Kathy Wilkes - Profile and Journalist Details

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Biography

Kathy Wilkes is a longtime writer and editor. She's the former communications director of the Int'l Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), headquartered in San Francisco, and former editor of their prize-winning newspaper, The Dispatcher. Prior to ILWU, she represented airline workers in the US and Canada, both with Air Transport Employees, which she helped co-found and organize, and, before that, the Brotherhood of Railway & Airlines Clerks. She did union outreach and fundraising for the PBS television show, "We Do The Work," and initiated labor coalition support for the establishment of Palcare, an extended-hours, quality childcare facility for SFO airline workers that exists to this day. As a freelancer, she worked on newspapers for SEIU, Machinists, Teamsters, and Plumbers, and has contributed to many other publications, including In These Times, The Progressive, Salon, Truthout, The Capital Times, New York Daily News, Union Labor News, Portside and more. She contributed to two Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons books, Mad in USA and Two-Headed Alien Shrinks Labor Movement, and their newsletter, Wage Slave World News. She worked with legendary radical labor historian Howard Zinn and artist Mike Konopacki on the graphic history, A People’s History of American Empire, and blogged for seven years at the now-defunct NBC Newsvine. She's done ghost writing for several high-profile clients and is the recipient of numerous labor press awards, which are rotting away in a drawer somewhere. She did a lot of other stuff, but she’s getting older and can’t effing remember. She swears like a sailor and speaks snark as a second language.

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Freelance