Update on some of our work.
We’ve been busy. A few things worth mentioning:
The case against the Kingston tax assessor and others on behalf of the LGBTQ Center is chugging along. The defendants filed their opposition papers earlier this week. Center board president Ginny Apuzzo was interviewed on Northeast Public Radio yesterday evening. I sat in my car in my driveway listening to it. It was a terrific piece talking about the Center’s outreach efforts, and concluding with a discussion of the lawsuit. It was nice to hear a discussion of the Center’s terrific work juxtaposed against Kingston’s outrageous denial of the Center’s tax exempt status.
In our case against the Sullivan County poultry plant, the judge granted our motion to distribute “Curative Notice.” The case was certified as a class action in January ‘07, but the employer had engaged in what we are claiming was a campaign to confuse and intimidate class members and prospective plaintiffs, including requiring employees to sign a “work agreement” that had a mandatory arbitration provision. As a result, the employer was required to distribute this Curative Notice, which among other things informed employees that the work agreement had no impact on their rights. The distribution occurred concurrently with the distribution of the employer’s payroll checks, in sealed envelopes which we provided so as to prevent tampering.
I’ll be participating in several human trafficking discussions and trainings over the next couple weeks. First, I’ll do a presentation on labor trafficking for the New York Police Academy. The next day, I’m off to Washington, DC to participate in a panel discussion of human trafficking issues at the National Immigration Law Center conference. From DC, I get on a plane to Barcelona, Spain. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Human Rights Department invited me to participate in a workshop on human trafficking and labor exploitation. The following week, I’ll do another presentation on labor trafficking — primarily for law enforcement in NYC.
In late October, I filed a class certification motion and a summary judgment motion in our case against a large construction contractor who our clients allege violated federal and state wage & hour protections. The Defendants filed their own summary judgment motion, and we filed our opposition papers on Monday.
The same day we filed our class cert and summary judgment motions in the construction case, we — along with our co-counsel at Kaye Scholer and FLSNY — filed our class certification motion in our western New York human trafficking case. The defendants have filed their opposition papers, so we’re plugging along with our replies.
In another case we’re co-counseling with Kaye Scholer — our gender discrimination case against one of the largest recruiters of H-2A and H-2B guestworkers from Mexico, the judge issued a great decision granting our class certification motion.
Several other cases are in the thick of discovery.
Needless to say, it’s been a busy Fall/early winter.
Dan
