This website provides an introduction and links to some of the published and unpublished professional materials contained in the Gary B. Hansen collection, housed in the Department of Special Collections and Archives at Utah State University (MSS 319). It has been organized to highlight a selection of the topical areas of the collection and some of the most interesting and provocative publications and papers written by me during my 40-year professional career. A selected chronological list of my publications, papers and speeches that are in the collection, and a list of my "Top 25" are also included.
I was born in 1935 in Ogden, Utah to Clarence James Hansen and Lena Barker Hansen. When I graduated from high school in 1953, I attended Utah State Agricultural College (now Utah State University), where I graduated with a BS in Economics in 1957 and received a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the United States Army Ordnance Corps. As a Lieutenant, I entered the U.S. Army in July 1957, serving at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and Tooele Army Ordnance Depot in Utah, and received an honorable discharge as a 1st Lieutenant in June 1959.
From September 1959 to September 1961 I was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Great Britain. I served in the British, North British and Scottish-Irish Missions, and helped set up the latter two missions, serving as Mission Secretary in both of them.
After two years in Great Britain, I returned to Logan to attend Utah State University and work for Prof. Leonard J. Arrington. I married Helen Ure in September 1962 and received an MS degree in Economics in June 1963. During that summer I authored an article on "Industry of Destiny: Copper in Utah," based on my Master's thesis at Utah State University, which was published in the Summer 1963 issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly. I also co-authored The Richest Hole on Earth: A History of the Bingham Copper Mine with Prof. Arrington, published as a research monograph by Utah State University.
I continued my studies at Cornell University and spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics in 1965-66. I completed my studies at Cornell, and, subsequently, received my Ph.D. from Cornell in 1970. I returned to Logan with my family in September 1967 to accept an appointment as an Assistant Professor of Economics. During my 31 years at USU I served as a Professor of Economics, and from 1993 to 1998 as a Professor of Management and Human Resources. I became a Professor Emeritus at USU in November 2000. Throughout my career I published 110 books, chapters, articles, research reports and documents, and made over 150 professional presentations.
While teaching at Utah State University and after my retirement, I worked extensively as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Labor and other state and national committees and task forces, plus the International Labor Office and other international agencies. I was also a member of a number of professional organizations, including the American Economic Association, Industrial Relations Research Association, American Society for Training and Development, and the International Industrial Relations Association.
During the 1970s and 1980s, I also conducted research and worked extensively to improve labor-management cooperation, the use of innovative approaches to collective bargaining and workplace democracy, and to promote the use of worker-owned cooperatives and other forms of worker ownership (ESOPs). In the 1980s I worked throughout the United States helping state and local governments implement programs to assist dislocated workers, plus giving testimony before Congress and other national commissions, and spent one year serving on the Secretary of Labor's Task Force on Worker Dislocation, a group whose report provided the framework for the passage of national legislation that was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1988.
From 1990 to 2004, I served 3 years on the Federal Committee on Apprenticeship, and worked in 11 countries in Southeast Asia and Central and Eastern Europe (Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, China, India, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Serbia and Ukraine) helping national and local community leaders learn how to improve their human resource development and utilization systems, and to organize and implement economic development and cooperative entrepreneurship programs for job creation.