Ken Moffett, a son and grandson of union leaders who rose to become the country’s top labor mediator, serving as a charismatic middleman and peacemaker in disputes with dockworkers, air traffic controllers, newspaper pressmen and Major League Baseball players, died Nov. 19 at his home in Alexandria, Va. He was 90.
He had dementia, said his son Ken Moffett Jr., the director of negotiations at the National Treasury Employees Union.
Raised in coal-mining country in northeastern Pennsylvania, where three generations of his family had fought to improve working conditions for miners, Mr. Moffett spent two decades at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), acting as a neutral third party while trying to resolve some of the nation’s thorniest labor fights.
He became the agency’s acting director in January 1981, at the beginning of a hectic year in which he worked on disputes with air traffic controllers, ballplayers, postal workers and — once again — air traffic controllers. By the end of the summer he was “the mouthpiece of the moment,” a “spokesman turned star,” as Washington Post journalist Stephanie Mansfield put it in a 4,000-word profile.
“I must admit, it’s been kind of overwhelming,” he said of the attention, which included interviews with TV networks as well as Playboy magazine.
Mr. Moffett was appointed the federal mediation service’s director in January 1982 — the Reagan administration needed someone to carry out budget cuts before it could install an appointee of its own — and briefly led the MLB Players Association in 1983. He retired two decades later as human resources director at the Communications Workers of America (CWA), which represented about 600,000 members at the time.
By his own account, he was far more interested in dealing with strikers than with bureaucrats, preferring to mediate negotiations rather than “run the silly agency,” as he called the FMCS. He was praised as a steadying force at the bargaining table, credited with defusing volatile situations with his folksy sense of humor. (He once joked that he wanted to recruit federal mediators from the waitstaff at Duke Zeibert’s Washington restaurant.) But some critics accused him of doing too little, saying he soaked up publicity while merely preventing opposing parties from coming to blows.
“Sometimes I think he uses that as a facade, to relieve anxieties and tensions,” his friend Jack Donlan, a top negotiator for the National Football League, once said of Mr. Moffett’s easygoing personality. “People call him laid-back, but I compare it to a duck on the water. Underneath, he’s paddling like hell.” Mr. Moffett, he added in a 1981 interview, was “gutter smart”: “He finds a way to get his way.”
Mr. Moffett had little luck that year in mediating a dispute between the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or PATCO, and the Federal Aviation Administration. He said he had deluded himself into thinking that the air traffic controllers would never strike; when they did just that, the Reagan administration fired the striking workers, crushing the union in an episode that is often cited as the start of a long downturn for organized labor in the United States.
“It was like lemmings running into the sea. People falling on a sword,” Mr. Moffett said of the strike.
He found greater success during negotiations that ended a 50-day baseball strike earlier that year, with owners and players battling over free agent compensation in the middle of the 1981 season. Mr. Moffett joined negotiations in New York and Washington, brought in Labor Secretary Raymond J. Donovan in a bid to ease tensions, and received much of the credit for facilitating a resolution that ended what was then the longest stoppage in baseball history. (A 1994 strike stretched more than seven months, wiping out much of the season.)
“Dear President Reagan,” Post sports columnist Dave Kindred wrote near the close of negotiations, “Ken Moffett, the valiant mediator afflicted with the assignment of listening to baseball’s owners, needs a vacation after this.”
The oldest of four sons, Kenneth Elwood Moffett was born in Lykens, Pa., on Sept. 11, 1931. As a boy, unionism “was ingrained in me,” he later told an interviewer with the CWA.
His great-great-grandfather was part of the Molly Maguires, a group of militant Irish American coal miners who battled with mine owners and rival ethnic groups in Pennsylvania, and his grandfather started a local branch of the mine workers union. His father, Elwood, rose to become president of District 50, a group of some 250,000 chemical and industrial workers that he took out of the United Mine Workers and joined with the United Steelworkers. His mother was a homemaker.
The family moved frequently because of his father’s union work — Mr. Moffett said he attended “eight schools in eight states in eight years” — and settled in suburban Langley Park, Md.
Mr. Moffett served in the Navy and studied physical education at the University of Maryland, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1958 before working as an organizer at District 50. Stepping out on his own, he launched his mediation career in 1961, joining the FMCS’s office in Cleveland.
By 1977, he was the agency’s deputy director and had already mediated several high-profile labor disputes, including a 1975 pressmen’s strike at The Post that ended after management began hiring nonunion replacement workers. He was also brought in for the 1978 New York newspaper strike, which shut down the presses of the Times and Daily News for almost three months.
After his success with the baseball strike, he was unanimously elected the head of the MLB Players Association, succeeding Marvin Miller, who had built the group into one of America’s strongest unions. Mr. Moffett championed “a more cooperative relationship with management,” according to an essay in the book “Baseball History From Outside the Lines,” but his approach infuriated Miller, who closely followed his successor and disparaged Mr. Moffett in a memo to the players.
Mr. Moffett was dismissed after only 11 months — he blamed his ouster on the fact that he was working on a “tough, impartial drug policy” to stem cocaine use by the players — and was replaced by Donald Fehr, the association’s longtime general counsel.
“I was trying to build a bridge to management,” Mr. Moffett said after his ouster. “However, the union is determined to be confrontational on every issue. They’re still back on a 1930s tack. They might be the last union in America that thinks that way. They’d rather fight than switch.”
In 1985, he became an assistant to the president of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians. He remained with the union after it merged with CWA in 1994, and later worked as an arbitrator, which his son described as “his way of staying involved with labor.”
His first marriage, to Barbara Wilcox, ended in divorce after more than two decades. He had three more marriages before marrying Mary Taddeo in 1999. In addition to his wife and son, both of Alexandria, survivors include two other children from his first marriage, Laura Tornell of Olney, Md., and John Moffett of Antioch, Calif.; two brothers; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Mr. Moffett played basketball, football and baseball in high school, dreaming of making the major leagues as a pitcher. By the 1980s he had devoted himself to long-distance running, saying it helped him build stamina for negotiations, and put an “I’d Rather Be Running” bumper sticker on his Datsun sports car. He completed marathons in Boston, Washington, New York and Honolulu, and joked — half-seriously, it seemed — about leaving mediation behind to open a running-shoe store.
“So much of my life is hostility,” he said, “that in my own private life, I’d go anywhere to get away from it.”

