Actors’ Equity has named Lynn Rhinehart as special counsel, effective immediately.
Rhinehart comes to Actors’ Equity from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), where she served as general counsel from 2009 until her retirement from the organization in 2018. The AFL-CIO is the largest federation of unions in the United States, comprised of 55 unions that represent 12.5 million working men and women.
As special counsel to Actors’ Equity, Rhinehart will guide the development of Equity 2020, which, according to Mary McColl, executive director of Actors’ Equity, is the union’s mission to create a “more aggressive, inclusive and responsive union” by the year 2020.
A graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, Rhinehart first began working for the AFL-CIO legal department in 1996 as Associate General Counsel. She serves on the board of the National Employment Law Project, the advisory board for Harvard Law School’s Clean Slate Project, an initiative that seeks to reform labor law to rebalance the economy and politics, and is a senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute with a focus on unions and collective bargaining.
This appointment comes a little more than a month after Actors’ Equity reached an agreement on lab contracts, ending the union’s 33-day-long strike.
