Biography
David Rolf has worked as a labor leader, organizer, author, and strategist working to build the next American labor movement. He has been called “the most successful union organizer in America” by Fast Company, and American Prospect wrote that “no American unionist has organized as many workers, or won them raises as substantial, as Rolf.”
David has led campaigns that helped organize hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers, including the landmark 1999 effort to win a union for 75,000 Los Angeles home care aides, the largest successful organizing drive since 1941. He led the nation’s first successful campaigns for $15 minimum wages in SeaTac (2013) and Seattle (2014).
From 2002 to 2018, David served as Founding President of SEIU 775, which organized more than 45,000 long-term care workers in Washington and Montana. Under his leadership, previously unrepresented home care aides saw wages more than double and gained employment benefit, retirement and professional training for the first time.
David chairs the SEIU 775 Secure Retirement Trust, and was founding chairman of the SEIU 775 Health Benefits Trust and the SEIU 775 Training Partnership. He is a co-founder and board member of the SEIU 775 Benefits Group. He has also co-founded and helped lead other The Workers Lab, Working Washington, and the Fair Work Center. From 2019-2021 he led the Raise Wages Now Project.
He is the author of The Fight for Fifteen: The Right Wage for a Working America (New Press, 2016) and A Roadmap to Rebuilding Worker Power (The Century Foundation, 2018). His work has been published in The Nation, Democracy Journal, The American Prospect, the Aspen Journal of Ideas, the Boston Review, the Social Policy Journal, American Compass, and Generations, among other publications