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 by:
Providing Technical Support to Base-Building Partners
GLOW partners with worker centers and base-building organizations 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 providing legal, policy, and research support for campaigns, representing worker leaders in strategic enforcement actions, convening coalition and network-building spaces to build solidarity, share best practices, and advance collective fights, and engaging in thought partnership around campaign strategy and best practices for organizational resilience and sustainability.
Democratizing the Law
GLOW creates materials, trainings and workshops that empower worker-leaders and organizers to understand the law and the systems that perpetuate exploitation, challenge oppressive conditions directly, and participate in building a more just, sustainable, and equitable economy and society.
Building a Worker Center Bar
GLOW is building a Worker Center Bar to develop a scalable legal infrastructure for the low wage worker movement that is capable of withstanding authoritarian attacks and advancing the struggle for a bold, vibrant multiracial democracy that prioritizes people over profit.
This involves the strategic recruitment and mobilization of lawyers and legal workers to support low-wage workers and their organizations.
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.
Anchoring the Temp Worker Advocacy Coalition
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.
Engaging in Strategic Enforcement
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.
