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Jeff Ballinger

Jeff Ballinger

See Blume's Interview with Jeff Ballinger

Jeff is Director of Press for Change, a non-profit human rights organization with a focus on worker rights in the developing world. He has just finished three years as a Research Associate at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. In the 1990s, Jeff was a program advisor for international trade union training programs, law drafts in the areas of privatization, labor codes and non-governmental organizations, and a consultant for the American Bar Association's human rights law-drafting team (Russia and Kazakhstan).

In 1992, he wrote the first expose of Nike's abusive labor policies for Harper's Monthly and played an instrumental role in getting several dozen NGOs to support the courageous struggle of workers at Nike's contract factories in Asia.

As a thirty-something, Jeff was Country Program Director for the Asian-American Free Labor Institute (now the AFL-CIO's American Center for International Labor Solidarity): Turkey 1984-1987 and Indonesia 1988-1992, responsible for all aspects of field office operations. Jeff fought sweatshops here in the U.S. as the national student coordinator of the Farah Pants Boycott and, later, as an organizer in the epic struggle to organize workers at J.P. Stevens (see the movie 'Norma Rae', Jeff says).

In campaign work that presaged the current explosion of NGO-labor cooperation, he co-founded the Committee in Support of Solidarnosc, which organized frequent demonstrations and circulated lists of prisoners to New York-based media and organized the first trip to the U.S. by young Palestinian trade union leaders.