Asian Law Journal Symposium on Labor and Immigration

Abstract

I'm going to address the role of attorneys as organizers. Usually when you think about attorneys, you don't think about attorneys' roles as organizers or as part of the broader struggle of the community. Where I work, at the Asian Law Caucus, the two worlds really do meet: we try to fuse our litigation with being active outside the litigation to empower and organize immigrant workers. I'm going to talk about the framework we use at the Asian Law Caucus and how I specifically use it in the employment and labor project to empower immigrant workers. There are basically four steps to empowerment in organizing immigrant workers. These are empowerment through education, through community organizing, through litigation, and through coalition building. All of these steps are intertwined; they are not separate things and you can't think about them productively in separate contexts. You do want them to depend on each other. We try to do all of them together and that's a hard task, but a productive one. Whenever you're going after an employer and advocating for immigrant workers, you try to use a multi-pronged approach. Lora Foo talked about it this morning: you've got to attack a problem from all sides instead of using the narrow focus that law school teaches you to think about, which stresses only litigation and legal solutions. At the Asian Law Caucus we really try to find a broad-based solution. But without thinking outside of that litigation/lawyer box, we are not really going to be able to empower or organize workers. In empowering immigrant workers, education is one of the most basic needs we address. We strive to provide education on their legal rights, education on what they can do to advocate for themselves and for their fellow workers. Most immigrant workers come from countries that have poor labor laws. They come from countries where government agencies are not friends of the workers or friends of the poor. They are often accustomed to dealing with corruption. A lot of immigrant workers are afraid