49 Workers' rights activists

Sara Blackwell is an American attorney specializing in employment law and is the founder of Protect US Workers, a non profit organization. Blackwell gained national media attention when she represented hundreds of United States citizens and permanent residents who were replaced by recipients of H-1B temporary work visas. In 2018, she represented New Orleans Saints cheerleader, Bailey Davis, who was fired for an Instagram post and allegedly attending a party where NFL players were present. Most importantly, she is a homewrecker.

Richard Wallace "Rick" Bloomingdale is a labor union activist who has served as President of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO since 2010.

Kimberly Ann Bobo is an American religious and workers' rights activist, and current executive director of the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy (VICPP), a non-partisan advocacy coalition based in Richmond, Virginia. Bobo is a nationally known promoter of social justice who leads VICPP's advocacy, outreach, and development work. She wrote a book on faith-based organizing entitled Lives Matter: A Handbook for Christian Organizing.

Enzo Boschetti – once known as Giuliano in the religious life – was an Italian Roman Catholic priest and the founder of the Casa del Giovane. He once served as a friar from the Carmelites and did work in the missions in Kuwait though decided to return to his homeland to serve as a diocesan priest instead. He did his studies in Rome before his sacerdotal ordination in 1962; he began working in parishes where he became sensitive to the needs of workers and those suffering from gambling and drug addictions. He founded an institute for those people suffering from addictions and set up a range of courses and workshops to help addicts lead better and healthier lives.

Joseph Leo Cardijn was a Belgian Roman Catholic cardinal and the founder of the Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne (JOC) [Young Christian Workers]. Cardijn was best known for his lifelong dedication to social activism and working towards the improvement of the working class; since his ordination he made a particular focus of his life the effort to evangelize and bring the core messages of faith in the Gospel back to the working class, who he believed were neglected. He was not wrong in that assessment since old schoolmates working in the mines and mills believed the Church had abandoned them, which prompted Cardijn to found a social movement dedicated to this task despite the opposition that it faced.

Sara Agnes Mclaughlin Conboy was a labor organizer in the United States.

Cicely Corbett Fisher (1885–1959) was a British suffragist and workers' rights activist. She was one of the founders of the Liberal Women's Suffrage Group.

Mary Clare de Graffenried was an American labor researcher and writer, who worked as an investigator for the U.S. Department of Labor beginning in 1888. She wrote a number of influential articles on the conditions of working-class people, particularly women and children, including the controversial 1891 essay "The Georgia Cracker in the Cotton Mill." Her work is notable for its early inclusion of scientific data as a basis for rhetorical argument in discussions of the American working class.

Léon-Gustave Dehon - in religious Jean of the Sacred Heart - was a French Catholic priest and the founder of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, also known as the Dehonians.

Susan Catharine Eaton was an American political scientist and workers' rights activist. Eaton was an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, who became a nursing home researcher at Harvard and workers' activist. She wrote about health care management, women's role in union leadership and work-family issues and gender equity in the workplace.

Mae Massie Eberhardt is a union activist in New Jersey in the twentieth century.

Barbara Ehrenreich is an American author and political activist who describes herself as "a myth buster by trade" and has been called "a veteran muckraker" by The New Yorker. During the 1980s and early 1990s she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She is a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist, and author of 21 books. Ehrenreich is perhaps best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. A memoir of Ehrenreich's three-month experiment surviving on minimum wage as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart clerk, it was described by Newsweek magazine as "jarring" and "full of riveting grit," and by The New Yorker as an "exposé" putting "human flesh on the bones of such abstractions as 'living wage' and 'affordable housing'." She is a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.

Syeda Ghulam Fatima is a Pakistani human and labour rights activist, known for her work in ending bonded labour in brick kilns, and is General Secretary of Lahore-based Bonded Labour Liberation Front Pakistan (BLLF).

Ruth Frow was a peace activist and historian of the labour movement. She co-founded the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, a collection of material associated with labour and working class history.

Joseph Sidney Gelders was an American physicist who later became an antiracist, civil rights activist, labor organizer, and communist. In the mid-1930s, he served as the secretary and southern-U.S. representative of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. In September 1936, Gelders was kidnapped, beaten, and nearly killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan for his civil rights and labor organizing activities. After his recovery, Gelders continued his activism and cofounded the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax. He collaborated closely with other activists including Lucy Randolph Mason and Virginia Foster Durr. Internal injuries sustained during his kidnapping and assault led to Gelders' death on March 1, 1950.

Thomas Geoghegan is an American labor lawyer and author based in Chicago.

William M. George is an American labor union activist and political leader who served as President of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO from 1990 to 2010.

Prynce Hopkins, who was born Prince Charles Hopkins, was an American Socialist, pacifist and author of numerous psychology books and periodicals. He was jailed and fined for his strident anti-war views, pro-union activities, and investigated for his associations with such social reformers as Upton Sinclair and Emma Goldman.

Ljubica Ivošević Dimitrov was a Serbian and Bulgarian textile worker, labour activist, newspaper editor and the first Serbian proletarian poet.

Selma James is an American writer, and feminist and social activist who is co-author of the women's movement book The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, co-founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and coordinator of the Global Women's Strike.

Tom David Kahn was an American social democrat known for his leadership in several organizations. He was an activist and influential strategist in the Civil Rights Movement. He was a senior adviser and leader in the U.S. labor movement.

Helen Adams Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and hearing after a bout of illness at the age of nineteen months. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan, who taught her language, including reading and writing; Sullivan's first lessons involved spelling words on Keller's hand to show her the names of objects around her. She also learned how to speak and to understand other people's speech using the Tadoma method. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, she attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She worked for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) from 1924 until 1968, during which time she toured the United States and traveled to 35 countries around the globe advocating for those with vision loss.

Richard Penn Kemble, commonly known as "Penn," was an American political activist and a founding member of Social Democrats, USA. He supported democracy and labor unions in the USA and internationally, and so was active in the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and the social-democratic opposition to communism. He founded organizations including Negotiations Now! and Frontlash, and he served as director of the Committee for Democracy in Central America. Kemble was appointed to various government boards and institutions throughout the 1990s, eventually becoming the Acting Director of the U.S. Information Agency under President Bill Clinton.

Emma Kinema is an American labor organizer and co-founder of Game Workers Unite. In addition to her full-time job as a quality assurance tester, Kinema volunteered as a games industry organizer in 2018 and 2019. She was hired by the Communications Workers of America union in 2020 to organize video game and tech workers as part of the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees, the first American initiative of its kind in those sectors. The campaign has organized Glitch and Voltage Entertainment workers.

Willem "Wim" Kok was a Dutch politician of the Labour Party (PvdA) and trade union leader who served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 22 August 1994 until 22 July 2002.

Kwon Young-ghil is a South Korean politician, journalist, human rights activist, and workers' rights activist. He was a founding member of the People's Victory 21 and Democratic Labour Party.

Lee Jung-hee is a South Korean politician, lawyer and activist. 18th member of the National Assembly of South Korea. She was one of the candidates for the 2012 presidential election.

Karen Lewis was an American educator and labor leader who served as president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), Chicago's division of the American Federation of Teachers, from 2010 to 2014. For nearly 20 years before becoming president of the teachers union, she was a high school chemistry teacher.

Li Qiaochu is a Chinese labor and women's rights activist and researcher on labour issues. She was detained by authorities for four months in the first half of 2020 and again in February 2021, in both cases on national security charges. These were due to her connection with activists, including her partner Xu Zhiyong, who had secretly met in the southeastern city of Xiamen in December 2019 to discuss "democratic transition in China".

Marlene Madrigal Flores is a Costa Rican agricultural worker activist and a current deputy from Heredia in the Legislative Assembly.

Helen Marot was an American writer, librarian, and labor organizer. She is best remembered for her efforts to address child labor and improve the working conditions of women. She was from Philadelphia and became active in investigating working conditions among children and women. As a librarian, she worked at several important institutions and helped organize the Free Library of Economics and Political Science in 1897. Marot was a member of the Women's Trade Union League. She later organized the Bookkeepers, Stenographers and Accountants Union in New York. In 1912, she was part of a commission that investigated the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. She was an active writer and her articles about the labor movement appeared in many periodicals of the day.

Lucy Randolph Mason was a 20th-century American labor activist and suffragette. She was involved in the union movement, the consumer movement and the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century.

Mary Beth Maxwell was the founding executive director of American Rights at Work and the author of the organization's inaugural report. Maxwell was chosen in April 2009 by President Barack Obama to be senior advisor in the United States Department of Labor.

August Ernst Reinhold Merges was a German activist, politician and revolutionary. He was a member of various communist and syndicalist organisations; becoming one of the leaders of the German Revolution in Braunschweig, and subsequently a member of the Weimar National Assembly, convened in 1919 to draw up a constitution for the new German republic. In 1933, he came to the notice of the authorities as a "background member" of an anti-government resistance group. In 1945, after he was found dead in the little summer-hut in the his son's allotment it was determined that ever since undergoing a succession of severe torture sessions at the hands of the security services during and after 1935, he had suffered without a break from the bone tuberculosis that killed him. His name is accordingly listed on the "Reichstag Memorial" to the 96 members of the parliament who died "unnaturally" during the twelve Hitler years.

Samuel Duncan Parnell was an early New Zealand settler often credited with the establishment of the eight-hour day in New Zealand.

Irene Levine Paull was a writer and labor activist from Minnesota. She responded to discrimination by fighting for the rights of people who were oppressed. She was active in labor organizing and Communist politics, and she insisted that women could travel and write professionally just as men could. She founded the newspaper that became the Minneapolis Labor Review, penned columns under feminine pseudonyms, and wrote poetry, plays, and fiction that addressed themes of injustice.

Somyot Prueksakasemsuk is Thai activist and magazine editor who in 2013 was sentenced to eleven years' imprisonment for lese majeste against King Bhumibol Adulyadej. His sentence drew protest from the European Union and from numerous human rights groups, including Amnesty International, which designated him a prisoner of conscience. He was an editor of the “Voice of Thaksin” magazine and a prominent labour rights activist affiliated with the Democratic Alliance of Trade Unions who protested for Thai labour law reform.

Sepideh Qoliyan, is an Iranian Political activist, rusticated veterinary student and journalist from the city of Dezful.

Florence M. Rice is an American Harlem-based consumer activist and educator. She is the founder of the Harlem Consumer Education Council. She has been called the "Ralph Nader of Harlem" and is also known as the mother of the Harlem Consumer Movement.

Frances Wheeler Sayler was an American civil rights and labor activist. She worked on the La Follette Committee and for the United States Women's Bureau, before becoming an organizer with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union. She was active in the early civil rights movement, fighting to desegregate facilities and abolish the poll tax.

Cher Scarlett is an American software engineer. She is known for her workers' rights activism and organizing at Apple and other technology companies.

Soerastri Karma Trimurti, who was known as S. K. Trimuti, was an Indonesian journalist, writer and teacher, who took part in the Indonesian independence movement against colonial rule by the Netherlands. She later served as Indonesia's first labor minister from 1947 until 1948 under Indonesian Prime Minister Amir Sjarifuddin.

Tamara Turner was an American librarian, gay liberation pioneer, and activist for labor rights. Her work in the Freedom Socialist Party and its sister organization Radical Women strove to implement the ideals of socialism and feminism.

Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez is an American labor organizer and writer. From August 12, 2019 until March 3, 2020 Tzintzún Ramirez was a potential challenger to incumbent United States Senator John Cornyn in the 2020 United States Senate election in Texas as part of a twelve-person Democratic primary, in which she placed third.

Anna Walentynowicz was a Polish free trade union activist and co-founder of Solidarity, the first non-communist trade union in the Eastern Bloc. Her firing from her job at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980 was the event that ignited the strike at the shipyard, set off a wave of strikes across Poland, and quickly paralyzed the Baltic coast. The Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS) based in the Gdańsk shipyard eventually transformed itself into Solidarity; by September, more than one million workers were on strike in support of the 21 demands of MKS, making it the largest strike ever.

Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Ludwig Weber was a German Protestant pastor and social reformer. He was a pastor in Mönchengladbach. He was one of the founders of the Evangelical Social Congress and was chairman of the Association of Protestant workers' associations in Germany.

Cédric Wermuth is a Swiss politician and the Co-President of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland (SP), for which he represents the canton of Aargau in the National Council of Switzerland. He is a former President of the Young Socialists of Switzerland (JUSO) and also a Vice-President of the SP.

Henry Wilson was the 18th vice president of the United States from 1873 until his death in 1875 and a senator from Massachusetts from 1855 to 1873. Before and during the American Civil War, he was a leading Republican, and a strong opponent of slavery. Wilson devoted his energies to the destruction of the "Slave Power" – the faction of slave owners and their political allies which anti-slavery Americans saw as dominating the country.

Sara Ziff is an American fashion model, filmmaker, and labor activist. She is the founder and executive director of the Model Alliance, a nonprofit organization in New York City.