Roxanne Brown on power, solidarity and a new era for women in the labour movement

"That moment wasn't about me. It was about us."

On 1 March 2026, Roxanne D. Brown became the 10th international president of the United Steelworkers (USW), the first woman, and the first Black woman, to lead one of North America's most powerful unions. She is clear about what it means. Not a personal milestone. A collective one. A moment that captured, as she put it, "so many hopes, dreams, silent struggles and prayers" and belonged to every sister who had ever been told the top was not for her.

One month on, speaking to IndustriALL at the USW International Women's Conference in Toronto, the weight of that moment was still landing. For retirees who said they never thought they would live to see it. For young women still working out whether there is a place for them at the top. For Roxanne Brown herself, still occasionally catching herself saying "vice president" out of habit.

"Sisters can do anything. There is no job, no role, no thing that is insurmountable for our sisters all around the globe."

Built for this moment

Roxanne Brown did not arrive at the presidency by accident. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in White Plains, New York, she came to the labour movement through lived experience, her mother and aunt worked union jobs that allowed them to buy homes and break into the middle class. That transformation shaped everything that followed.

She joined the USW 27 years ago and spent nearly three decades fighting for workers on health care, trade, manufacturing and workplace safety. Throughout it all, she held to one conviction: the workers themselves are the most powerful thing in any room.

Know who you are

Standing before a room packed with union sisters, Roxanne Brown delivered the lesson she has shared with her own daughter and that she now carries to women across the movement.

"At some point, the world is going to try to tell you who they think you are. So it's really important that you know who you are. So that when that moment comes, you stand in the power of the knowledge of who you are."

She speaks from experience. In the years before her election, she heard it herself, the doubts, the limitations others tried to place on her. She had already decided who she was.

For Roxanne Brown, knowing who you are is not a passive thing. It means knowing what makes you powerful, and being intentional about protecting that knowledge. She connects with people through conversation, through listening, through the stories she gathers and carries into her work. She speaks openly about imposter syndrome, naming it not as a personal failure but as something structural, something women navigate constantly in spaces not built for them.

"Even when you do know who you are, that confidence shakes a little bit, and the imposter syndrome steps back in," she said. "Knowing who you are from the front end and taking the steps to remind yourself, even in small ways, that is really important."

She points to her eight-year-old daughter, who was in the room at the conference. She has more confidence at her age than Roxanne Brown ever did at the same stage. Why? Because she has grown up surrounded by strong women, in her family and in her union family, who have shown her what power looks like in practice.

"That's what this is about," Roxanne Brown said. "Showing what is possible."

Building women's leadership: the Women of Steel model

Roxanne Brown's presidency did not emerge from nowhere. It was prepared over decades by a powerful model for women's leadership development in the global trade union movement.

Women of Steel, the USW's dedicated programme for women's organizing and leadership, predates female representation on the union's executive board. When it was founded, every leader at the top of the USW was a man. The first woman would not join the executive board until 2008. Yet former international president Leo Gerard made a commitment, to the programme, to the sisters in the union, to the idea that women needed a structure where they could learn, be trained and understand how to exercise power.

The results are clear. In 2008, one woman on the executive board. Today, three. The majority of USW department heads are women. And for the first time in the union's history, the international president is a woman.

"If we didn't have that programme, I don't know that we would have had a system to talk to sisters about their power," Roxanne Brown said. "About what they bring into the union and how that power serves the union."

Under the leadership of Randie Pearson, director of Women of Steel, the programme has been fully revamped for 2026. The training, the language, the issues addressed, all updated to reflect what women need today. That includes explicit recognition of domestic violence as a union issue, something sisters were once uncertain the union would even care about.

"There were things sisters were dealing with back then they didn't even know the union would care about," Roxanne Brown said. "And that is something that is embedded within the programme we have today."

For affiliates around the world who are at the beginning of this journey, Roxanne Brown's message is direct: it starts with leadership. The commitment has to come from the top. And the programme has to be built to last, not just for the sisters who are there today, but for the ones still finding their way.

"This is the beginning,"

she said.

"And the goal is to make sure that other sisters see what's possible. Because we have more coming."

Global solidarity in a moment of pressure

As IndustriALL Global Union's regional vice president for North America, Roxanne Brown brings the weight of USW members to a global coalition of workers across 130 countries. At a moment when U.S. trade policy, attacks on workers' rights and the rollback of workplace protections are sending shockwaves through labour markets worldwide, that connection has rarely mattered more.

"When the United States sneezes, the world catches a cold," she said. "The workers of the United States are not the government. We too are feeling the pain and the pressure, and we rely on the solidarity of our union family all around the world."

She is equally direct about the threat at home. The current political environment, the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion protections, the scaling back of workplace safety regulations, the chaos of tariff policy that has upended supply chains globally, is not just political noise. It is material harm to workers.

"In the last year, so many protections for workers in safety and health have been scaled back," she told the conference. "We may not see the immediate impacts of these cuts. But we will see them."

Her response to those trying to make workers forget their power is fierce and unambiguous. Workers built these economies. No one else can go into the mines, the smelters, the pulp and paper facilities and do what union members do every day. That, she insists, is where the power actually lies.

"We outnumber them. We provide the power. And that is something we need to remember in this moment."

She describes IndustriALL as exactly the platform the movement needs right now, a space to bring that solidarity together, to be honest about what this moment demands, and to remind workers everywhere that they are not fighting alone.

"The only way through this period is with us knowing that we're not in this fight alone," she said. "That the workers of the world stand with us."

"Somebody say new era"

Roxanne Brown addresses delegates at the opening plenary of the USW Women of Steel conference in Toronto, March 2026. Photo: IndustriALL Global Union

Before she left the stage in Toronto, Roxanne Brown looked out at the room, more than half of whom were attending a Women of Steel conference for the first time, and named what she saw.

"That's leadership," she said. "Sisters who raise their hands, wanting to come, wanting to get educated, get some additional tools for their toolbox. That is the kind of leadership we expect as a union."

She spoke about the sister who told her the night before that she had been nominated to run for local president and that seeing Roxanne Brown made her know she could do it. She spoke about the young woman who said she was ready to get more involved because she had seen not one but three sisters on the International Executive Board.

That moment on 1 March 2026, she said, was never just about her.

"It captured so many hopes. Dreams. Silent struggles. Prayers. And so much more. And we did it all together. And we will continue to do this together."