The Century Foundation Welcomes Labor Expert Amy Dean as a New Fellow

Jan 20, 2012

Authors: Christy Hicks

Publisher(s): The Century Foundation

January 20, 2012--The Century Foundation welcomes as a new fellow Amy B. Dean, who is one of the nation’s leading experts on regional efforts beyond traditional unions to strengthen worker protections, enhance civic participation, and advance progressive social and economic policy. Her Century Foundation book, A New, New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement (Cornell University Press, 2009), and other work highlights innovative labor movements that have arisen throughout the country and how these local institutions realize economic change.

Dean discusses her research and activities around workers’ rights and opportunities in a new Policycast podcast on The Century Foundation web site, www.tcf.org.  You can listen to the podcast here.

“Amy is doing groundbreaking work in rethinking how working people can come together to improve everyone’s economic security,” said Janice Nittoli, president of The Century Foundation. “We are so excited to provide a new platform that gives more visibility to her fresh approach to these issues.”

Currently, Dean is the principal of ABD Ventures, LLC, a consulting firm that works with social change organizations to develop new and innovative organizing strategies that link advocacy and public policy reforms. Previously, in 2005, Dean founded Building Partnerships USA (BPUSA), a national organization dedicated to increasing civic and political participation to strengthen democracy and advance social and economic justice at the regional level. From 1993 to 2003, she served as president and CEO of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, the fifteenth-largest regional labor federation in the country, representing more than ninety unions and 110,000 members. She was the youngest person and first woman to lead a major labor federation of the AFL-CIO.

During that time, she established Working Partnerships USA (WPUSA), a nonprofit organization that connected economic research and community organizing. Under her leadership, WPUSA’s accomplishments included the nation’s first universal health care insurance for children regardless of immigration status, the enactment of San Jose’s first living wage ordinance governing public contracts, and the development of one of the nation’s first community benefits ordinances.

Dean is one of five newly appointed Century Foundation fellows, all of whom are widely recognized as insightful generators of distinctive and provocative public policy ideas. Together they will advance TCF’s mission of providing bold, thought-provoking responses to unequal opportunity in America and the challenges to the United States of the diffusion of global power. The other  new fellows are: Daniel Alpert, the founding managing partner of Westwood Capital, LLC, who writes perceptively about the causes of the economic woes facing America and the rest of the world while recommending ambitious policy responses; Michael Cohen, a foreign policy analyst and author who writes about U.S. foreign policy, national security, and foreign assistance, and whose critiques of U.S. military policy, and particularly America’s approach to the Afghanistan war, have proven to be prescient; Suzanne Mettler, a Cornell University political scientist who analyzes the problems of policymaking through tax expenditures, sources of the public’s alienation from government through examination of health care reform, and the implications for democracy of higher education policy and stagnating access to college; and Mark Thoma, a University of Oregon economist whose widely read blog, Economist’s View, synthesizes current economic research for non-experts and highlights ideas for strengthening American social insurance and employment opportunities.

“Our new fellows share the rare ability to connect dots about the ways in which U.S. policy has gone astray and how it can be repaired in politically plausible ways over the course of the next decade,” said Greg Anrig, vice president of policy and programs. “In each case, their insights are distinctive and not widely known by the general public, but their arguments are persuasive and have the potential to transform policy debates in the United States.”

The Century Foundation is a progressive nonpartisan think tank. Originally known as the Twentieth Century Fund, it was founded in 1919 and initially endowed by Edward Filene, a leading Republican businessman and champion of fair workplaces and employee ownership strategies, all with an eye to ensuring that economic opportunity is available to all. Today, TCF issues analyses and convenes and promotes the best thinkers and thinking across a range of public policy questions.  Its work today focuses on issues of equity and opportunity in the United States, and how American values can be best sustained and advanced in a world of more diffuse power.

For more information on The Century Foundation and its work, please visit www.tcf.org. You can keep up with the latest news from Century by signing up for our mailing list, following us on Twitter @tcfdotorg and joining our Facebook page.  For media inquiries, contact Christy Hicks at hicks@tcf.org or (212) 452-7723.