Staff and Collaborators

Les Leopold, Co-Executive Director and Co-Founder

After graduating from Oberlin College and Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs (MPA 1975), Les Leopold co-founded and currently co-directs The Labor Institute (1975), a non-profit organization that designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment and economics for unions, workers centers and community organizations.

He is the author of:

·       The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own (JP Zenger Press 2026)

·       Wall Street’s War on Workers (Chelsea Green 2024)

·       Defiant German, Defiant Jew,” (Amsterdam Publishers, 2020)

·       Runaway Inequality, (Labor Institute Press 2015, 2017, 2018)

·       How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Financial Elites get away with siphoning off America’s Wealth (John Wiley and Sons, 2013)

·       The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It,” (Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009)

·       The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi, (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006)

Les also writes a free weekly column on Substack found here

Jim Young, Co-Executive Director

Jim has spent his career focused on working with unions and labor-environment-public health coalitions and has been with The Labor Institute since 2005. He currently leads the LI’s work with the United Steelworkers on member education about climate change and environmental policy, working closely with USW District 12, which covers 11 western states in the US.

Jim is a national expert on the subject of “Just Transition” for workers and speaks frequently on this topic.  He is carrying on longstanding work led by the Labor Institute, as the concept was invented for workers by Tony Mazzocchi.  Over the past several years, Jim has contributed to the development of a model transition program for oil workers in California and has also worked on related policy in Washington, Oregon and New Jersey.  

In 2006, Jim and the LI’s Les Leopold helped the USW and Sierra Club found the BlueGreen Alliance, a national labor-environment collaboration that now includes nine of the country’s largest unions and five of the largest environmental organizations.  From 2006-2014 Jim helped build the organization, serving as BGA’s Vice President of Programs.

Prior to joining the Labor Institute, Jim was media and strategy consultant to many unions, including 1199 Service Employees International Union, Utility Workers Union of America, and the Association of Flight Attendants. He also worked for both the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), a network of unions fighting for safe working conditions, and the New Jersey Work Environment Council (WEC), the oldest and largest statewide labor-environment alliance in the country. Jim now serves as Chair of the WEC Board of Directors.

Rodrigo Toscano, Project Director

Rodrigo has worked for the Labor Institute since 1999. He is a certified NIEHS (National Institute of Environmental Health Science) Health & Safety, and Environment bi-lingual training coordinator, OSHA Susan Hardwood Grant trainer, an authorized OSHA outreach trainer/coordinator in General Industry as well as in Construction. Rodrigo coordinates the NIEHS Department of Energy grant with native American partners, Yakima Nation and Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla United Steelworkers and workers centers, New Labor, Make The Road, and National Day Laborers Network. Rodrigo is currently working on the Covid-19 crises, helping to design safe back-to-work models for unions, Native American tribes and communities of color. Rodrigo played a lead role through the NIEHS EPA grant in organizing community based cleanup efforts in New York and New Jersey in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy by helping local organizations build lasting and effective second-wave response structures. As a training coordinator for the United Steelworkers, Rodrigo has been working in conjunction with the Tony Mazzocchi Center in a nation-wide cross-organizational 5-year effort to adapt Labor Institute / USW OSH curriculum and training methods to the Communications Workers of America telecommunications sector. Rodrigo is also a nationally recognized author of experimental poetry. He was a 2007 National Poetry Series Selection, a recipient of a 2005 New York State Fellowship in Poetry and two Fund for Poetry grants. His works have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry (2004). His critical and poetic works have appeared in over 150 journals and magazines. He has given talks, conferences, and readings in over 70 colleges and universities around the country and abroad. rt5le9 (@) aol (dot) com

Arturo Archila, Project Director

Arturo has worked for the Labor Institute since 2015. He is a Master Trainer in the Construction and General Industry Field and he is also a certified NIEHS Health & Safety, Infectious Disease, Resiliency and Environment bi-lingual training coordinator, an authorized OSHA outreach trainer/coordinator in General Industry as well as in Construction. He is currently the project director for the New York State Hazard Abatement Board grant. He was recently the NIEHS Health & Safety Liaison between the United Steelworkers and Wind of the Spirit, Worker Justice Project, New Immigrant Community Empowerment, El Centro, Workplace Project, Center for Popular Democracy, La Colmena, New Labor, Make The Road, and National Day Laborers Network. The project has been an incredible support for worker centers in providing capacity building and developing a cadre of Authorized Outreach trainers that have as a mission to reach out to immigrant workers and provide access to Health and Safety Training in a language and manner understood by the local communities. The overarching aim is to dramatically decrease fatalities in the workplace, specifically the injuries and fatalities of Latinos in the workplace. Similar efforts are being replicated in Washington State with the Yakima Nation.

As part of the collaboration with the Steel Workers, Arturo is part of the SERT Specialized Emergency Response Trainer team. Through the project, strong connections have been created between USW and grassroots organizations to respond to local disasters such as Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria in Houston and Puerto Rico.

Arturo is currently a Building Power Node Leader and a Network Council Member in The “Cancer Free Economy” Network is a growing collaboration of 50+ organizations working together in aligned, cross-sector projects to eliminate toxic chemicals associated with cancer and other chronic diseases, from where we live, learn, work, play and pray. It is a network of member organizations, not a new organization itself, that is governed by a Network Council made up of working group leaders and contributing foundations.

Arturo works part time as a field organizer for USW District 4. The campaigns focus on marginalized workers in an array of industries that include warehousing, clerical, material handling and manufacturing. The campaigns reflect the power of building alliances among community base organizations and successful Union drives.

He is currently spearheading Covid-19 health and safety response efforts alongside immigrant worker centers nationwide.

Kris Raab, Project Director

Kris Raab spent more than 20 years at the Communications Workers of America in research, bargaining support, mobilization, and education. Through CWA’s long-standing relationship with The Labor Institute, she was introduced to the small group activity method for workshops and quickly became a zealous advocate for it. She has since developed or contributed to dozens of workshop curriculums for contract mobilization, internal organizing, legislative work, and deeper political education and trained hundreds of worker-trainers in the small group method.

While at CWA, Kris helped develop an economic and racial justice workshop based on Les’s book, Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice, and to train CWA’s Runaway Inequality worker-trainer corps. Those trainers have run workshops for thousands of their co-workers as well as members of USW, UAW, NEA, Teamsters, APWU, the Sierra Club, and other unions and community groups.

Since joining the Labor Institute, Kris has adapted the Reversing Runaway Inequality workshop for other unions and community organizations; worked with the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute to educate union members about Medicare for All through the “Runaway Inequality and the Crisis in U.S. Healthcare” curriculum; collaborated with Grassroots Power Project on political education to fight authoritarianism through Democracy Defenders and Solidarity Wins workshops; and continued training trainers.

Kris’s other experience includes helping to revise NIEHS training workbooks for the USW Tony Mazzocchi Center, working on behalf of union clients at a labor law firm, and serving multiple terms as an elected shop steward and bargaining committee member.

Manuela Goitein, Director of Finance and Administration

Need to add text here for Manuela. 

Collaborators (need short bios)

David Denbo

Peter Kreutzer

Joined the Labor Institute’s Runaway Inequality project in 2016 as webmaster and newsletter writer. His role has expanded to include research and editing on a variety of projects, including this website, Les Leopold’s newsletter and books, and LI projects involving Covid, layoffs, and elections and working class politics. In his career Peter has adapted Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales for PBS, written sports instructionals with Little League, Ozzie Smith, Joe Namath, and Tracy Austin, and is a member of the Fantasy Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame.

Steve Lawton

Laura McClure

Mike Merrill

Todd Vachon

Assistant Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University and serves as the Director of the Labor Education Action Research Network (LEARN)—the university’s labor education program. Todd has written extensively about labor and climate justice, including his recent books Clean Air and Good Jobs: U.S. Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice and Revaluing Work(ers): Toward a Just and Sustainable Future. Beyond climate scholarship,Todd serves as President of the New Brunswick chapter of the faculty union, Rutgers AAUP-AFT, where he is also co-chair of the union’s climate justice committee. Todd also serves as Vice President for Higher Education of AFT New Jersey and is a founding steering committee member of the recently formed Environmental and Climate Justice Caucus within the American Federation of Teachers nationally. Todd is also the current President of the Middlesex-Somerset Central Labor Council in New Jersey. With the Labor Institute, Todd helps with program development, research, writing, and outreach for political economy education.   

Norman Rogers

Norman is the Second Vice President of United Steelworkers, Local 675, an amalgamated union representing workers which include the oil, chemical, bedding, carwash, paper, and electric bus manufacturing industries. He currently works in Storage and Handling at the Marathon oil refinery in Los Angeles County. He has spent the majority of his 24-year career facilitating gasoline blending and the shipping and receipt of finished products. He has been active on multiple committees in his local, in particular health and safety but also contract negotiations. Following the Chevron refinery fire in 2012, Norman provided testimony to the Department of Industrial Relations on the importance of strengthening Process Safety measures and working in coalition with environmental organizations to improve safety regulations for refineries and chemical plants. Norman is now deeply engaged in the struggle for a Just Transition for fossil fuel workers whose jobs will be lost in the move to a green economy.