Lora Jo Foo, Champion for Labor and Social Justice, dies at 75.

Lora Jo Foo, a visionary labor organizer and people’s advocate, passed away on March 13, 2026. At the age of 11, she worked in sweatshops alongside her mother in San Francisco’s Chinatown. She helped her mother to support the family of six daughters while her father was largely absent. While working in sweatshops she contracted tuberculosis, which left permanent damage to her lungs. These hardships fueled in Lora Jo a fierce passion and lifelong commitment to workers’ rights and social justice.

As a teenager, Lora Jo joined the budding Asian American movement and was active in San Francisco’s Manilatown, where she co-founded the Kearny Street Workshop and joined the historic campaign to Save the International Hotel, the building that housed Kearny Street Workshop along with hundreds of mostly Filipino seniors who were being evicted.

By the time she finished college, Lora Jo knew that she wanted to organize workers. Embedding herself among rank-and-file workers, she went to work in hotels as a room cleaner and garment factories as a seamstress. Several years later she added to her organizing skills by going to law school, with the intention of becoming a labor lawyer.

As labor attorney for the Asian Law Caucus, Lora Jo handled numerous wage theft cases. Together with leaders from the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, and other allies, she helped form Sweatshop Watch, a coalition of groups committed to ending sweatshop conditions. This group crafted and got passed AB633, a California law that held retailers and manufacturers liable for wage violations in their contractors’ factories, a landmark measure that held those who profited from sweatshops accountable to workers.

This background led her to mentor many young attorneys, especially Asian Pacific American women. It also gave her expertise for authoring Asian American Women: Issues, Concerns, and Responsive Human and Civil Rights Advocacy, a publication of the Ford Foundation.

Aside from labor rights advocacy, Lora Jo loved being in nature and was an avid hiker. She became an accomplished nature photographer and published Earth Passages: Journeys Through Childhood, a book of photographs taken in her explorations of nature, and of reflections on her childhood. In The Della Project, a book about her family, she wrote, “The woods is where I am nurtured,” and “Mother Earth gave me what I did not receive from our overworked mother – images of folds of a tree that invite embrace, roots that cradle, the caressing of boulders, the safety of the womb.”

Lora Jo combined this love in nature with her interest in the arts and commitment to immigrant women’s rights to co-create Asian American Women Artists + Craftswomen Faire. This annual winter arts and crafts faire brought together local Asian American women artists to sell their wares, with a percentage of their sales to benefit Asian Immigrant Women Advocates. It seeded a wide-ranging, inter-generational community of artists and their supporters to celebrate the connection between beauty, human rights, and dignity.

Lora Jo’s caring for the natural world also led her to work in the environmental movement. She worked at Worksafe, an organization at the intersection of labor and the environment. She also participated in the campaign for No Coal in Oakland, where she brought her legal expertise to bear on a critical argument.

After many organizing campaigns, Lora Jo understood that success for working people and the environment depended upon power, and that political campaigns were critical. She volunteered countless hours for local, regional and national electoral campaigns, and was a volunteer leader in Working America, a political action program of the AFL-CIO.

Several years ago Lora Jo moved from the Bay Area to southern California, to a community of retired social activists called Pilgrim Place. There she continued her interests in the arts, nature, and politics, and was particularly active in supporting the rights of the Palestinian people.

“She was barely 5 feet tall and always spoke with a quiet authority,” said Julie Su, former acting Secretary of Labor who was mentored by Lora Jo. “She made the world better for more people and in more ways than she would ever know.”

One of Lora Jo’s favorite quotes was, “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” It is attributed to Albert Einstein, but it sums up Lora Jo’s spirit and outlook on life.

Lora Jo is survived by her sisters Betty Jo, Dorothy Jo, Ida Jo and Ann Jo, and their families.

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