Roxanne Brown will become the international president of the United Steelworkers (USW) union on March 1, 2026. In doing so, she will be the first woman and the first Black person to lead North America’s largest industrial union, which has some 850,000 members and has run for more than 80 years.Â
But there is a lot of political and economic pressure expected for Brown as she takes on the lead of the USW. The economy is unstable, and the government and lawmakers are making it hard for unions to protect their members. This is taking place just as the USW is scheduled to renegotiate contracts for its 30,000 workers at oil and petrochemical refineries in January 2026, for its aluminum industry workers in April, and for its tire and rubber workers in July 2026.
In an interview with the Amsterdam News, Brown — originally from Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in White Plains, New York — spoke about how the USW has melded its mostly white, male industrial members with union members from the more diverse service and healthcare sectors. She talked about how the USW has been able to broaden its membership across a variety of sectors by getting members to share a platform of economic equality.
AmNews: What do you think you can do for the USW in this period of time, when unions are facing headwinds with the current [Trump] administration?
Roxanne Brown: I would say a few things: next year is a really significant bargaining year for our union. Many of our major industries will be negotiating next year, including oil, aluminum, tires and rubber, paper, and steel.
It’s a big year, and there’s a lot of economic uncertainty. It’s October 29th today, but in three, four, or six months, I couldn’t tell you what the economy will look like. We’re seeing impacts across all of our sectors. This uncertainty is also creating uncertainty for the bargaining that’s coming up next year, because at every negotiation, we have a job to do on behalf of our members to ensure that the contracts that we bargain for, provide them with the benefits and wages they deserve.
So,…to answer your question about what we’re going to do outside of bargaining, it’s really to lean into education with our members even more. We already have all the programmatic elements across the union to educate specific constituents in our union. We have our Women’s CEO [often referred to as Women of Steel, which advocates for female workers]; our Next Gen, which represents our young workers. We have our Civil and Human Rights Committee. We have our Rapid Response team, which handles grassroots activism. But we also do broader education focused on our core values — healthcare, retirement security, collective bargaining, safety and health, economic issues, and trade. There are many examples right now of how each of these core values are under attack.
My hope is that as we continue to lean into this education across our union, so that when people go to the ballot box next year, at the midterms, and then again in 2028 for the general election, they will make even more informed decisions about who really stands with them on their core values.
AmNews: Do you know if the USW is mostly made up of men, and if the demographic breakdown is still mostly white?
Brown: Yeah, yeah, for sure. But I’d say we are the most diverse union by sector in North America. No other union looks like ours because, for example, we have 50,000 members in healthcare. Think about the healthcare sector — many of our members there resemble me and share a similar background: they are Black, female, immigrants, Asian, or Hispanic. So, it’s much more diverse in that sector.
We represent folks in higher education. Again, it’s a diverse sector as part of the public sector, and also diverse in terms of race and gender. So, it’s not like the steelworkers of 1965 or even 2001, because we’ve been very intentional about building power for the union and organizing across many sectors where workers want stable jobs. Today’s steelworkers look different than they did 30 years ago, especially in terms of diversity, but they are still largely male and still predominantly white.
AmNews: So obviously, you’ve been able to meld this diverse demographic around their union goals. But a lot of white males have been supportive of the Trump administration. Do you see any difficulties or any problems with that?
Brown: You know, I go back to what I say about education and an educated voter being a powerful voter, right? Because, at the end of the day, people just want to be seen and heard. And, aside from the more nefarious elements surrounding Trump and his administration — like racism, misogyny, and sexism — apart from all of that, many people who align themselves with the cause, especially our members, ultimately want to be recognized and acknowledged.
We see our members, hear them, and understand them better than any politician could because of our daily fight for them across those four values I mentioned. We’ll keep deepening our efforts on education and continue encouraging members to stand up for those who share our values as a labor organization — values they stand for as members because they wouldn’t be connected to us if they didn’t. You have someone’s back who has yours, and that’s the work we do.
AmNews: How do you think the USW specifically can safeguard union jobs for the next couple of years until we’re out of the woods here?
Brown: We’ve always focused on policy because, you know, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. So, regardless of who’s in office — whether it’s a Democratic-led government or a Republican-led government — and I’m talking about federal, state, and local levels — we engage everywhere. We have to, not only to protect workers’ rights related to retirement, security, and healthcare, but also to ensure unions can bargain collectively. These attacks are especially fierce at the state level. Whenever we speak with anyone in the labor movement, we come together to push back against attempts to weaken workers’ rights to organize. Right now, those threats are also at the federal level, where people are losing their collective bargaining rights with the stroke of a pen, like what happened with the AFGE [American Federation of Government Employees] members.
So we’re just committed to staying at the table in the policy space, advocating for our members and working people, and pushing back against any efforts to weaken or eliminate the right of workers to collectively bargain and secure a better now and a better future for themselves and their families.