Joe Alvarez

Joe is a veteran labor leader, organization development expert, and visionary labor educator. After a 30-year history in social justice activism and labor organizing, he co-founded the Alvarez Porter Group in 2007 to help leaders and organizations work effectively toward creating a just, equitable, and sustainable world. As an organization development practitioner, Joe specializes in developing leadership in others and in helping unions and social change organizations to be visionary, adaptive, and effective.

Joe has extensive experience working with large local and national membership organizations that face the challenge of successfully combining democratic governance with programmatic effectiveness. His work with unions has involved him in a number of industries, including retail, food processing, arts and entertainment, transportation, public sector, education, construction, and health care. He has also worked with national, state, and local union federations, as well as with unions in Indonesia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His work among non-profits has been with organizations involved in community organizing, civil rights, housing, human rights, and environmental sustainability.

Joe was the Northeast Regional Director of the AFL-CIO before pursuing a graduate degree in leadership and organizational development. He designed and co-led the AFL-CIO's "New Alliance" program, a major state-by-state campaign to revitalize and reorganize state and local AFL-CIO bodies. In 2000, he helped found the New York AFL-CIO/Cornell University Union Leadership Institute, where he still teaches. He has led courses in union leadership and management at U-Mass Amherst, City University of New York, and at The Worker Institute at Cornell. Joe is a member of the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Sciences.