A nonprofit that supports unions across the world received extra infusions of cash from a federal agency after one of the union group’s employees took a leadership role at the agency. She later went on to serve as the agency’s acting chief of staff.
Lauren Stewart spent 15 years at the Solidarity Center, a left-leaning nonprofit that supports unions, advocated for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and champions “climate justice.” She joined a subagency in the Labor Department in 2022, and in the years since, that agency awarded the Solidarity Center millions more than it had under previous administrations. A Labor Department official told The Daily Signal that Stewart had been placed on administrative leave in April.
Stewart’s role at the department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs draws increased scrutiny after the Solidarity Center sued the bureau for canceling the grants under the Trump administration.
The bureau canceled nearly $80 million in funding to the Solidarity Center earlier this year, working with the Department of Government Efficiency. The Department of Labor announced Tuesday that it has cut $400 million.
These cuts led the center to file a lawsuit in April, seeking to restore the funding.
What Is the Solidarity Center?
According to its website, the Solidarity Center is “a U.S.-based non-profit partnering directly with workers—where it matters most—to come together, speak out and create real change.” The nonprofit boasts having programs in more than 70 countries, partnering with over 900 organizations, including 500 trade unions, worker associations, and community groups.
“Stronger worker voices mean stronger democracies, fair economies, and more stable societies,” the website states. “When workers have power, everyone benefits.”
Yet the Solidarity Center has advocated for politically divisive ideologies, notably climate alarmism and DEI.
“The Solidarity Center was originally one of the four core institutes funded through the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy established by President Reagan at a time when Big Labor was vociferously anti-Marxist,” Max Primorac, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, told The Daily Signal. “Unfortunately, like so many foreign aid vehicles funded by the U.S. government, it turned into an instrument of leftwing ideology the rest of the world rejects.”
Before President Donald Trump took office, the Solitary Center’s website hosted a page on “Equality & Inclusion.” The organization has removed most of the content from its website following the cancellation of grants.
“The Solidarity Center engages with unions and their allies through an analysis and practice of equality, radical inclusion and intersectionality that is explicitly feminist, anti-racist, pro-equality, pro-worker, pro-migrant and class conscious,” the page stated. It added that the group aims “to confront the multiple and intersecting forms of oppression that contribute to economic structures in which women and other groups of workers are devalued and excluded from economic and social equality.”
The center’s 2023 annual report stated that the group “is advancing a worker-driven, just and inclusive approach to combatting the climate crisis.”
“The Solidarity Center is elevating worker perspectives in climate justice discourse,” the report stated. “We are supporting unions to effectively build and advocate for worker-driven, justice-oriented climate solutions at the local, national, region, and global level.”
Last November, Next Day Animations created a video for the Solidarity Center explaining the concept of “intersectionality”: the idea that institutional biases against women, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people, the disabled, and others may compound to make individuals face different forms of “oppression.”
Labor Department Funding
The Labor Department created the Bureau of International Labor Affairs in 1947 to “strengthen global labor standards, enforce labor commitments among trading partners, and combat international child labor, forced labor, and human trafficking.” The bureau has played a major role in trade negotiations since the 1970s.
According to The Daily Signal’s analysis of grants on its website, the bureau has given at least $86.063 million to the Solidarity Center since October 2008, with $60.563 million of that coming in the Biden administration.
Since April 2022, when Stewart joined the bureau, it has awarded the Solidarity Center $54.313 million, more than twice the sum it awarded the group under the first Trump administration ($18.05 million).
Lauren Stewart’s Role
According to her LinkedIn profile, Stewart spent 15 years at the Solidarity Center, rising through the ranks from program assistant for Latin America in 2008 to regional program director for Latin America in 2020.
She moved directly from the Solidarity Center to the Bureau of International Labor Affairs in April 2022, becoming a division chief for the Monitoring and Enforcement of Trade Agreements office. Starting in September 2023, she served as acting chief of staff for the entire bureau, a role she held until April.
After Stewart joined the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, the bureau awarded Solidarity Center more than $12 million in a grant to further “worker empowerment” in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. The bureau also awarded a grant worth $20 million to building the labor movement in Mexico.
In addition to Stewart, three other former Solidarity Center employees went to work at the Labor Department during the Biden administration, two of them at the Bureau of International Labor Affairs.
The grants to the Solidarity Center came as left-wing groups sent their staff and policy proposals in to the Biden administration in an influence campaign I describe in “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”
Neither the Solidarity Center nor the Labor Department responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment.
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