Katie Quan
Associate Chair

Katie Quan on leave during 2007-2008 academic year Beginning September 2007, Katie Quan will spend nine months at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR), at the New York City campus. She will work with ILR faculty on leadership development, globalization, and diversity issues. These topics are closely related to Katie’s interests at Berkeley, and her collaboration with Cornell faculty will help to strengthen the work at Berkeley upon her return. While in New York, Katie will also launch a participatory oral history research project with New York Chinatown garment workers that will be the basis for an exhibit at the Museum of Chinese in Americas.

Katie Quan is Associate Chair of the Labor Center, and has worked as a labor specialist at the Labor Center since 1998. Her areas of specialization are labor strategies in the global economy, policies that promote the rights of immigrant workers, and equity issues for women workers. She also heads the Labor Center’s education and training activities. Prior to joining the Labor Center staff, Katie was an international vice-president of UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. She rose through the ranks, having been a rank and file seamstress, shop steward, union organizer, and manager of the union’s Pacific Northwest District Council. Katie chaired the founding convention of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, and her organizing experiences have been documented by Ruth Milkman in Women in Unions (Cornell ILR Press, 1993), and by Xiaolan Bao in Holding Up More than Half the Sky (University of Illinois Press 2001). She continues her involvement with garment worker and women’s issues as a Board member of Sweatshop Watch, the Worker Rights Consortium, the Labor Project for Working Families, the International Labor Rights Fund, and the Union Community Fund. She was also just named to the Board of Directors of the Working for Good Jobs in America Fund.

Areas of Expertise
• Global Labor Strategies
• Immigrant Workers Rights
• Race, Class and Gender

Current Projects
Documenting the Impacts of the End of the Multi-Fiber Agreement on Workers in Los Angeles and China
This participatory research project is a collaboration with labor organizations to train workers to survey garment workers about their employment levels, factory conditions, and community changes since the end of the worldwide textile trade agreement, known as the Multi-Fiber Agreement, in January 2005. A report will be published in 2007.

Retail Supply Chains in China
This book project is collaboration with scholars from China, Hong Kong, and Australia to study conditions in the production supply chain for foreign retailers in China.

Core Competencies Necessary for Effective Union Leadership
This research projects will identify core competencies necessary for effective union leadership, and then develop a menu of courses for union leaders based upon these competencies.

Recent Publications
Use of Global Value Chains by Labor Organizers, Competition and Change, Vol. 12, No. 1, March 2008,. pp 89-104. (link to journal)

“Women Crossing Borders to Organize,” in Cobble, Dorothy Sue, The Sex of Class: Women and the Future of U.S. Labor Movements. Ithaca: Cornell ILR Press, 2007.

“Unions Need to Talk,” International Union Rights, vol. 11, issue 4, 2004.

“Global Strategies for Workers: How Class Analysis Clarifies Us and Them and What We Need to Do,” in Zweig, Michael, What’s Class Got To Do With It? 2004. Ithaca: Cornell ILR Press.

“Strategies for Garment Worker Empowerment in the Global Economy,” U.C. Davis Journal of International Law & Policy. Fall 2003. Vol. 10, No. 1.

China and the American Anti-Sweatshop Movement, China Rights Forum: The Journal of Human Rights in China. April 2003, no. 1, 2003.

Advancing an Asian Agenda for Immigration Reform, Asian American Policy Review, Harvard University, vol. 12, 2003. (link to journal)

“Homecare Worker Organizing in California: An Analysis of a Successful Strategy,” with Linda Delp, Labor Studies Journal, West Virginia University Press, vol. 27, no. 1, Spring 2002.

Union Organizing in California: Challenges and Opportunities, with Carol Zabin and Linda Delp, The State of California Labor 2001, University of California Institute for Labor and Employment, 2001.

“Race, Class and Gender in the U.S. Labor Movement, ” New Labor Forum, New York: Queens College Labor Resource Center, No. 9, Spring/Summer 2001.

State of the Art of Social Dialogue – USA, InFocus Programme on Strengthening Social Dialogue, Working Paper No. 2, Geneva: International Labour Office, March 2000.

“A Global Labour Contract: The Case of the Collective Agreement Between the Association of Flight Attendants (AFL-CIO) and United Airlines,” Transfer, The European Trade Union Institute, vol. 6, 2000.


Curriculum Vitae