David Foster

David Foster is currently the Executive Director of the Blue-Green Alliance, a strategic partnership between the United Steelworkers, North America’s largest manufacturing union with 850,000 members and the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest and oldest grassroots’ environmental organization with 1.3 million members and supporters. He also co-chairs the Mayors’ Green Manufacturing Initiative with Mayors RT Rybak of Minneapolis, MN and Chris Coleman of St. Paul, MN. From 1990-2006, he was the Director of United Steelworkers (USW), District #11, a 13 state region based in Minneapolis, MN.

District #11 has a diverse membership of 43,000, comprised of iron ore and other mineral miners, steel, aluminum, tire, oil and gas workers, as well as health care employees. His responsibilities included serving on the union’s International Executive Board and negotiating with many of the country’s largest steel, iron ore and aluminum companies. He has spoken on trade issues to labor and management audiences in the United States, Canada, and Japan and co-chaired the USW’s initiative to establish a global network of unions in the aluminum industry in 2003.

He chaired the USW’s International Executive Board Task Force on the Environment and authored its 2006 policy statement. In 2004, he was awarded the Jane Lehman Bagley Award from the Tides Foundation for his work building labor/environmental coalitions in the United States. He serves on the Board of Directors of Evraz Oregon Steel Mills, a subsidiary of the Evraz Group, a global steel company headquartered in Moscow and Luxembourg with operations in the United States and Canada.

He also teaches classes on unions, globalisation and sustainability as an adjunct faculty at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities and on advocacy and political leadership in Duluth.

He has a BA from Reed College in Portland, Oregon.