Alex Han

Alex Han executive director of In These Times and a longtime organizer based in Chicago. Alex previously worked for Bernie’s 2020 campaign and SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana.

DSA at Socialism Conference 2024

Sessions featuring DSA members:

General Strike for May 1st, 2028?

Saturday August 31, 2024 10:00am – 11:30am CDT

Key leaders in various unions are attempting to align contracts for May 1st, 2028 to win bigger collective demands for the working class than would be possible separately, such as fighting national healthcare.

Featuring Sarah Hurd, DSA National Labor Commission cochair; Brandon Mancilla, UAW Region 9A director; Maria Moreno, CTU Financial Secretary; Dan Scoggins, SEIU local 26; Alex Han, In These Times.

OU editor

Organizing Upgrade

For 13 years, we’ve published lessons and reflections, strategy and history, working with an all-volunteer crew. Now we’re excited to announce that Alex Han has joined us as our first executive editor.

Based in Chicago, which he calls “a city at the heart of the neoliberal experiment,” Alex brings two decades of organizing experience and a strategic perspective honed at the intersection of labor, community, and left politics.

As a vice president of SEIU (Service Employees International Union) Healthcare Illinois and Indiana, he helped tens of thousands of home-based healthcare and childcare workers unionize. He helped found United Working Families, an independent political organization that has elected movement leaders to city, county, and state offices. In 2020 he served on the national political team for the Bernie Sanders campaign. He has also worked with the Bargaining for the Common Good network, which brings unions’ bargaining power to bear in broader campaigns to better the lives of workers as well as their communities.

Positive though all this is, “None of it is enough,” Alex said. “The challenges we face aren’t primarily about ‘scaling up’ our existing organizing—though that is still a necessary endeavor. We need to defeat the immediate dangers in front of us while protecting and expanding our collective ability to hope, imagine, and dream a different future.

“Whether we call it authoritarianism, a new feudalism, white nationalism—or all of those and more —I see Organizing Upgrade and many of the political and organizing forces that OrgUp represents as a critical place to help our movements chart a path forward,” he said.