Speakers

Ana Luisa Avendaño Denier has devoted her career to helping low-wage immigrant workers and their families. She currently serves as an Associate General Counsel and Director of the Immigrant Worker Program at the AFL-CIO. Prior to joining the AFL-CIO, she served as a consultant to the National Immigration Law Center, where she assisted in the development of legal and policy strategies to address the Supreme Court’s decision in Hoffman Plastic Compounds v. NLRB. She also served as Assistant General Counsel of the 1.4 million-member United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, where she was a front-line advocate in organizing, bargaining, and representation campaigns for immigrant workers. She was actively involved in the development of the labor movement’s historic call for amnesty and immigration reform. She also served in the Appellate Court Branch of the National Labor Relations Board, and in private practice in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Avendaño Denier is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and the University of California at Berkeley.

Matthew T. Bodie is an associate professor at Hofstra University School of Law. He teaches business organizations, contracts, and employment Law. Prior to joining the Hofstra faculty, Bodie taught at New York University School of Law as an acting assistant professor of lawyering. He graduated from Princeton University magna cum laude in 1991. He attended Harvard Law School, where he was an editor and social chair of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, Bodie served as a law clerk for Judge M. Blane Michael of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He then joined the New York office of the National Labor Relations Board as a field attorney. Bodie’s research focuses on the intersection between business and labor law. His articles have appeared in Iowa Law Review, Georgia Law Review, Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal, and the Journal of Labor Research.

Fred Feinstein, former General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, is a Visiting Professor and Senior Fellow in the Office of Executive Programs. He conducts research and writes on labor issues and develops executive education programs on such subjects as the challenge of adapting labor policy to new work environments. During his nearly six-year tenure as General Counsel, Feinstein was recognized for efforts to improve the administration of the National Labor Relations Act. He instituted a system for case prioritization and made significant progress towards assuring that elections for union representation were consistently conducted in a timely manner. He received three “Hammer Awards” for these and other innovations in the operations of the Office of General Counsel.

Janice Fine is Senior Fellow for Policy and Organizing at the Center for Community Change and Research Associate at the Economic Policy Institute. She will be joining the faculty of the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers in the summer of 2005. For the past two years, Fine has been the principal investigator of a national study on immigrant worker centers that is forthcoming from Cornell University Press and EPI in the fall of 2005. For many years, she has written about the labor movement and community organizing as well as the influence of money in American politics and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Industrial Performance Center at MIT as well as the Open Society Institute. In addition to her academic work, Fine has worked as a community, labor, and electoral organizer for more than twenty years. From 1981-83 she was the President of United States Student Association. During the 80’s, she worked for the AFL-CIO in Broward County, Florida, Massachusetts Fair Share in Boston, the Jackson ‘88 presidential campaign as well as numerous other electoral campaigns. In 1991, she founded the New England Money and Politics Project at Northeast Action and played a leading role in passing the nation’s first “Clean Election” law in Maine and subsequently in Massachusetts. Until 2003, she was the Organizing Director and Lead Trainer at Northeast Action, the hub of a regional network of statewide progressive electoral coalitions and citizen action groups across New York and New England.

Jennifer Gordon is Associate Professor of Law at Fordham Law School in New York City. Prior to joining the Fordham faculty, in 1992 Gordon founded the Workplace Project in New York, a nationally recognized grassroots workers center that organizes low-wage Latino immigrants to fight for just treatment on the job. After leaving the Workplace Project in 1998, she was the J. Skelly Wright Fellow at Yale Law School, where for two years she taught a seminar on “Workers, the Law and the Changing Economy.” Gordon has also worked as a consultant to the AFL-CIO, the Campaign for Human Development of the Catholic Church, and the Ford Foundation, among others. Her book Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights has just been published by Harvard University Press. Gordon’s previous publications include “Immigrants Fight the Power,” The Nation, January 3, 2000, and “We Make the Road by Walking: Immigrant Workers and the Struggle for Social Change,” 30 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 407 (1995). A magna cum laude graduate of both Harvard/Radcliffe College and Harvard Law School, Gordon was chosen in 1995 as one of National Law Journal’s forty leading lawyers under the age of 40 in the United States. In 1998, she was named “Outstanding Public Interest Advocate of the Year” by the National Association for Public Interest Law (now Equal Justice Works). She was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1999.

Seth D. Harris spent nearly seven years at the United States Department of Labor as a senior advisor to both of President Clinton’s Secretaries of Labor on policy, legal, management, and strategy issues. Professor Harris, who teaches Employment Discrimination Law, Labor Relations Law, and Problem-Solving & the Law of the Workplace at New York Law School, still maintains close contacts in Washington, D.C., and relishes enriching his teaching and legal scholarship with an understanding of politics and public policy. His scholarship examines the intersection of economics and the law of the workplace. He also serves as New York Law School’s Director of Labor & Employment Law Programs.

Charles Heckscher’s research focuses on organization change and its consequences for employees and unions, and on the possibilities for more collaborative and democratic forms of work. His books have explored the future of the labor movement (The New Unionism), the changing approaches of corporate management (The Post-Bureaucratic Organization), the effects of downsizing and restructuring on employee loyalty (White-Collar Blues), and the process of building stakeholder relations (Agents of Change). He has also written widely on mutual-gains bargaining, employment-rights movements, labor-management partnerships, and workplace participation. As Director of the Center for Workplace Transformation he is leading research into the development of collaboration in local unions and corporations. Before coming to Rutgers he worked for the Communications Workers’ union and taught Human Resources Management at the Harvard Business School.

Scott Heiferman is CEO of Meetup.com, revolutionizing how people organize local real-world community groups. Meetup.com first became well known for powering the grassroots presidential campaign of Howard Dean. Now, nearly 2 million people (and growing) have started or signed up for local self-organized Meetup Groups in over 50 countries about knitting, Chihuahuas, conservative politics, and most every other cause or interest that brings groups together. The company’s Board of Directors include Esther Dyson, Pierre Omidyar (Founder/Chairman, eBay), and Andreas Stavropoulos (DFJ). In 2002, Heiferman co-founded Fotolog.net, now the world’s largest online photo community. In 1995, Heiferman founded i-traffic, the pioneering online ad agency now owned by Omnicom. Previously, Heiferman was “Interactive Marketing Frontiersman” at Sony, where he created Sony’s first consumer online presence. In 2004, Heiferman was given a Rave Award by Wired Magazine for “Electrifying The Grassroots”, and he was named the M.I.T. Technology Review “Innovator of the Year”. He graduated from The University of Iowa and has posted a photo on his personal Fotolog every day since 2001.

Sara Horowitz founded Working Today in 1995 to represent the needs and concerns of the growing independent workforce. Working Today seeks to update the nation’s social safety net, developing systems so that all working people can access affordable benefits, regardless of their job arrangement. As executive director, Horowitz takes an entrepreneurial approach, pursuing creative, market-based solutions to pressing social problems. In recognition of her efforts to create a self-sustaining organization of flexible workers, Horowitz was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1999. Recently she was named as one of Esquire Magazine’s Fifty Best & Brightest and received a community development award from the New York Mayor’s Office. Before founding Working Today, Horowitz was a labor attorney in private practice and a union organizer with 1199, the National Health and Human Service Employees Union. Prior to joining 1199, Horowitz was a public defender in New York City. Her articles on the new flexible workforce have been published in USA Today, The New Democrat, and Industrial Relations Research Association Year 2000 Volume. Working Today has been featured throughout the popular and business press, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Fast Company; as well as on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Alan Hyde is Professor and Sidney Reitman Scholar at the School of Law, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (Newark). He is the author of Working in Silicon Valley: Economic and Legal Analysis of a High-Velocity Labor Market (2003), Bodies of Law (1997); the coauthor of Cases and Materials on Labor and Employment Law (forthcoming 2005, with C.W. Summers and K.H. Dau-Schmidt) and Cases and Materials on Labor Law (2d ed., 1982, with C.W. Summers and H.H. Wellington); and has been a visiting professor at Yale, Columbia, New York University, Cardozo, and the University of Michigan law schools. His current research projects include game-theoretic analysis of transnational labor standards; design of a North American Free Labor Market; work relations in labor markets with extremely short tenures and rapid turnover, such as Silicon Valley, California; and new bargaining structures for low-wage service workers. He is a director of the Association for Union Democracy, Inc., and has represented them in litigation. He has also represented the American Civil Liberties Union and its projects in litigation concerning worker privacy and constitutional aspects of worker action. Hyde maintains a personal web page at http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hyde/.

Danielle van Jaarsveld is currently an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University, and both her Master’s degree and Ph.D. from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She studied the use of temporary workers by Microsoft in her Master’s thesis, and this influenced her dissertation entitled “Boom & Bust: An Analysis of Information Technology Work Patterns”. She is currently studying flexible employment practices in Canadian and Dutch call centers.

Thomas A. Kochan is the George M. Bunker Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He has done research on a variety of topics related to industrial relations and human resource management in the public and private sector. His recent books include: Working in America, After Lean Production: Evolving Employment Practices in the World Auto Industry (1997) and The Mutual Gains Enterprise (1994). His 1986 book The Transformation of American Industrial Relations received the annual award from the Academy of Management for the best scholarly book on management. Kochan is a Past President of the International Industrial Relations Association and the current President of the Industrial Relations Research Association (IRRA). In 1996, he received the Heneman Career Achievement Award from the Human Resources Division of the Academy of Management. He was named the Centennial Visiting Professor from The London School of Economics in 1995. From 1993 to 1995 he served as a member of the Clinton Administration’s Commission on the Future of Worker/Management Relations.

Jonathan Lange is a union organizer who has found a home in the Industrial Areas Foundation. In 1992 he was invited by the Industrial Areas Foundation and the BUILD (IAF affiliate) leadership to come to Baltimore to work on issues of work and wages. That work led to the first Living Wage Bill in the United States. Lange now supervises the IAF projects in Maryland and in the United Kingdom, where he has consulted on the first Living Wage Legislation in Europe. Lange’s interests now include voter turnout methods and urban redevelopment and the training of new organizers. He is directing an effort to build 134 homes sold to low-wage workers in Baltimore.

Nadia Marin-Molina is the Executive Director of the Workplace Project, a non-profit membership center for Latino immigrant workers on Long Island, where she has worked in various capacities since 1995. Through the Cooperatives Program, which she designed and founded, Workplace Project members have been able to launch and successfully establish New York’s first worker cooperatives in landscaping and housecleaning, allowing these workers to take control of their work. Marin-Molina graduated from New York University School of Law, where she was a recipient of a Public Service Scholarship in recognition of her work with the Latino community, and has previously worked in the area of employment law at the Center for Immigrants Rights and the New York State Division of Human Rights.

Carlin Meyer practiced employment law for 13 years, first in a private firm, then for a union, and thereafter as head of the Labor Bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s office. She was recently appointed by the Attorney General to represent him in enforcing a labor code for greengrocers. She is a past president of the New York City Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and remains active in that organization, as well as in feminist legal organizations. She is currently a Professor at New York Law School, teaching in the areas of employment law, family law, and feminist jurisprudence.

Frank Munger teaches about poverty, economic justice, local government, and constitutional law. His research often combines analysis of legal policy with ethnographic and quantitative methods of inquiry. He is studying the new administrative state—a combination of entrepreneurial administration with devolution of policy making, privatization of public services, and other market-inspired changes—through a case study of welfare administration in New York City and Buffalo. He is also studying economic change in Southeast Asia and is in the final stages of a historical study of law and change in early West Virginia. Together with colleagues, he is writing a casebook on local government law that will emphasize issues of economic justice and democratic accountability. Recent publications include studies of poverty and welfare, a book on identity and disability rights (Rights of Inclusion: Law and Identity in the Life Stories of Americans With Disabilities, written with David Engel, a Professor at SUNY Buffalo Law School), and an edited volume of ethnography and commentary on low-wage labor (Laboring Below the Line: The New Ethnography of Poverty, Low-Wage Labor, and Survival in the Global Economy). He is a Past President of the Law and Society Association and former general editor of the Law & Society Review.

Victor Narro is currently the Project Director of the UCLA Downtown Labor Center, where his main focus is to provide leadership training and workshops for immigrant workers from unions and worker centers throughout Los Angles. Through the Center, Narro works on policy issues affecting low income immigrant workers and creating strong alliances between community groups and labor unions. Narro was formerly the Co-Executive Director of Sweatshop Watch, where he focused on eliminating sweatshop conditions and improving the lives of garment workers through policy, advocacy, and campaign organizing efforts. Prior to coming to Sweatshop Watch, Narro was the Workers’ Rights Project Director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). Through CHIRLA’s Workers’ Rights Project, Narro was involved with organizing Day Laborers, Domestic Workers, Garment Workers, and Gardeners. Narro’s groundbreaking and innovative work in multi-ethnic organizing led to the creation of the Multi-ethnic Immigrant Workers Organizing Network (MIWON) and the Garment Worker Center. Through Narro’s leadership, the day laborer project was able to grow into the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. Narro received a law degree from University of Richmond, Virginia in 1991. His prior work experience includes Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Beth Simone Noveck is an Associate Professor of Law and the Director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School. Noveck is the founder of the Democracy Design Workshop, the Law School’s “do tank” devoted to the deepening of democratic practice through technology design. A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, Noveck teaches in the areas of intellectual property, technology, and constitutional law.

Karen Nussbaum has spent 30 years fighting for the rights of working women and men—as the founder and director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women; the president of District 925, SEIU; and the director of the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, the highest seat in the federal government devoted to women’s issues. She joined the AFL-CIO in 1996 when John Sweeney was elected president as the director of the Working Women’s Department and now serves as an assistant to the President. Nussbaum is also the executive director of Working America, a community affiliate of the AFL-CIO. Working America is a new organization for people who do not have the benefit of a union on the job. She is the author, with John Sweeney, of the book “Solutions for the New Workforce,” and with Ellen Cassedy, of the book “9to5.”

Henry H. Perritt, Jr., is Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He served as Chicago-Kent’s dean from 1997-2002 and was a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2002. He worked on telecommunications issues while on President Clinton’s Transition Team and drafted principles for electronic dissemination of public information that would later form the core of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments, adopted by Congress in 1996. During the Ford administration, Perritt served on the White House staff and as Deputy Under Secretary of Labor. He has served on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Policy Board of the National Research Council, and on a National Research Council committee on “Global Networks and Local Values.” He was a member of the inter-professional team that evaluated the FBI’s Carnivore system. Throughout his career, he has been involved in labor-management relations, with experience as a labor lawyer and negotiator. As an academic, Perritt has worked on projects combining law and engineering around the globe, including the former Yugoslavia, China, and Mexico. He is the author of more than seventy law review articles and fifteen books, including the 730-page Law and the Information Superhighway.

Steven C. Pitts is a labor specialist with the University of California-Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education (the Labor Center). He was the principal investigator for Organize…to Improve the Quality of Jobs in the Black Community: A Report on Jobs and Activism in the African American Community, a 2004 study. Since arriving at the Labor Center in August 2001, his work has focused on union leadership development programs, job quality and labor activism in the Black community, and projects involving labor-community alliances. Pitts has an A.B. in economics from Harvard College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Houston. Prior to joining the CLRE staff, he was a full-time economics instructor at Houston Community College for 15 years and an adjunct lecturer in African American Studies at the University of Houston. Before returning to the school for his graduate training, Pitts worked in an oil tool factory in Houston for eight years and was an active member of Local 1742 of the United Steelworkers of America, including holding the position of shop steward.

James Gray Pope is Professor of Law and Sidney Reitman Scholar at the Rutgers University School of Law, Newark, New Jersey. He received his A.B. and J.D. from Harvard and his Ph.D. (in politics) from Princeton. From 1974 to 1980, he worked in a variety of industrial jobs including a four-year stint as a welder at the Fore River Shipyard, where he was an active member of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers. Before joining the Rutgers faculty, he clerked for the Hon. Rose Elizabeth Bird, Chief Justice of California, and practiced with the union-side law firm of Segal, Roitman and Coleman in Boston. His articles on labor include: “Labor-Community Coalitions and Boycotts” (Texas Law Review, 1991), “Labor’s Constitution of Freedom” (Yale Law Journal, 1997), “The Thirteenth Amendment versus the Commerce Clause: Labor and the Shaping of American Constitutional Law” (Columbia Law Review, 2002), and “Worker Lawmaking, Sit-Down Strikes, and the Shaping of American Industrial Relations, 1935-1958 (forthcoming, Law & History Review).

Joel Rogers is professor of law, political science, and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and founder and director of its Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS). Rogers has written widely on democratic theory, American politics, and comparative public policy. His books include On Democracy, Right Turn, Rules of the Game, Associations and Democracy, Metro Futures, America’s Forgotten Majority, and Working Capital. Rogers is credited with originating the “high road” theory and branding of competitiveness strategies that are both highly profitable and friendly to workers, the environment, and democratic government. He is most recently a founder of the Apollo Alliance, a national project aimed at achieving sustainable U.S. energy independence within a decade. He is a contributing editor of The Nation and Boston Review and a MacArthur Foundation fellow. Newsweek identified him as one of the 100 Americans most likely to shape U.S. politics and culture in the 21st century.

Catherine K. Ruckelshaus, a graduate of Princeton University (1983) and Stanford Law School (J.D. 1989), is currently litigation director at the National Employment Law Project in New York City. Her primary areas of expertise on behalf of low-wage workers are the employment rights of contingent workers, immigrants, and workfare participants; access to benefits for low-income workers; family and medical leave; and health and safety rights. Ruckelshaus is lead counsel in the class action Ansoumana v. Gristedes Fair Labor Standards Act case, brought on behalf of nearly 1,000 West African immigrant grocery delivery workers against the contracting services who hired them and the stores who employ them. To date, that case has netted over $6 million in unpaid wages for the workers. Ruckelshaus was lead counsel in the landmark case Lopez v. Silverman, which established for the first time that a garment manufacturer was liable for the sweatshop conditions of its subcontractors, and co-authored an article in the UCLA Law Review that suggests returning to the statutory definitions in the Fair Labor Standards Act to eradicate sweatshops. Ruckelshaus regularly gives presentations at national and regional trainings, appears in national and local media, and has published several articles. Ruckelshaus was a member of the first class of Skadden, Arps fellows, spending her two years of the fellowship at the Employment Law Center (ELC) from 1989 to 1991.

Edward Sabol is Organizing Director of the Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO. He assumed responsibility for directing the national CWA organizing program in 2004, and he was previously responsible for CWA organizing in District 1, which includes New Jersey, New York, Eastern Canada, and New England states. Sabol led contract negotiations for CWA, including those with Dow Jones, Bell Laboratories, NUI, and public sector groups. He has been a member of CWA since 1981. Prior to joining the Union staff, Sabol worked as Chief Union Steward and Laboratory Technician at Rutgers Medical School. He received his Bachelors Degree in Sociology from Livingston College, Rutgers University in 1976, and his Masters in Labor Education from Rutgers University in 1980.

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