David Rolf is a labor leader, organizer, author, and strategist working to build the next American labor movement.
David has led campaigns that helped organize hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers, including the landmark 1999 effort to win a union for 75,000 Los Angeles home care aides, the largest successful organizing drive since 1941. He led the nation’s first successful campaigns for $15 minimum wages in SeaTac (2013) and Seattle (2014).
From 2002 to 2018, David served as Founding President of SEIU 775, which organized more than 45,000 long-term care workers in Washington and Montana. Under his leadership, previously unrepresented home care aides built the largest local union in Washington State; saw their wages more than double; gained health, dental, vision, and workers compensation insurance; and won a retirement plan, paid time off and professional training and certification.
David is founder and chairman of the Fair Work Center, a worker center and employment law clinic, and Working Washington, a campaign organization for economic justice and workers’ rights. He was the founder and chairman of The Workers Lab, which invests in projects to build new models for worker power.
David serves on the advisory boards of the Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative; the MIT President’s Work of the Future Task Force; and the Clean Slate Project at Harvard Law School, which aims to build a policy agenda to reconstruct labor law.
David is the author of “The Fight for Fifteen: The Right Wage for a Working America” (New Press, 2016) and “A Roadmap to Rebuilding Worker Power” (The Century Foundation, 2018).
David now works with his long-time collaborator venture capitalist Nick Hanauer to develop a new organization for middle class and working Americans, and he advises several labor and non-profit organizations.