Moe (Morris) Biller was born in New York City on November 15, 1915. He attended Brooklyn College and City College and began work in the Postal Service in 1937 as a substitute clerk. Except for wartime service in the military he spent the rest of his life in the Postal Service and as a postal union leader. He had held almost every position within his local union (National Federation of Postal Clerks, Local 10) before the local broke away to become the Manhattan-Bronx Postal Workers, a local of the newly formed National Postal Clerks Union. He became president of the new local, 25,000 members strong, in 1959 and led the local through the so-called Great Postal Strike of 1970. This national strike lasted eight days and resulted in the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, creating the U.S. Postal service and granting its employees collective bargaining rights. In 1971 the National Postal Clerks Union joined with four other postal unions to become the American Postal Workers Union. Biller's local took on its present name, the New York Metro Area Postal Union, in 1973; the new name reflected the inclusion of the New York Bulk and Foreign Mail Center and the North Jersey Facility in the local's bargaining unit.

Biller was elected president of the American Postal Workers Union in 1980, and carried his activist style into this new arena. He was a long-time supporter of the civil rights movement and of women's efforts to advance in the labor movement. He served on the boards of numerous charitable organizations, including the March of Dimes and United Way, and sat on the boards of university labor studies programs at Cornell University and Empire State College. Biller's personal interest in labor history was exemplified in the cooperation he offered to the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, to the Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side, and to a number of labor history oral history and film projects. It was with his full and enthusiastic support that Dana Schechter embarked on her project to document the history of the New York Metro Area Postal Union through interviews with and by the local's retirees.

In view of his life-long interest in the preservation of labor history, Biller concluded that it was appropriate to mark his retirement from the APWU by donating a selection of his presidential files, as well as his personal collection of memorabilia, signed photographs, posters and books on postal union history to the labor archives at New York University. Incoming APWU president William Burrus confirmed the donation and designated the Robert Wagner Labor Archives as the official repositoryt for APWU records at the same time. In 2001 the union also transferred to NYU a body of records documenting the New York Metro Area Postal Union oral history project; these were apparently given to Moe Biller during his tenure as New York Metro president. On his retirement Moe Biller returned to his beloved New York City to live; he died in New York on September 5, 2003.

Sources:

Walsh, John and Garth Mangum, Labor Struggle in the Post Office: From Selective Lobbying to Collective Bargaining (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1992).