Obituary of Robert Senser

Robert Anton "Bob" Senser, 94, of Reston, Virginia, died peacefully at home on July 29, 2015, with his beloved wife and other family members by his side. He was born on July 21, 1921, in Chicago, Illinois. In a lifetime of working in the public and private sectors on four continents, he served as a butcher-shop helper, clerk-typist, World War II soldier, reporter, ghostwriter, and editor, as well as a staff member of a Catholic organization, a U.S. State Department foreign service officer, and a program director for an overseas assistance organization. Two important strands ran through nearly all of his jobs: a basic concern for human rights and a fondness for writing. The two strands came together early. While still in high school, he wrote a feature on a blind Boy Scout troop published in This Week (then a national weekly) and an exposé for Commonweal on how a corrupt union leader got his father fired. His writing skills and human rights concerns served him well in the major jobs he held: assistant editor of Work, published by the Catholic Council on Working Life in Chicago; labor attaché in the Foreign Service in Algiers, Bonn, Brussels, and Saigon; and program director with the AFL-CIO's Asian-American Free Labor Institute. His formal retirement didn't mean withdrawal from his decades-long involvements. He kept active in the Washington, D.C.-based Child Labor Coalition and the International Committee for Human Rights in Vietnam. In the summer of 1995, he worked pro bono on an AFL-CIO campaign that helped win the release of activist Harry Wu from a jail in China. He also traveled to various Asian countries to gather first-person accounts of factory conditions, which helped him generate public awareness of sweatshops and the struggles of laborers. In February 1996, he launched his website Human Rights for Workers (www.senser.com), dedicated to exploring how globalization affects working men and women, and how it creates the need to incorporate the human rights of workers into rules and practices at the national, regional, and international levels. In early 2008, it evolved into a blog (http://humanrightsforworkers.blogspot.com), which he maintained until August 2012. His book Justice at Work: Globalization and the Human Rights of Workers was published in March 2009 and has served as a college textbook. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in social science from Chicago's Loyola University, where he attended late afternoon and evening classes while working full-time. He is survived by his wife, Dzung Senser; his children, Thuy Senser (Kelly), Sonny Senser, Han Arthurs, and Anthony Senser (Monika Kelley); his grandchildren Anton Arthurs (fiancé Ciara West), Levi Arthurs, Mai Senser, and Thuy Robert Senser; and his sister Frances Denver. He was preceded in death by his parents, Anton and Frieda Senser, and his sister Louise Middleton. A memorial mass for family and friends will be held at 2 p.m. on Friday, August 7, 2015, at St. Thomas à Becket Catholic Church; 1421 Wiehle Avenue; Reston, Virginia 20190 (http://stbchurch.com). Robert will have an inurnment service with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery at a later date. In lieu of flowers, please consider making a contribution in Robert's name to Human Rights Watch (https://www.hrw.org) or the Solidarity Center (http://www.solidaritycenter.org).