Rand Wilson has worked as an organizer for more than forty years with a number of national and local unions.

In the early 1990s, the semiconductor industry and the federal government launched a $200 million a year industrial policy initiative “SEMATECH” in Austin, TX, to research making smaller and faster chips. In response, Wilson helped organize a national campaign to broaden SEMATECH’s research agenda to include benefits for workers, host communities, and the environment.

When SEMATECH refused repeated requests to devote some of its resources to making cleaner and safer chips, the campaign persuaded Congress to earmark $10 million of SEMATECH’s budget for “environmentally safe manufacturing methods.”

That successful grassroots industrial policy campaign helped inspire several national unions and environmental groups to form a new coalition, CHIPS Communities United (CCU). The coalition is supporting local groups to ensure that the $52.7 billion federal CHIPS Act grants and billions more in state subsidies for domestic chip making create good jobs and protect the environment.

Wilson has also worked as an organizer for the Communication Workers of America; the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union; the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; and SEIU. He also worked for the national AFL-CIO on several national organizing and political campaigns.

In addition to serving as an advisor to CHIPS Communities United, Wilson is a resident of Somerville Massachusetts, where he convenes Somerville Stands Together (a community-labor coalition) and serves as a trustee on the Somerville Job Creation and Retention Trust.