Natalicia Tracy

Senior Policy Advisor

Prior to joining DOL/OSHA, Natalicia Tracy, Ph.D., was Executive Director of Boston’s Brazilian Worker Center (2010-2021). She was also Lecturer in Labor Studies, Sociology and Human Services, and Resident Scholar at the Labor Resource Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston (2010-2021). She is Afro-Brazilian, who was brought to the U.S. as a nanny when she was 19, and finished her education here, including earning a PhD in Sociology from Boston University (2016). She was a co-founder of the Massachusetts Coalition for Domestic Workers, and she spearheaded and co-led legislative campaigns in Massachusetts and Connecticut to advance labor rights for excluded workers. To support communities of color disproportionally impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, she co-founded the Massachusetts Immigrant Collaborative and developed the Brazilian Policy Center, Inc., to help move policy agendas. 

Ms. Tracy has been the recipient of many awards recognizing her work, including the Petra Award for “Unsung Heroes of Social Justice” (2014); the Richard M. Fontera Award from the Arnold M. Dubin Labor Education Center, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (2014); two special Leadership Awards from the Greater Boston Labor Council, AFL-CIO (2014 & 2019); and the Brazilian “Making a Difference: World Impact” Award from O Globo Media Network and the Industrial Federation of the State of Rio de Janeiro (2017). She was named in 2015 as one of the nation’s 25 major black women labor leaders in And Still I Rise: Black Women Labor Leaders. In Boston, she was also a member of the City of Boston’s Living Wage Advisory Committee, and the Advisory Board for the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Advancement. She has been a board member of the Community Advisory Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Greater Boston Legal Services, Women’s Institute for Leadership Development, and Massachusetts Jobs with Justice. 

As a professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, she taught courses in “Work and Society,” “Labor and Globalization,” “Labor and Community Organizing,” and “Labor and Sex Trafficking in the Global Economy,” among others. An experienced researcher, she planned and directed many community-based participatory research projects on labor and immigration issues, and field studies on the Brazilian immigrant communities in Boston and in Lisbon, Portugal. Many of these projects were done as a community partner of NIH-funded research at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston University, Tufts University, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University.

Ms. Tracy is the author of many publications on issues of immigration, labor, and race, including the 2014 Invisible No More: Domestic Workers Organizing in Massachusetts and Beyond, University of Massachusetts Labor Resource Center, and “Worker-Led Research Makes the Case for Labor Justice for Massachusetts Domestic Workers: Social Research and Social Change at the Grassroots,” in Susan Greenbaum, Glenn Jacobs, and Prentice Zinn, eds., Collaborating for Change: A Participatory Action Research Casebook, Rutgers University Press (2020). 

She is thrilled to be working toward creating safer and more just workplaces for all workers.