In January, In These Times launched the inaugural “Labor Organizer of the Year” award to celebrate emerging leaders, and to showcase the diversity and tenacity of the modern labor movement. The prize provides a one-time, “no-strings-attached” cash award of $25,000, with an additional $25,000 for their respective organizations, campaigns or unions, with the generous support of Omidyar Network.
Nominations were carefully evaluated by a panel of veteran labor leaders, scholars and organizers including: Nelson Lichtenstein, noted labor historian and author; Jane Slaughter, labor journalist and former editor at Labor Notes; Victor Narro, project director for the UCLA Labor Center; Sheri Davis, executive director with the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization; and Jennifer Epps, executive director of the Labor Innovations for the 21st Century (LIFT) Fund.
We received 273 nominations, ranging in age from 22 to 82 and spanning many occupations and sectors of the economy. The pool of nominees represented the breadth and depth of the American working class. They came out of traditional unions, workers coops, tenant unions and worker centers, and they hailed from — almost equally — every region of the United States.
Learn more about this year’s awardees and the exceptional work they’re doing to build worker power.
Antonio Rosario
Teamsters’ lead Amazon organizer for the Northeast
Antonio Rosario is a 30-year Teamster and the union’s lead Amazon organizer for the Northeast, responsible for the New York metro region. Rosario combines an education in trade unionism from 27 years as a UPS Teamster driver — where he participated in the rank-and-file movement Teamsters for a Democratic Union and the historic 1997 strike — with an education in socialism and in the realities of today’s gigified workplaces from six years organizing with and learning from Amazon workers.
In 2024, Rosario led an organizing blitz at Amazon’s DBK4 warehouse in Queens that resulted in unanimous demands for union recognition from drivers across all eight delivery subcontractors at the warehouse. Rosario was also pivotal in convincing the independent union at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, the first Amazon union shop, to affiliate with the Teamsters in June 2024.
The DBK4 warehouse was among the most active picket lines in the Teamsters’ coast-to-coast pre-holiday strike in December 2024 aimed at forcing Amazon to the bargaining table.
Anonymous
In a Southern red state, an Indigenous immigrant helped her mostly immigrant workers stand together for fair treatment in a brutal industry
She’s one of the recipients of our Labor Organizer of the Year awards, and her story is compelling — but with so many unknowns right now regarding how far Immigration and Customs Enforcement will go to target someone, we can’t share it in full. Despite having obtained a legally protected status, she decided she could not accept the award publicly and has requested to remain anonymous.
For now, she has quit organizing and is lying low, in fear of retribution and deportation.
Hers is a case study in how the Trump administration’s detention and deportation practices are terrorizing immigrants and dampening their ability to organize, protest and demand better working conditions.
Katherine Passley
Co-Executive Director, Beyond the Bars
Katherine Passley is co-executive director of Beyond the Bars, a member-led worker center for people with criminal records and their families — the first organization of its kind in the country. All of its staff are formerly incarcerated people or, like Passley, people whose family members have been in the system.
Passley, who was born and raised in North Miami, joined Beyond the Bars as a founding member in 2020 after her father’s incarceration and came on staff in 2021. Starting with a campaign to make phone calls free (after Covid shut down visiting hours), Beyond the Bars eventually convinced the Miami-Dade County commission to wipe out $10 million in jail fees and more than $100 million in jail debt, alleviating a major financial burden for an estimated 60,000 formerly incarcerated people and their families annually.
A current focus of Beyond the Bars is teaching temp workers impacted by the criminal justice system how to advocate for themselves and improve their working conditions. Through a door-knocking campaign, they work to identify temp workers and recruit them into member-led temp worker organizing committees. In April 2025, Beyond the Bars led a statewide fight that successfully stalled HB 6033, a bill that would have eliminated the few legal protections temp workers have in Florida.
In 2021, Starbucks workers in Buffalo, N.Y. made history by voting to form the company’s first U.S. union, inspiring one of the most visible unionization efforts in recent history. Four years onward, Starbucks Workers United has 13,000 members working across over 570 unionized stores — all driven by a powerful model of worker-to-worker organizing.
In 2024, after years of pressure, Starbucks came to the negotiating table. A democratic bargaining committee of more than 500 workers proposed a $20 starting wage, improved benefits and a right to organize, amongst other demands. After the company offered a 1.5% wage increase, negotiations broke down and the union organized to shut down more than 300 stores during the holiday season. After the strike, Starbucks agreed to enter mediation with the union.
2024 was a watershed year for labor power in higher education. Six universities won their first contacts with UE, covering 18,000 graduate workers, and at the University of Minnesota, workers pushed for reforms that made it possible for graduate students to win their first collective bargaining agreement and made 23,000 workers eligible for union membership.
This year’s wins build on more than a decade of organizing in higher education; since 2012, unionization rates among grad students have grown 133%. In the same period, faculty unions have grown by 7.5%, driven in large part by adjunct and contingent faculty.
Across the country, academic workers are building power to secure living wages and benefits — and to defend against attacks on freedom of expression as university administrators and the federal government continue to crackdown on students and faculty for pro-Palestine activism.