Caroline O’Connor, Director of Communications, SAG Foundation 

Caroline O’Connor has worked in the American labor movement for more than 16 years as an organizer, a legislative and political director and a communications director. She is currently the Director of Communications at the Screen Actors Guild Foundation where she brings visibility and awareness to the SAG Foundation’s free programming for SAG-AFTRA performers while engaging with union actors, the media and the public on a daily basis through the various social media platforms.  In her almost two year tenure, Caroline has spearheaded a social media campaign that has grown the SAG Foundation’s Twitter followers by 700%, Facebook likes by 500% and YouTube subscribers by 250%. She also started an Instagram account that currently has almost 1800 followers.

In addition, Caroline is a part-time adjunct faculty member in the Labor Studies Department at Los Angeles Trade Technical College where she teaches “Framing the Message for Labor” during the spring semester to both union and non-union students.

Prior to working at the SAG Foundation, Caroline worked at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, as the Communications Director, for almost two years. There, she developed and implemented internal and external communications, social media strategies and messaging for the most dynamic Central Labor Council in the country representing nearly 800,000 union workers.

When Caroline began working in Los Angeles in 2010, she thought she’d landed in labor’s land of milk and honeybecause she had cut her teeth working in the labor movement in Texas, the land of fire and brimstone, for more than ten years prior.Caroline was a union organizer with the Texas State Employees Union/Communications Workers of America Local 6186 for five years, where she signed up over 2,000 state employees into a union in a “right to work” state without collective bargaining rights in the public sector. For her next five years, she was the chief Legislative and Political Director of TSEU, lobbying at the Texas Legislature for state employees’ issues and services and to stop massive privatization efforts. As well, she built a significant COPE program at TSEU to strengthen the voice of state employees in Texas electoral politics.

Between working in the Texas and the California labor movements, Caroline received her Masters of Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Austin, LBJ School of Public Affairs, where she was a graduate teaching assistant and union activist in the University Caucus.

You can follow Caroline on Twitter @carolineoconnor and @unioncaroline where she tweets about labor.

SAG Foundation Link:

http://www.sagfoundation.org/about