Study Group with Secretary Julie Su

Seize the Day: Unions, Strikes & Labor Negotiations

When workers have a union, they have the power to bargain over the conditions of work. Over the last 3 years, unions have become more popular than they’ve been in decades, with more union elections and record-setting contracts attained through collective bargaining. We will talk about the purpose, promise, and challenges of unions and labor negotiations using recent examples and explore why so many resources are devoted to defeating them. 

GUEST: Lynn Rhinehart, Senior Advisor to the Labor Secretary (2021-2025) and 25-year attorney with the AFL-CIO, joins Secretary Julie Su in-person for the February 25 session.

Lynn Rhinehart is a Washington, D.C.-based labor lawyer and labor policy expert. 

Most recently, Lynn served as Senior Counselor and Senior Advisor in the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Labor. She assisted Secretary Marty Walsh and Acting Secretary Julie Su in their roles as Vice Chair of the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, established by Executive Order 14025, and advised them on other issues relating to unions and collective bargaining, including the East and West Coast port negotiations, the Big 3/UAW negotiations, and others. 

Until July 2018, Lynn was General Counsel of the national AFL-CIO, a federation of 63 national and international labor unions representing 15 million working people, and executive director of the AFL-CIO Union Lawyers Alliance (formerly the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee), a national organization of 2,100 union-side labor lawyers. 

Lynn has also served as a senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and as special counsel to Actors’ Equity, the union for stage actors and stage managers. She is a graduate of Georgetown Law and the University of Michigan.

AUDIENCE: These conversations are open to members of the Harvard community. Please RSVP with a valid Harvard email address. 

OFF-THE-RECORD: In keeping with our long tradition at the IOP to ensure honest and candid discussions of politics, all IOP study groups are off-the-record.