Labor Leader of the Week: Ryan Boyer

Ryan Boyer grew up in a strong Union household and remembers playing in union halls as a child. He would accompany his father and mother, both Union members who served their sisters and brothers in work and in their community.

Today, Ryan is the Business Manager of Laborer’s International Union of North America Business Council (LiUNA) of Philadelphia and Vicinity. He is also the African American Caucus President and Special International Representative of LiUNA.

“To me, I always thought a Labor Leader gives the working people a voice,” Ryan works diligently to amplify those voices. He got one of his first union jobs before turning 18, his interest in politics came even earlier.

“When I was 13 or 14,” Ryan said, “that’s when I got the political bug. There was a big groundswell around Black leadership at that time. Harold Washington had just become the mayor of Chicago, the energy around electing Wilson Goode as the first Black mayor, it caught me even at a young age, and what it meant to communities.”

With the state of America as it is now, Ryan believes it is “10 times more important to get the country motivated.”

That is why every week Ryan is out in Philadelphia mobilizing voters and organizing early voting rallies for hundreds of Union members every weekend to encourage people to come out to authorized voting satellite locations.

“As Labor Leaders, we do not have the luxury to deal with the world the way we want it to be, we need to deal with the world as it is. We need to ask some people: Is your racism more important than being able to take care of your family?” Ryan said, “We can lose our Republic. It is very important that we do this and it is very important that workers across Pennsylvania know the real Donald Trump. He is just not a friend of the worker.”