Bill Fletcher Jr. has been an activist since his teen years. Upon graduating from college he went to work as a welder in a shipyard, thereby entering the labor movement. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO.

Bill’s organizational development/organizational change work started full force in the early 1990s when he was working for the Service Employees International Union. While there he began facilitating strategic planning processes with local unions, as well as trouble-shooting various organizational challenges. Since then he is regularly called upon to assist organizations in evaluating their operations, engaging in strategic planning, and thinking through restructuring and reorganization. This work has taken place within advocacy organizations, both community-based and workplace-based. Additionally, Bill began engaging in professional coaching, largely as an outgrowth of mentoring that he has regularly offered. This coaching has included leaders of organizations as well as staff.

Bill is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com. Bill is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941, the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice; and the author of They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions. Bill is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.

Bill lives in Mitchelville, MD.