Portland Jobs with Justice has a new leader. In April, Diana Pei Wu became executive director of the faith-labor-community coalition, which is known for its frequent labor solidarity demonstrations.
Wu, 41, has a bachelor’s degree from Duke University, a master’s from Princeton, and doctorate from University of California, Berkeley. She also has a lengthy movement résumé and has been an activist since her teens.
Wu grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and at the age of 15 organized fellow Chinese students to march in protest of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square.
In November 1999, she protested the World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in the streets of Seattle—wearing a superhero costume as part of an ad hoc group called the Hall of Justice. That was her first real contact with the labor movement, and she calls it a formative moment.
In 2009, she was among dozens arrested in Emeryville, California, for blocking the street in front of a hotel where hotel workers with UNITE HERE were fighting for a living wage ordinance. As an instructor at Antioch College, she was part of an unsuccessful unionizing effort. As co-director of the activist training group Ruckus Society, she led trainings for the California Faculty Association, a union affiliated of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
Wu also worked on affordable housing, immigrant rights, and many other causes. She moved to Portland in 2013 to be the organizing director with the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO).
Now she’ll head one of the largest and oldest chapters of Jobs with Justice, overseeing a staff of three and a coalition made up of over 100 member faith, labor, and community organizations.
“As a queer woman of color I’m really thankful for the chance to lead an important coalition of faith labor and community,” Wu told the Labor Press.
Wu succeeds Karly Edwards, who served as executive director from October 2013 until May 2014, when she left to become state director of the Oregon Working Families Party. And Edwards followed Margaret Butler, who helped found the group and then served as the group’s executive director for 16 years. Butler, a member of Communications Workers of America Local 7901, is now executive coordinator at AAUP-Oregon.
