ABSTRACT
Jürgen Kuczynski was the eldest of Robert René Abraham Kuczynski and Berta's children, and represented the sixth generation of his family to belong to the intelligentsia. Today that intellectual tradition in the family has been continuing already through eight generations. Jürgen relates that the family home where he grew up was a meeting place for leading intellectual and political figures as well as the wider family. Jürgen described the whole American Federation of Labor (AFL) organisation and its leadership at the time very succinctly in his memoirs as 'this "upstanding" high bourgeois leadership of the organisation, made up of leading officials from many unions [which] was primitive gangsterism closely associated with the theft of union funds as well as murder'. At the AFL, Jürgen also introduced the idea of publishing regular unemployment statistics, against much initial resistance from Green, who felt it would only undermine the negotiating power of his organisation.
