Bruce Raynor

Bruce Raynor is the President of Workers United, an SEIU affiliated union representing 150,000 workers in the U.S., Puerto Rico and Canada who work in the laundry, food service, hospitality, gaming, apparel, textile, retail, manufacturing and distribution industries. Described as a "rising star in the labor movement" (BusinessWeek, April 7, 2003), Raynor has distinguished himself as a creative, aggressive and strategic organizer with a broad understanding of the role of labor in North America. He is a pioneer in the area of comprehensive campaigns, starting with the campaign against textile giant J.P. Stevens early in his career.

Raynor has handled many key negotiations and has collective bargaining relationships with companies including Levi Strauss & Co., Liz Claiborne, T.J. Maxx/Marshall's, the Hartmarx Group, Xerox, Delaware North, Hilton, Starwood, and national food service and laundry industry employers such as Aramark, Compass and Sodexo. He has forged productive labor-management relationships in the apparel, textile, hotel, laundry and other industries which have contributed to improved wages and benefits and safer working conditions for working people across North America.

Raynor began his career in the education department of the former Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) in 1973, where he worked on numerous southern organizing drives, including the successful J.P. Stevens campaign in the late 1970's. Based in Atlanta, he went on to organize tens of thousands of workers in the South, including nearly 1,000 Lichtenberg Curtain and Drapery workers in Georgia, 500 shirt workers in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, 3,200 Tultex workers in Martinsville, Virginia, and the giant Cannon Mills complex in Kannapolis, North Carolina. He eventually became the elected leader of 50,000 Southern clothing and textile workers.

He used a combination of aggressive rank and file organizing and alliances with civil rights and community leaders to build worker power. He was responsible for building the ACTWU's organizing program throughout the United States and Canada, and was subsequently elected to various leadership positions. He was elected Executive Vice President of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) in 1993 and elected Executive Vice President of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE) at its founding convention in 1995. Raynor was elected Secretary Treasurer of UNITE in 1999, and President in 2001 and was elected General President of UNITE HERE at the union's founding convention in July 2004. After 150,000 former UNITE and former HERE members voted to leave UNITE HERE, form Workers United, and affiliate with SEIU in early 2009, Raynor was elected President of Workers United.

Raynor has played an important role in extending health and pension benefits to low-wage workers. He is Chairman of several union-affiliated national pension and insurance funds. He is Chairman of the Board of Amalgamated Life Insurance Company, a union-affiliated insurance company established in 1943 which provides insurance services to Workers United and other union members. As Chairman of the Amalgamated Bank, the only union-owned bank in the U.S., with assets of more than $4.5 billion, and as former co-chair and current member of the Council of Institutional Investors, an organization of institutional investors that control $3 trillion in pension funds, he is a leader in corporate governance and capital strategies initiatives. Raynor is also President of The Sidney Hillman Foundation, a foundation that supports and rewards socially conscious journalism.

He is a member of Cornell University's Board of Trustees since 1988 and serves on the Advisory Board for the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He graduated from Cornell's ILR School in 1972 and in 1999, received the ILR School's Groat Award for Distinguished Alumni.

Raynor lives in Nyack, New York, with his wife Joan. They have five children.