What we do
Rooted in deep partnerships with worker centers, base-building organizations and movement lawyers, GLOW's work combines legal and organizing strategies to capacitate and embolden the low-wage worker movement. Specifically, we engage in:
Law & Organizing Support for Worker Centers
GLOW partners with worker centers to use legal strategies to meet the immediate needs of workers in a manner that fosters collective action, advances pro-worker workplace organizing and policy campaigns, and builds the capacity of worker centers for the long-term.
This includes conduction popular education style trainings about workers’ rights, holding campaign specific legal clinics, providing in-depth law and organizing trainings for organizers, conducting strategic research, reviewing and drafting legislation in conjunction with organizers and worker leaders, and much more.
GLOW engages in strategic enforcement of workers’ rights by directly representing worker center members in legal matters, co-counseling high impact cases with legal allies and non-profits and private firms, providing legal referrals, and working with federal, state and local labor enforcement agencies to develop strategies to maximize the enforcement of low-wage workers’ rights. This work is done in consideration and furtherance of worker center goals and is therefore often done in conjunction with an organizing campaign or broader narrative, or system change strategy.
Strategic Enforcement
Temp Worker Advocacy
GLOW centers workers who are pushed to the margins of the labor market. Workers employed through temporary staffing have become a priority for us as the temp industry profits off of the exclusion of marginalized workers from the traditional labor market and suppresses working standards across the board. By institutionalizing a fissured work structure in every sector of our economy, temp staffing allows employers to outsource labor needs to maximize profits, shields corporations from accountability for wages and working conditions, undercuts unions, creates an exploitable second-class workforce, and disproportionately harms immigrant and BIPOC workers and communities.
To build collective power against bad jobs and collaborate across state lines to hold corporations and staffing agencies accountable, we anchor the national Temp Worker Advocacy Coalition (TWAC). The coalition is comprised of over 30 worker centers, unions, legal and policy organizations dedicated to winning justice for temp workers through strategic enforcement, local and national campaigns, base-building and more.
Organizing and Mobilizing Lawyers
GLOW is building a Worker Center Bar to help meet the immense legal needs of the low-wage worker movement, at scale. This involves engaging, recruiting and mobilizing lawyers and legal workers to use their skills to support the low-wage worker movement. The Worker Center Bar connects lawyers and legal workers with opportunities to support workers and their organizations in critical moments and through long-term engagement.
We encourage members of the private bar, law students, and legal workers to join us in creating the legal infrastructure necessary to with stand authoritarian attacks and continue to advance the fight for a bold, vibrant multi-racial democracy that prioritizes people over profit.
