Cathy Feingold was elected as Deputy President of the ITUC in December 2018 and was re-elected at its Fifth World Congress in Melbourne, Australia, November 2022.
As director of the AFL-CIO’s International Department, Cathy is a leading advocate on global workers’ rights issues.
For more than 20 years, she has worked on trade union rights, women’s rights and economic justice at both global and grassroots level with a commitment to strengthening the voice of working people in policy debates.
Cathy is the former director of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center’s work in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Here, she partnered with local trade unions to develop innovative campaigns to improve the working conditions of domestic, migrant and informal-economy workers. The work led to a growing movement of domestic workers who affiliated to the Dominican labour movement.
In Haiti, she developed labour law training programs and helped publish the first Creole language version of Haitian labour law to help working people access justice. She led the organisation’s humanitarian response to the country’s January 2010 earthquake.
In addition to her trade union work, Cathy has also worked for large international organisations and small grassroots NGOs. She has written about the impact of economic policies on market women in Nigeria and, as a Fulbright research scholar in Nicaragua, she investigated the impact of structural adjustment policies on women workers. She continues to be a strong advocate for gender equity and working women’s issues.
