Robin Clark-Bennett serves as an educator and Director of the University of Iowa Labor Center. She teaches classes for working Iowans on basic labor and employment rights, representation and collective bargaining skills, organizing, communications, labor-community coalitions, labor history, and the intersection of labor and immigration policy. Robin also speaks Spanish and conducts many of the Labor Center’s outreach programs with immigrant and refugee community organizations.

She first joined the Labor Center from 2002-2004 to work on the Child Labor Public Education Project, a two-year initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Labor that delivered scores of outreach workshops and several published adult education modules on the subject of child labor in global context. She returned to the Labor Center as an educator in 2008, served as lead instructor for a 2010-2012 U.S. Department of Justice funded regional public education project on the workplace nondiscrimination rights of immigrant workers, and was appointed Director in 2021.

Robin has nearly 30 years of experience with the labor movement, beginning as an intern with the ILGWU in New York City in 1992. She served as a regional Organizing Director in ACTWU/UNITE working with manufacturing, industrial laundry, and distribution center employees in New England, and held staff leadership positions in SEIU and AFSCME representing hospital employees, home care, and family childcare providers in the Midwest.

Robin holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University, where she studied U.S. labor history with Professor David Montgomery. She is a member of the American Federation of Teachers Local 716, the United Association for Labor Education, and is a co-founder and board member of the Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa.