Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Melvyn Dubofsky is a product of the city public school system and the city university. For the past fifty years, he has taught at public universities in Illinois, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and since 1971, at the State University of New York at Binghamton (now Binghamton University), where prior to his retirement in 2006, he served as Distinguished Professor of History & Sociology.

Dubofsky has taught and participated in collaborative projects with other scholars in England (succeeding David Montgomery as the Visiting Senior Lecturer in American Labor History at the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick), Israel, Austria (where he served as a Distinguished Fulbright Professor), the Netherlands (where he was the John Adams Professor of American Civilization at the University of Amsterdam), France, and the former Soviet Union.

He has written and edited numerous books about labor and working-class history in the US, among which the most notable are his first, When Workers Organize: New York City in the Progressive Era (1967), We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (1969), John L. Lewis: A Biography (1977, co-written with Warren Van Tine); The State and Labor in Modern America (1994); and Hard Work: The Making of a Labor Historian (2001). He has also written numerous reviews and essay for various scholarly journals, general interest periodicals, and on-line sites. Currently, he is editing a two-volume history of American Economic, Business, and Labor History for Oxford University Press.