Less than two weeks remain until the WRLC’s big fundraising raffle.   Tickets are $100, and only 299 tickets will be sold.  Prizes are $10,000, $2500, and $1000.  Plus, your ticket serves as your entrance to our chicken BBQ on June 15th at the Linwood Spiritual Center in Rhinebeck.

Check out the main webpage for more info, and call our office to purchase a ticket.

Please help us make this event a success, and support the work of the WRLC!

 – Tricia

Less than two weeks remain until the WRLC’s big fundraising raffle.   Tickets are $100, and only 299 tickets will be sold.  Prizes are $10,000, $2500, and $1000.  Plus, your ticket serves as your entrance to our chicken BBQ on June 15th at the Linwood Spiritual Center in Rhinebeck.

Check out the main webpage for more info, and call our office to purchase a ticket.

Please help us make this event a success, and support the work of the WRLC!

 – Tricia

~Lara

The OSCE has something like 56 member states, including the U.S. and Canada, all of the EU, Turkey, and most (perhaps all) of the former Soviet republics, spanning Europe and central Asia. There are participants in the workshop from close to 20 of these countries, including judges from Azerbaijan and the Ukraine, a prosecutor from Romania and a former prosecutor and a former victim-witness coordinator from the U.S., a Somali union organizer based in the UK, and folk from NGOs throughout Europe… and me.

The OSCE brought me here (on OSCE’s dime… Euro, actually) in recognition of the work the WRLC has done on behalf of immigrant workers and survivors of human trafficking. As the OSCE member states develop a protocol for compensating trafficked and exploited workers, the organizers thought having the perspective of a US-based NGO would add an important element to the dialogue.

I gave a short presentation on the first day about the perspective of exploited workers in the U.S. with respect to the importance of compensation. Since then, I’ve been listening and periodically chiming in with comments. The sessions are in English and Russian, with simultaneous interpretation through funky wireless headphone contraptions.

What I’ve found particularly interesting – and surprising – is how much farther along the U.S. is in the development of compensation for exploited workers, as compared to every other OSCE state participating in the workshop. I really didn’t expect this. My world view has not been particularly worldly. Until now, I was under the assumption that western Europe in particular was a bastion of labor bliss and social harmony (okay, a bit of an exaggeration – I’ve been well aware of the immigrant riots in Paris suburbs and some of the anti-immigrant backlash in Germany, France, and elsewhere, but in my naivete this struck me more as an aberration than a reflection of Europe’s economic and social conditions).

The reality is that remedies for exploited workers – and particularly immigrant workers – throughout Europe are extremely limited. With only a few exceptions (most notably, Spain), most of the participant states simply do not provide undocumented immigrants with a mechanism to seek redress for labor abuses (the laws on the books are great, but the remedies — and particularly the remedies for undocumented immigrants — are poor or non-existent). Undocumented immigrants are unapologetically excluded from labor law protections. Generally – and I am making some broad generalizations – in the rare cases where workers seek compensation, it is through applications made as part of criminal prosecutions, and relief is often limited to restitution, if that. Seeking what folk here in Europe refer to as “moral damages” (pain and suffering, emotional distress, punitive damages, etc.) is considered cutting edge, and where moral damages are awarded they are a pittance compared to awards in severe labor exploitation cases in the U.S.

I am in no way suggesting that our frustration with the many faults of the U.S. legal system and the treatment of immigrant workers is misguided. I’m particularly concerned that the anti-immigrant backlash we’re seeing in the U.S. may ultimately result in a corrosion of rights that brings us down to the utter and appalling absence of meaningful remedies many of the NGOs’ constituencies represented here are confronting.

Comparatively, we have a decent and equitable justice system – severely flawed in many respects – but still better than most. May our system not sag any further.

Dan

– Tricia

To purchase through Goodshop, go to http://www.goodsearch.com/?charityid=841800 (make sure Workers’ Rights Law Center of New York is selected in the “Who do you Goodsearch for?” space).  Click the “Who do you Goodshop for?” link, select the retailer, shop away, and check out the normal way.  The retailer somehow knows to credit the WRLC.

Dan

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

In summary, the authors argue that employer sanctions and guestworker programs, while both are touted as solutions to the “problem” of illegal immigration, are failed policies that have simply brought discrimination and an ever-greater “off the books” workforce, to the detriment of U.S. workers and foreign workers alike. At least part of the lesson of low-wage work in the United States, including work by U.S. citizens, guestworkers under various programs, and undocumented workers, shows that comprehensive immigration reform must mean comprehensive enforcement of the hard-won labor protections that all workers in the United States rely upon, as a matter of law, economics, and human rights.  The authors include recommendations for shoring up the wage floor for all workers and reforming guestworker programs.

For those of you with Westlaw or LEXIS access, the cite for the article is 10 N.Y.U. J. Legis. & Pub. Pol’y 555.

We’ll also be making this blog more active. There are plenty of critical issues we’re itching to write about.

We’re also looking at getting some interesting contributions from guest bloggers.  Stay tuned.