Kelly Fay Rodríguez
Kelly M. Fay Rodríguez was appointed by the Biden-Harris Administration to serve as the Special Representative for International Labor Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. As the lead U.S. diplomat for international labor policy she launched and implemented the first-ever Presidential Memorandum to promote workers and labor in U.S. foreign policy and trade. Previously, she served as trade counsel for the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she led oversight of labor-trade policy, including of enforcement of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement's Labor Rapid Response Mechanism, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, and Section 307 of the Tariff Act (prohibiting imported goods made of forced labor). She is a Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights and co-founded the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice. She will lead the new Competence Centre for Human Rights Due Diligence.
From 2012 to 2020, she worked for the AFL–CIO and Solidarity Center on domestic and global trade union programs. She led the Center’s flagship program in Dhaka, Bangladesh from 2018 to 2020, which provided legal support, trade union capacity-building, and supply chain advocacy with women garment workers. From 2012 to 2017 in Washington, D.C., she advanced strategic local capacity-building, immigration reform, and political campaigns for the AFL-CIO. Before law school, she worked in the Labor Bureau of the New York State Attorney General's Office on minimum wage and hour law enforcement, and for SEIU Local 32B-J union members in New York City on immigration legal services. She also helped coordinate a dozen international election observation missions across Latin America and the Caribbean for the Organization of American States.
She graduated from City University of New York School of Law, where she was a Haywood Burns Human and Civil Rights Fellow and completed the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic. She also earned a bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies and Spanish from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She comes from a proud union and immigrant family, with roots in Worcester, Massachusetts and the Dominican Republic