About
An experienced change-maker, Mary Beth Maxwell serves as a special advisor at the Open Society Foundations. She is also a consultant and strategist on labor policy as well as issues affecting civil rights and the LGBTQ+ community.
Mary Beth Maxwell began her career as a national field director for Jobs with Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based national workers' rights coalition. During her seven years there, she co-founded its Workers Rights Board and Student Labor Action Project, which was instrumental in the organization becoming a national leader in its field.
Maxwell next founded American Rights at Work (ARAW) in 2003 and served the following six years as its first executive director. Under her guidance, ARAW became the leading advocacy voice in the U.S. for the restoration of workers' rights to collective bargaining. She helped achieve this by funding a variety of strategic communications, research, and field organizing activity nationwide in addition to creating diverse leadership teams to support the organization's agenda. She also co-authored its inaugural report—Some of Them Are Brave: The Unfulfilled Promise of American Labor Law—and created the Partnerships That Work initiative to draw attention to businesses with successful labor-management practices.
In 2009, Maxwell was appointed by President Barack Obama as a senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Labor. She served in a variety of roles over six and a half years including leading the Wage and Hour Division and Deputy Chief of Staff and ultimately served as Principle Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy where she managed a team of 36 full-time equivalent employees and a $6.5 million budget. She helped secure policy victories that raised the minimum wage and overtime pay, ended discrimination against LGBTQ+ workers employed by federal contractors, promoted paid leave, and improved working standards for 2 million homecare workers, a majority of whom are Women of Color and immigrant workers.
After working in the Obama administration, Maxwell returned to the nonprofit sector and served as senior vice president for foundation programs at the Human Rights Campaign, where she led programs focused on the workplace, youth, health and aging, and other critical issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community in the U.S. and abroad. She was a leader in mobilizing the LGBTQ+ community around issues of racial justice, including supporting immigrant rights and opposing Trump’s Muslim ban. She returned to strategic consulting on labor policy and the Future of Workers for OSF, Public Welfare Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network, and others. More recently, Maxwell was a member of the DOL Personnel Team for the Biden-Harris Transition.