Victor Van Bourg; Union Labor Lawyer

Victor Van Bourg, founder of one of the nation’s largest union-side labor law firms, collapsed and died of a heart attack Tuesday at San Francisco International Airport while trying to rush to the bedside of a daughter dying of cancer.

Van Bourg, 68, had cut short a trip to Washington, where he was arguing a case, but was stricken before learning that his only daughter, Julie, had died while he was on the plane.

A staunch defender of union rights who was called the “lion of the left” by a Bay Area law journal, he was considered the dean of labor lawyers in California, a socialist spawned by the Depression and one of the last of a dying breed.

“He was an institution,” said Walter Johnson, secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Labor Council. “He made a real effort to understand working people . . . and took risks for union members.”

Van Bourg’s firm, founded in 1964, has 35 lawyers who represent more than 400 unions, including the 1.1-million-member Service Employees International Union.

Associates described Van Bourg as charismatic, a big man--6 feet, 350 pounds--who was capable of dominating a room through his fiercely held opinions as much as by his physical presence.

He was controversial within labor circles, accused by some of favoring the interests of entrenched union leadership over the rank and file. He was nearly burned in effigy on Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay, last year during a demonstration in which workers alleged that he was trying to squelch union democracy movements.

Van Bourg was born in New York City but grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a teacher and a painter who were active in working-class political and cultural organizations. He earned a bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, graduating from the university’s Boalt Hall School of Law in 1956.

After passing the bar, he plunged into work as an advocate for unions, which led to his targeting by the FBI and right-wing forces during the McCarthy era.

During the 1960s, he was involved in many classic worker struggles in California.

He represented Cesar Chavez’s National Farm Workers in the union’s 1966 merger with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. The next year he advised faculty members at San Francisco State on strategy when they shut down the campus for four months in solidarity with students striving for control over the ethnic studies program.

“If it was happening,” longtime partner Stewart Weinberg said of Van Bourg’s activism, “Victor was there.”

Van Bourg argued many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and the California Supreme Court over his 43-year legal career. He submitted his first brief on a U.S. Supreme Court case just three years out of law school. It was a landmark San Diego case in which he and other lawyers successfully argued that the National Labor Relations Act barred state courts from awarding damages to parties claiming losses as a result of peaceful picketing.

In 1965 Van Bourg won an important victory for members of government employees’ unions, successfully arguing that they have the right to strike.

More recently, he won a unanimous decision from the California Supreme Court upholding the validity of a labor agreement guaranteeing that all work on a multibillion-dollar expansion of San Francisco International Airport be built by union members.

Van Bourg’s firm was one of the first in California to sue tobacco companies on behalf of union health and welfare trust funds.

He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Shirley, of Berkeley, sons Andrew of Hawaii and Timothy of Berkeley, and three grandchildren.