Thomas A. Kochan is the George Maverick Bunker Professor Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a faculty member in the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research. Thomas focuses on the need to update America's work and employment policies, institutions, and practices to catch up with a changing workforce and economy. His recent work calls attention to the need for a new social contract at work, one that anticipates and engages current and future technological changes in ways that build a more inclusive economy and broadly shared prosperity. Through empirical research, he demonstrates that fundamental changes in the quality of employee and labor‐management relations are needed to address America's critical problems in industries ranging from healthcare to airlines to manufacturing.

His most recent book is Shaping the Future of Work:  A Handbook for Action and a New Social Contract (Routledge, 2021).  He is a member of the National Academy of Human Resources, the National Academy of Arbitrators, and past president of the International Industrial Relations Association and the Industrial Relations Research Association. From 2018-2020 he served as a member of the MIT Task Force on Work of the Future.

Thomas holds a BBA in personnel management as well as an MS and a PhD in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin .