Thomas Kochan

Professor Thomas Kochan is one of several faculty members at MIT Sloan who have won the 2019 Ideas Worth Teaching Award from The Aspen Institute’s Business & Society Program. The other MIT Sloan winners are Barbara Dyer, Leigh Hafrey, and Christine Kelly. This award recognizes 10 exceptional courses, and honors faculty who are redefining business education, providing learning experiences that equip managers of tomorrow with the context, skills, and decision-making capabilities needed to lead in an increasingly complex business environment and world. The award celebrates innovative teaching that challenges conventional thinking and tests new approaches to divisive issues, rethinking the path forward for business and society and preparing students to make business decisions that create both financial and social value.

The winning course, 15.S02 “Bridging the American Divides: Work Community and Culture —USA Lab,” is MIT Sloan’s U.S.-focused Action Learning Lab, developed by the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative at MIT Sloan in partnership with the MIT Mens et Manus America Initiative and MIT Sloan Action Learning.

Thomas Kochan is the first-ever winner of the International Labour and Employment Relations Association Academic Excellence Award. This award, which will be given every three years, was created to recognize outstanding academic achievements in the field of labor and employment relations. The award selection committee, comprised of distinguished scholars from around the world, selected Kochan in recognition of his lifelong contributions to the field.

The Frances Perkins Center has named Tom Kochan as its 2018 Intelligence and Courage Award recipient, recognizing his outstanding work in the areas of social justice and economic security. These are causes to which Frances Perkins, the first female Cabinet secretary, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, devoted her career. Perkins was the author of many foundational New Deal labor and economic reforms. The award’s name derives from a 1929 speech when Perkins pledged (as a New York State Industrial Commissioner): “I promise to use what brains I have to meet problems with intelligence and courage.” Frances Perkins Center Board Member Allison Beck wrote: “Tom has dedicated his life’s work to the challenges facing working families. His research, scholarship, and teaching reflect the intelligence and courage with which Tom has always met the problems of our times.”

Tom Kochan has received the 2016 LERA (Labor and Employment Relations Association) Lifetime Achievement Award,recognizing Tom’s many years of outstanding contributions to the field of Industrial Relations and Human Resources. The award recipient is selected by the LERA President, who said of Kochan, “He is a brilliant strategist and a treasure in our world of labor and employment relations which includes conflict resolution in the community at large.”

Tom Kochan has received the prestigious 2015 Aspen Institute Faculty Pioneer “Lifetime Achievement” Award, recognizing his contributions as an educator at the vanguard of teaching and scholarship about “business practices that contribute to an economy that works for all.”

Tom Kochan has been awarded a Doctor of Science in Economics honorary degree by the University of Sydney. This highest form of honor and recognition bestowed by the institution is given in recognition of Tom's "distinguished achievements throughout [his] professional life".

Tom Kochan has been elected to the National Academy of Arbitrators, whose members are chosen by involved parties to hear and decide labor and employment arbitration cases in private industry, the public sector, and non-profits in both the United States and Canada.