VICE PRESIDENT, MANUFACTURING AND INDUSTRIAL POLICY

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Ted Fertik is Vice President for Manufacturing and Industrial Policy at the Bluegreen Alliance, where he leads the organization’s strategy, team management, policy development, and advocacy on clean technology manufacturing and industrial transformation, including overseeing work on industrial investment programs, procurement, and trade policy.

From 2018 until 2024, Ted was Senior Strategist for Policy and Research at the Working Families Party, where he led a range of research, policy, and organizational development projects, including the crafting of the WFP People’s Charter in 2020 and a multi-phase research project on the multiracial working class in 2023 and 2024. In that role Ted also launched and served as deputy director of WFP’s Federal Affairs department, helping to develop strategies for translating progressive electoral victories into legislative victories for working class people. Ted represented WFP within the Green New Deal Network, and helped develop and direct WFP’s strategy for winning action on jobs, climate, care and justice in the first years of the Biden administration. Between 2018 and 2022 ,Ted simultaneously served as Senior Strategist at the Grassroots Power Project, where he contributed to the development of the organization’s framework around governing power, and also co-facilitated the New York State Alignment Table, which launched the highly successful 2021 Invest in Our New York campaign, winning over $4 billion in new permanent revenue in New York State.

Prior to 2018, Ted pursued a doctorate in economic and international history at Yale University, culminating in a dissertation entitled “Steel and Sovereignty: The United States, Nationalism, and the Transformation of World Order, 1898-1941”. This work explored how a combination of intensifying nationalism in developing countries and geopolitical rivalry between the world’s major capitalist powers contributed to a rapid acceleration in global industrialization and new forms of “north-south” relations in the interwar period. In researching and writing this dissertation, Ted gained wide-ranging familiarity with the political motivations, enabling conditions, financial means, and coordination capacities necessary for industrial transformation. While in graduate school he was also a rank-and-file leader in the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), now Local 33 of Unite Here, which won recognition and a contract in 2023 after a 30 year fight.