Laurie Wimmer

Northwest Oregon Labor Council

Laurie Wimmer, a 34-year veteran of Oregon politics, is Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Northwest Oregon Labor Council, a coalition of 103 union locals in a four-country region representing 58,000 workers in public and private-sector labor organizations. Wimmer was elected in February 2023 to the remainder of a predecessor’s term and re-elected in October of the same year to another four-year term.

For nearly 26 years, she was a Government Relations Consultant for the Oregon Education Association. In that time, Laurie became a policy expert on school finance and taxation, school choice, student health and safety issues, civil rights, education governance, and community college funding. Her magnum opus was the passage of the game-changing Student Success Act, which boosted education funding by $2 billion a biennium.

Laurie has served as an appointee to various policy groups. She was the co-founder and 20-year chair of the Oregon Revenue Coalition. She also served as Vice Chair of the School District Business Best Practices Advisory Committee, as a member of the School Revenue Forecast Committee, and on various educational advisory groups relating to student poverty, the equalization formula, charter and virtual school laws, gun violence prevention, instructional time, and school safety. She was a seven-year member of the advisory council for the African American/Black Student Success Plan.

She served for 10 years on the board, most recently as Vice President, of Oregon’s Virtual Education program (ORVED) through the NW Regional ESD. She led the Education Caucus of the Democratic Party of Oregon for one year. Prior to her work with OEA, she was Executive Director of the Oregon Commission for Women for six years, where she helped to pass historic legislation on family leave, stalking, sexual harassment, domestic relations law, civil rights, and women’s health policy. She has twice run for the Oregon House of Representatives.