Jacob Horwitz

Jacob Horwitz has built membership-based worker-led organizing programs in the US South and Global South for fifteen years. He’s led dozens of workplace and community campaigns against multinational corporations including Hershey, McDonalds, and Wal-Mart. He’s organized at the intersection of migration and forced labor and spent over nine years co-developing a transnational membership-based worker organization that became the National Guestworker Alliance (NGA).
Jacob developed a specialty in guestworker organizing and has directed guestworker campaigns in key sectors including seafood supply chain, oil and gas, and hospitality. Before joining GLJ-ILRF, Jacob was working with UNITE HERE to build union power at the Charlotte Douglas Airport, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Jacob led the airline catering workers and airport concession workers in a fight to win a contract for living wages and affordable healthcare.
Jacob also served as Interim Executive Director and Organizing Director at the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ). In both of those roles, Jacob directed multidisciplinary organizing teams of Black and immigrant workers to build power in the workplace and in the City. Under his leadership, thousands of people, largely African American, targeted by racist policing and saddled with unpayable fines and fees won relief; members won significant changes to federal and local migration policy targeting undocumented families. Thousands of guestworkers fought and won permanent immigration protections, increased wages and improved working conditions in food processing, hospitality and construction.