Alvin Finkel is president since 2016 and a founding member of the Alberta Labour History Institute. He is emeritus professor of History at Athabasca University where he taught for 36 years. He served as president of the Canadian Committee on Labour History for six years and as book review editor for the journal Labour/Le Travail for 11 years and is still a member of that journal’s editorial board. He also served for four years on the board of the Edmonton Social Planning Council.
A prolific author, Alvin’s 13 books have sold over 150,000 copies. They include textbooks on Canadian history and the history of social policy as well as labour history and the history of the events leading to World War II. On the latter topic, he co-wrote The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion with Clement Leibovitz. Alvin’s latest and most ambitious book is Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy, which seeks to demonstrate—in 300 pages!--how societies from time immemorial across the globe have sought to provide aid to their most vulnerable members (or failed to do so) and the role of social movements in influencing social policies across the world in different eras.