Roxanne Brown

The membership of the United Steelworkers elected Roxanne D. Brown the union’s 10th International President in the fall of 2025, selecting as their leader a passionate advocate widely admired for her strategic work on behalf of USW members.

Brown previously oversaw the union’s atomic sector and served as a key negotiator in bargaining contracts in major USW industries, including oil. She also directed the union’s legislative, policy, political and advocacy initiatives as International Vice President at Large since 2019.

Elected the union’s top leader amid a volatile economic climate, Brown demonstrated the vision needed to bargain additional gains for workers and build the middle class.

Her innovation and commitment to balancing the scales for workers paved the way for the USW to support union drives in numerous industries as growing numbers of Americans seek a path forward amid widening economic inequality, attacks on workplace rights and runaway corporate greed.

“We are the labor movement,” Brown observed during an address in Baltimore in early 2026. “We were built for moments like this.”

Brown, the first woman to lead the USW, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in White Plains, N.Y. Union-represented jobs enabled her mom and aunt to buy houses and break into the middle class, a transformative experience that inspired her lifelong commitment to other working people.

She joined the USW’s Legislative and Policy Department in Washington, D.C., 27 years ago. As she rose through the ranks, she put working families at the center of the nation’s conversations around health care, jobs, manufacturing, retirement security, trade, workplace safety and other issues.

Brown’s commitment to preserving good union jobs led to safeguards for critical industries—including steel, glass, metals, paper and tire—and penalties against companies that illegally dumped goods in U.S. markets.

Her testimony before state legislatures, Congress, the U.S. International Trade Commission, regulatory agencies and global forums helped to position the USW as a leading voice for working people.

Yet she realized that workers in the trenches invariably made the biggest impact on decision-makers, and she often enlisted them to tell their stories.

“You’re the expert in the room,” she recalled telling a local union president shortly before he addressed then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders on the importance of a manufacturing bill in 2011.

“He crushed it,” recounted Brown, still proud of him many years later.

Her advocacy with workplace safety agencies yielded groundbreaking protections for union members, including safeguards against silica exposure, greater worker input during inspections, and process safety management upgrades at oil refineries.

Brown’s intimate knowledge of the federal government also prepared her to oversee the USW’s atomic sector, where thousands of union members work for contractors at U.S.-owned former uranium enrichment sites.

She helped to lead negotiations that won significant wage and benefit enhancements as well as the safety improvements essential to the workers’ inherently dangerous mission.

Brown makes it a practice to look ahead, realizing that union members need to shape the future and drive policy or be left on the sidelines.

To that end, she mobilized Rapid Response—the USW’s grassroots advocacy arm—to galvanize support for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Under her leadership, the union organized a multi-state “We Supply America” bus tour in 2021 that focused national attention on the need for infrastructure upgrades and highlighted the ways in which manufacturing workers stood to benefit from a modernization drive.

“For so long, when folks thought about infrastructure, they really only thought about the workers who were building the systems—the roads, the bridges, the highways, etc.,” she explained at the time. “But we wanted to retell that story and remind people that the things that are essential for those systems—cement, steel, steel pipes, fiber optic cable—are all made by Steelworker members.”

The IIJA unleashed $1.2 trillion for transportation networks, water systems and other improvements, creating USW jobs at places like Travis Pattern and Foundry in Spokane, Wash., while bringing additional work to union members at companies such as McWane Ductile in Coshocton, Ohio. The IIJA also fueled record contract gains for USW members at Cleveland-Cliffs, U.S. Steel and other companies.

The following year, Brown helped to push through the Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated billions for advanced manufacturing and cutting-edge industries. She then worked with the Department of Energy to deliver funding to union-represented employers, including Eos Energy Systems, a battery maker in Turtle Creek, Pa., that continues to expand and hire USW members.

Known for her engaging style and rapport with members, Brown oversaw the Your Union Your Voice (YUYV) program starting in 2019 to hear directly from workers, retirees and their families about the issues most important to them.

Members and retirees who responded to the YUYV surveys and turned out for the town halls overwhelmingly cited labor rights, retirement security and affordable health care, among other issues, as their top concerns.

Brown made these the centerpiece of the union’s mission, such as the successful drive in 2021 for legislation that shored up foundering multiemployer pension plans and saved the retirements of more than a million Americans, including 120,000 USW members.

YUYV also underscored the membership’s desire to rally behind candidates who demonstrate a willingness to put working families first. The union subsequently helped to elect dozens of pro-worker candidates at all levels of government and succeeded in electing more union members to public office.

Brown’s current work continues to unite workers around shared values, especially as growing support for unions provides the momentum not only to secure better wages but to force employers and policymakers to meet broader needs related to health care, paid leave and retirement security.

“People want a voice. We’re a platform for them,” she said, praising union members’ willingness to speak truth to power and stay the course.

Brown is a vice president on the AFL-CIO Executive Council and chairs the federation’s Industrial Union Council, steering its work on manufacturing, workforce development and industrial policy. She is also a vice president of IndustriALL Global Union, which unites 50 million workers in 130 countries.

In addition, Brown is a member of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and serves on the boards of Community Change, the League of Conservation Voters and the National Endowment for Democracy. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and daughter.