Monica Russo
President
Monica Russo is president of SEIU Florida Healthcare Union (FHU), the largest union of health care workers in the state of Florida, representing more than 13,000 nurses, other hospital employees, and nursing home workers at 89 facilities across the state.
Russo was elected to be the first International Vice President in the South for the 1.8 million-member Service Employees International Union—the nation’s largest and fastest-growing health care union. She is helping lead the effort to unite health care workers throughout the industry to raise professional and workplace standards in hospitals and nursing homes from coast to coast.
Over the last six years, she has led one of the most successful union organizing campaigns in state history—uniting more than 7,000 nursing home and hospital employees despite strong and often vicious employer opposition.
Under her leadership, SEIU members won the first safe staffing law for nursing homes in the United States (S1202). The groundbreaking Florida staffing legislation brought the state from the nation’s lowest-ranked in staffing ratios to having the best caregiver-to-resident standards in the country. Russo is committed to using her experience winning staffing standards for nursing home workers to win a similar safe staffing law for Florida’s hospitals as well.
Russo began her career in the labor movement in 1986. Since then, she has used her passion for advocating on behalf of working families to negotiate the first pension for nursing home workers in Florida, and has won innovative contracts with some of the largest health care corporations in the country that have raised the standard of living and improved working conditions for thousands of health care workers across the state.
Russo is active in many community labor organizations dedicated to improving the lives of Florida’s working families. She was instrumental in forming the
Immigrant Family Partnership, which includes
Mi Familia Vota, an organization that encourages civic participation in the Hispanic community. She is also the founder of
Unite for Dignity, an organization dedicated to leadership development among immigrant workers on issues including health care, organizing at work and in the community, and immigrants’ rights.
In addition, Russo founded
South Florida Jobs with Justice (SFJWJ), a community labor coalition dedicated to supporting workers’ rights and economic justice. As a member of SFJWJ’s South Florida Workers Rights Board, Russo has worked with prominent community leaders and elected officials to expose and remedy workers’ rights violations. Russo and SFJWJ also played a key role in organizing the largest civil rights protest in Florida’s history, the March 2000 “March on Tallahassee” to defend affirmative action.
Under Russo’s leadership, SEIU’s purple political machine has become a powerful and well-known entity in statewide politics. SEIU has been a key partner in
Arrive with Five’s Early Vote and Election Protection programs to educate and mobilize voters about their rights. SEIU also played a central role in passing a hotly-contested Constitutional Amendment for smaller class sizes in Florida’s public schools by mounting a grassroots campaign to gather petitions to qualify to be placed on the ballot, staffing call centers, and mobilizing voters to pass the amendment. In 2004, SEIU worked with
Floridians for All to win a statewide ballot initiative to increase Florida’s minimum wage by $1/hr.
Russo frequently lectures around the country and world, including at Cornell University, the University of Miami Law School, and St. Thomas University. She has spoken to audiences in Germany, Brazil, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Russo has coauthored several articles published in academic journals and books, including
Strategies for Labor Revitalization in Miami, coauthored with Center for Labor Research and Studies Director Bruce Nissen, and
This World Called Miami, in the Labor Research Review.
She has spoken before the U.S. Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Florida Conference of Black State Legislators and testified before the Florida State Senate and House of Representatives regarding issues of quality healthcare and access.
Her work has been covered extensively in the state and national news media, including the Today Show, Univision, the New York Times, the Nation, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Miami New Times, the Independent (London), the St. Petersburg Times, the South Florida Business Journal, the Palm Beach Post, the Hotline, and the Florida Times-Union, among many other newspaper and television appearances.
Her campaign work has also been highlighted in the August 2000 Human Rights Watch report entitled
“Unfair Advantage: Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States Under International Human Rights Standards” and the American Rights at Work report
“Some of Them are Brave,” which document the many challenges to forming a union faced by Florida’s health care workers. In addition, Russo’s work was featured in
Miami Now! Immigration, Ethnicity, and Social Change, a collection of papers edited by Guillermo J. Grenier and Alex Stepnick III.
Russo grew up in rural Pennsylvania, the daughter of Lincoln University professors. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University, and has studied in Brazil, Belgium, and France. She lives in Miami with her daughter, Giovanna.