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Amy B. Dean is an American author, political commentator, and labor leader who served from 1993 to 2003 as the executive director of the South Bay Labor Council.

South Bay Labor Council
After completing an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dean worked as a union organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. In 1991 she was hired as a political director at the South Bay Labor Council, and became director in 1993 when then executive director Rick Sawyer joined the Clinton administration. As executive director of the South Bay Labor Council, Dean became the youngest woman to lead a labor federation with 100,000 members.

In 1995 Dean founded the labor policy research center Working Partnerships, USA, which releases annual reports on working and living conditions in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. In 1996 AFL-CIO president John Sweeney picked Dean to chair the federation's National Central Labor Council Advisory Committee. In 1998 Dean won the highest living wage statute for publicly funded projects in San Jose. In 2001 Dean led the South Bay Labor Council in pursuing a political organizing strategy that led to the passage of the Childrens' Health Initiative, a universal child health care program adopted by the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.

Political Commentator
In 2003 Dean founded Building Partnerships, a national research center focused on regional community-labor coalitions, based on Working Partnerships, USA. In 2009 she co-authored a book with David B. Reynolds, A New, New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement. In 2012 Dean was named a fellow at The Century Foundation. She has written articles for The Nation, YES! Magazine , Crain's Chicago Business , The Boston Review , Tikkun , and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas , among many others.