In 1950, the U.S. State Department revoked singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson's passport as a means of preventing him from traveling overseas and continuing his left-wing political work. Witt was Robeson's first attorney and initiated Robeson's eight-year battle to regain his passport.