Valery Alzaga is a labor and migrant rights campaigner and organiser with more than 20 years of organising experience across different sectors – including property services, care, transport, health, public sector, retail, IT, renewable energies and auto-manufacturing. She started as an organiser with the successful Justice for Janitors campaign before becoming the Property Services Director for SEIU Local 105. She then worked for SEIU’s global department helping win and implement breakthrough global cleaning and security organising agreements. From 2008 to 2015 she was the European organising coordinator with the Change to Win European Organising Centre (CTW-EOC) based in Amsterdam, working with many European unions and sectors to help them develop their own strategic organising campaigns and programs – including FNV (NL), UNISON and Unite (UK), IG Metal and ver.di (DE), 3F (DK), Solidarnoc (PL), SATAWU (SA) and GUFS (ITF and UNI). Since 2015 she worked in UK public sector unions organising anti-privatization and EU and non-EU migrant rights campaigns. From 2018 to 2021 Valery was a field campaign strategist and advisor to Barcelona and Catalynia en Comu in Spain (in collaboration with Working Families Party) and to Mijente – a political Latinx organisation seeking racial, economic, gender and climate justice in the U.S.
Valery has been a trainer and collaborator with the Grassroots Policy Project where she has co-lead Racial Capitalism political education courses for various U.S. unions. She is currently the Deputy Director of Global Labor Justice (GLJ-ILRF), a newly merged organization bringing strategic capacity to cross-sectoral work on global value chains and labor migration corridors. GLJ-ILRF holds global corporations accountable for labor rights violations in their supply chains; advances policies and laws that protect decent work and just migration; and strengthens freedom of association, new forms of bargaining, and worker organizations.