Charles A. (Chuck) Hobbie
Charles A. (Chuck) Hobbie retired from the Office of the General Counsel, U.S. Peace Corps (Foreign Service) in 2018 after serving for 2½ years as a Peace Corps Volunteer (1968-71), teaching English at Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Korea, and almost 15 years (over a 45-year period) on Peace Corps staff as a trainer (K-19, School for International Training, Putney, VT, 1971), special services officer (1972), Korea/Thailand country desk officer (1973-78), and associate general counsel (labor/employment law (2011-13) and litigation (2013-2018)).
For most of his legal career Chuck was an attorney with the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO (1979-2011). He was AFGE’s staff counsel for six years before becoming deputy general counsel in 1985. As AFGE’s deputy general counsel, with the general counsel he supervised twenty attorneys engaged primarily in federal sector personnel and labor relations litigation and was responsible for the legal aspects of AFGE’s internal labor relations, as well as Civil Service Reform Act and Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act standards of conduct compliance. At AFGE he also represented the union and its members in hundreds of cases before the Merit Systems Protection Board, Federal Labor Relations Authority, Department of Labor, and arbitrators, and in more than a hundred judicial cases before virtually every U.S. Court of Appeals, six U.S. District Courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court, where he argued the seminal federal sector arbitration case, Cornelius v. Nutt.
He has been a member of the American Bar Association for over 40 years, has served as the past Union Chair of the Association’s Standing Committee on Federal Service Labor and Employment Law, and was a member of the AFL-CIO’s Lawyers Coordinating Committee for over 25 years, where he served on its Diversity Task Force. Prior to his professional career, Chuck received a B.A. from Dartmouth College (with Honors in English), M.A. in English literature from the U. of Wisconsin, and J.D. from the National Law Center, G.W.U.
With other former Peace Corps Korea volunteers, Chuck is a 2008 recipient of the prestigious James A. Van Fleet Award, awarded annually since 1995 by the Korea Society, “to one or more distinguished Koreans or Americans in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the promotion of U.S.-Korea relations.”
Chuck has also served on the board of directors of the Friends of Korea—a non-profit organization of former Peace Corps volunteers engaged in various initiatives to further the goals of the Peace Corps; as coach and manager of several youth soccer teams; as chair of the Falls Church tree commission; on the board of directors of the Falls Church Village Preservation and Improvement Society; on the governing board of Falls Church Presbyterian Church; on the board of trustees of Oakwood Cemetery in Falls Church; and as a mentor in Dartmouth’s Bridges to Impact Program for recent graduates in Washington, DC.
Since 2009 Chuck has published memoirs of his childhood in Buffalo, NY (Buffalo Wings), college years at Dartmouth (Years of Splendor, Hours like Dreams), and service as a volunteer in Korea (The Time of the Monkey, Rooster, and Dog). In September 2011 he received a Congressional Commendation for the latter at the Library of Congress. His latest book will be released in July 2022 (Through Grateful Eyes: The Peace Corps Experiences of Dartmouth’s Class of 1967).
Chuck has been married for 47 years to Young Ei Shin, a Korean nurse he met in 1969, who retired from the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s Medical Unit in Washington in 2009, and they have two children and two grandchildren.
