Katie Quan is a senior fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. Formerly chair and associate chair of the Labor Center, she retired in 2016, but continues to work at the center on special projects involving research on global labor strategies and executive education for union leaders.

In 2010 she co-founded the International Center for Joint Labor Research at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and was its co-director for four years. In 2014 she received a Fulbright grant to study the apparel supply chain in China at Peking University. Katie has recently consulted with the International Labour Organization on industrial relations reform in Vietnam.

Prior to joining the staff of the Labor Center in 1998, Katie Quan was a seamstress, organizer, and international vice-president with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and its successor, UNITE. In 1992 she chaired the founding convention of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. She has volunteered as a board director for many labor organizations, including the Worker Rights Consortium, the International Labor Rights Forum, Sweatshop Watch, and the Labor Project for Working Families. Her organizing experiences were 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).