David Rolf is known internationally as an innovative labor leader and thinker on the future of work and labor. He was a leading architect of the historic fights to win a $15 living wage in SeaTac and Seattle, Washington. He serves as an international vice president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and as founding president of SEIU 775, which has grown to represent more than 45,000 long-term care workers in the Pacific Northwest. During the 1990s David led the campaign that resulted in 74,000 Los Angeles home care workers winning union representation, the largest union organizing campaign in the U.S. since 1941. He has been called “the most successful union organizer of the last 15 years” by The American Prospect, which said that “No American unionist has organized as many workers, or won them raises as substantial, as Rolf.” He was honored by the White House in 2014 as a “champion of change” for his work raising the minimum wage. David writes and speaks frequently about alternative futures for U.S. worker movements, and is the author of the book Fight for Fifteen: The Right Wage for a Working America (New Press, 2016). He has been published in the American Prospect, the Nation, the Aspen Journal of Ideas, Democracy, Social Policy, the Boston Review, Generations, and Spotlight on Poverty. In addition to his leadership in SEIU, David has co-founded and helped lead numerous worker-forward nonprofit organizations, including Working Washington, the Fair Work Center, the Workers Lab, Carina, a union-affiliated health plan, a workforce training school and a pension fund.
