Josesph Geevarghese

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Josesph Geevarghese (born 1972) is an American labor organizer, political strategist and attorney. He is known for his work on campaigns addressing health-care access, worker rights and progressive politics in the United States. As of 2025, he is the executive director of Our Revolution, a progressive political organization founded by U.S. senator Bernie Sanders following his 2016 presidential campaign.

Early life and education

Geevarghese attended Catholic High School for Boys in Little Rock, Arkansas. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1995, where he served as student government president. He received a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center in 2000.

Career

Health care organizing

In the early 2000s, Geevarghese was executive director of the Hospital Accountability Project, an initiative of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in Chicago. The campaign organized uninsured patients to challenge hospital billing practices, highlighting what organizers described as “price-gouging” of low-income patients, aggressive debt collection and limited charity care at nonprofit hospitals.

Illinois state senator Barack Obama, chair of the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services Committee, subsequently opened an investigation into Advocate Health Care, the state’s largest hospital chain, and introduced legislation on hospital billing and charity care.

In coverage of the campaign, Obama said that the Hospital Accountability Project had “put a spotlight” on hospital debt and its impact on low-income patients, stating that such debt could drive some people into bankruptcy or homelessness.Health-care themes later featured prominently in his 2004 United States Senate campaign.

Following public scrutiny of hospital billing practices, Advocate Health Care suspended some debt collection practices, and the Illinois Hospital Association adopted guidelines recommending discounts for low-income uninsured patients and limiting aggressive bill-collection tactics.

Change to Win and Obama’s first term

From 2007 to 2019, Geevarghese was deputy director of the Change to Win labor federation’s Strategic Organizing Center. In that role, he worked on executive-branch policy initiatives, advised the White House Task Force for Middle Class Working Families, and advocated for stronger labor standards on federally funded contracts, loans and grants.

According to later reporting by The New York Times, Obama administration officials initially told Geevarghese and other activists that the federal government lacked the authority to impose such standards on contractors, but after Obama’s re-election they identified ways to implement changes through executive action.

Good Jobs Nation and Obama’s second term

During Obama’s second term, Geevarghese served as executive director of Good Jobs Nation, a Change to Win initiative established to create outside pressure on the Obama administration to raise pay and improve labor standards on federal contracts.

MSNBC described Good Jobs Nation as “one of the more successful 21st century labor organizations in influencing policy on the federal level.” The Nation also described Geevarghese as playing a key role in launching the “Fight for $15” national strike movement. [The Nation].

As head of the campaign, Geevarghese helped coordinate a series of strikes by low-wage workers at federal buildings and national landmarks in Washington, D.C., calling on Obama to use executive authority to raise wages, curb wage theft and support union rights for workers on federal contracts.

Geevarghese argued that an executive-action strategy was necessary given partisan gridlock in Congress, contending that many major social movements in U.S. history had relied on presidents using their executive powers.

After an initial round of walkouts, Obama used his 2014 State of the Union address to announce he would sign an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers to US$10.10 per hour and urged Congress, state and local governments, and private-sector employers to follow suit. Geevarghese described the order as significant because it applied to workers employed by some of the largest federal contractors and could influence wage policies at major private employers.

Under Geevarghese’s leadership, Good Jobs Nation also pursued legal strategies on behalf of low-wage federal contract workers, filing complaints that helped recover back pay and penalties for hundreds of workers employed by federal contractors.

In July 2014, shortly after Good Jobs Nation led a strike to protest wage practices at a federal food-service contractor, Obama issued an executive order requiring federal contractors to disclose certain labor-law violations and to comply with workplace standards as a condition of receiving federal contracts, saying that U.S. tax dollars should not go to companies that violate workers’ rights.[26][27]

In July 2015, Geevarghese led a Good Jobs Nation strike at the United States Capitol at which Sanders, then a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, joined protesting workers and introduced legislation to raise the US minimum wage to $15 an hour. Commentators viewed Sanders’ backing of the US$15 demand as part of broader pressure on other Democratic presidential candidates to support a higher federal minimum wage.

After the 2016 election, Geevarghese shifted Good Jobs Nation’s focus toward pressuring the incoming Trump administration to prevent offshoring of federal contract work and to raise wages at companies receiving federal subsidies and contracts, including through rallies featuring laid-off factory workers in cities such as Indianapolis.

Sanders later cited Geevarghese and the Good Jobs Nation strikes in his book Where Do We Go from Here?

Our Revolution and national politics

Ahead of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Geevarghese became executive director of Our Revolution, a progressive political group that grew out of Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign.[1][2] Under his leadership, the organization has said its goals include organizing grassroots voters to oppose Donald Trump and what it describes as oligarchic influence in U.S. politics, elect progressive candidates, and transform the Democratic Party by reducing corporate influence and strengthening its working-class base.

During the 2020 presidential cycle, Geevarghese argued in a USA Today opinion column that many Midwestern working-class voters who had supported Trump in 2016 later felt betrayed, and that Democrats needed to offer a more transformational economic program rather than rely on incremental policy changes.

Following the 2022 midterm elections, he told The New York Times that Our Revolution’s goal in that cycle had been to push the House Democratic caucus in a more progressive direction, and he pointed to the election of nine new members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus as a measure of the group’s impact.

In the 2024 Democratic presidential primaries, Geevarghese warned that President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza risked alienating young and progressive voters. Our Revolution backed “uncommitted” protest-vote efforts in several states, urging Democratic primary voters to use uncommitted ballots to pressure the administration to change course on Gaza.

After Biden withdrew from the race and Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, Geevarghese criticized what he saw as the Harris campaign’s shift toward centrist messaging aimed at disaffected Republican voters, arguing that it risked weakening support among key Democratic constituencies and objecting to efforts to court figures such as members of the Cheney family.

He said that internal Our Revolution surveys showed an “enthusiasm deficit” for Harris among left-leaning voters and told reporters that many progressives were unsure whether she would “fight for the things that we believe in.” In a later interview, he described what he saw as a “fundamental failure” by the Harris campaign to acknowledge voters’ economic hardship, arguing that the campaign placed more emphasis on themes such as democracy and reproductive rights than on the kind of economic populism associated with Sanders.

In opinion articles for outlets including The Nation and Common Dreams, Geevarghese has argued that the Democratic Party has become overly dependent on corporate donors and consultants, leaving it disconnected from working-class communities. He has called for reforms such as banning dark-money spending in Democratic primaries, increasing investment in grassroots organizing and adopting a broader progressive policy agenda centered on working-class economic concerns.

During Trump’s second term, Geevarghese warned in an opinion piece that what he called “the merger between authoritarianism and oligarchy” posed a major threat to American democracy, and said that Democratic leaders could not respond to Trump-era politics as “business as usual.”

References

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