After graduating from Oberlin College and Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (MPA 1975), Les co-founded the Labor Institute (1976), a non-profit organization that designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment and economics for unions, worker centers and community organizations.

He is the author of Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice (Labor Institute Press, 2015), How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Financial Elites Get Away with Siphoning off America’s Wealth (John Wiley and Sons, 2013); The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009); The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi (Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2006). The Mazzocchi story won the Independent Publisher Award for best biography.