Lane Windham Joins Joseph A. McCartin as Co-Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University

Dear friends and supporters:

I am happy to share the news that Lane Windham has joined me as Co-Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative as of today, April 1. This shared leadership will allow us to further our mission to help working people build an equitable, sustainable, and democratic economy through new resources and strategies, in the nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit institution of higher learning.

Lane has served as the K.I.’s Associate Director since 2017 and has since been a key player in conceptualizing and building much of our programming. She leads the Labor Spring initiative that has brought together campuses and communities for hundreds of workers’ rights events nationwide from 2023 through 2026. She took the lead on organizing and building two major New Social Compact gatherings during the global pandemic, in 2021 and 2022, to spark discussion on new models for centering equity for working people. She was a key organizer of the 2019 International Labor Organization (ILO) centenary conference, as well as numerous other public K.I. talks, gatherings and panels. In her new role, she will continue to co-direct WILL Empower, a joint program with Rutgers University’s CIWO that builds labor leadership among women and gender expansive people.

The K.I. will benefit from Lane’s decades of experience in the labor movement, as well as her historical knowledge. Lane’s first job after graduating from Duke University was formative. She built an interfaith coalition for workplace safety in North Carolina in the wake of the tragic Hamlet chicken processing plant fire which killed 25 people in 1991. She then became a union organizer, traveling across the U.S. South to help clothing and textile workers form unions. She began working with the national AFL-CIO in 1998, where she directed the media outreach department under President John Sweeney. Lane then went on to earn a Master’s and Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Maryland. She is author of Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide, winner of the 2018 David Montgomery Award, Organization of American Historians (OAH). She is a frequent commenter in the media, and has published widely, including in The Washington Post, The American Prospect, The Hill, In These Times and more.

I am proud of the work that the K.I. has done since our inception in 2009: creating pathbreaking research; incubating new ideas for worker justice; convening our community for action; educating and engaging students on issues of worker rights and advocating for the working poor. We were thrilled to celebrate our Sweet 16th anniversary in December, where we released this report on our work. We look forward to joining with all of you as we continue to build power and justice for working people in these enormously trying times. – Joe McCartin, Kalmanovitz Initiative Co-Director