OUR LEADERSHIP

Bianca Agustin was born and raised in the border town of El Centro, California. She is the descendant of Filipino and Mexican immigrant farmworkers and a first generation college graduate. While attending UC Berkeley, Bianca became active in Students Organizing for Justice in the Americas and United Students Against Sweatshops, developing student-labor coalitions in support of local unionization campaigns and successfully pushing the university to cut ties with apparel brands tied to abusive labor practices overseas. Her commitment to fighting for immigrant and worker rights led her to a career in the labor movement, working first as a corporate researcher on Justice for Janitors campaigns in NY, NJ, CT, and VA and then on campaigns that successfully organized thousands of multiservice, security, and airport workers with SEIU 32BJ. She joined United for Respect in 2019 as director of corporate accountability, overseeing the organization’s capital strategies, campaigns targeting private equity owned retailers, and supporting people who work at Walmart and Amazon to fight for hazard pay and safety protections during the COVID 19 pandemic.

Terrysa Guerra was raised by her grandparents in Los Fresnos, Texas, a farming community near the US/Mexico border. Terrysa saw first-hand the difference a union job made for her family when she saw her mother and coworkers take collective action through their union advocating for better pay, working conditions and fighting privatization of their jobs. She learned by example from her grandparents the importance of voting and participating in the political process when they took her to vote for the first time when she was 18. As a first generation college student, Terrysa was recruited into a Democratic congressional campaign soon after graduating from Texas A&M University. She went on to work for the national and Texas state Democratic parties, managed the successful campaigns of two state senators and a state representative in Texas, and then as deputy campaign manager for the gubernatorial bid of Wendy Davis. Profiles of Terrysa ran in the New York Times and Marie Claire. After the 2016 election, Terrysa focused on combining her labor roots with her political skills at the Make It Work Campaign organizing around issues of paid leave, childcare and equal pay, and then managed the fair workweek campaign for retail workers at Center for Popular Democracy. In 2018, she joined United for Respect where she built the organization’s policy and political programs that led to passing into law the new national labor standard of guaranteed severance pay, winning stable working hours for over 2 million families, helping win $20 million in a hardship fund for 30,000 Toys R Us workers, and building UFR’s civic engagement program to reach low wage workers and activate them to vote in elections.