As the Federal government continues to dismantle critical economic protections—gutting collective bargaining rights for public workers, weakening anti-discrimination safeguards, and rolling back hard-fought worker protections—state and local governments are emerging as critical arenas for defending and reimagining economic justice. This symposium convenes lawyers, policymakers, and movement organizers to examine how state and local actors can advance transformative labor policy from below—countering federal retrenchment, developing new frameworks for worker power and inclusion, and identifying the legal, institutional, and organizing tools needed to promote long-term economic justice and democratic stability.

 

Program Schedule

Time	Program
9:30 am – 9:45 am	Welcoming Remarks
9:45 am – 11:00 am	Panel #1 – State and Local Interventions: Legal Strategies for Worker Protections This panel will explore how state and local governments are responding to federal rollbacks of labor protections and advancing new models for economic justice. Panelists: Branden Butler, Director, San Diego County Office of Ethics, Compliance, & Labor Standards Matthew Goldberg, Chief Attorney, Worker Protection Team, S.F. City Attorney’s Office Ellen Love, Policy & Project Analyst, Low-Wage Work Program, UC Berkeley Labor Center Satoshi Yanai, Senior Assistant Attorney General, Worker Rights and Fair Labor Section at California Department of Justice Moderator: Seema N. Patel, Associate Professor of Law, UC Law SF
11:00 am – 11:15 am	Break
11:15 am – 12:30 pm	Panel #2 – Movement Lawyering in Action: Building Worker Power Through Community-State Collaboration This panel brings together movement lawyers, worker advocates and organizers, and state and local advocates to examine how communities and state agencies can work innovatively and collaboratively to advance worker protections. Panelists will explore how lawyers inside and outside government, alongside movement leaders, are co-creating strategies that make public institutions more responsive, accountable, and aligned with worker-led demands. Panelists: Rachel Deutsch, Local Progress Winnie Kao, Senior Counsel, Impact Litigation, Asian Law Caucus Minsu Longiaru, Senior Staff Attorney, Worker Power, PowerSwitch Action Nayantara Mehta, [Former] Director, Worker Power Program, National Employment Law Project (NELP) Moderator: Brenda Muñoz, Executive Director, UC Berkeley Labor Center
12:30 pm – 1:30 pm	Lunch and Keynote Address Speaker: Betty Hung, Assistant Deputy Chief of the California Labor Commissioner’s Office
1:30 pm – 2:30 pm	Networking Session

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Speaker Biographies

 

Branden Butler

Branden Butler is the Director of the County’s Office of Ethics, Compliance, and Labor Standards. He oversees two Offices, Office of Ethics and Compliance (OEC) and Office of Labor Standards and Enforcement (OLSE). During his leadership at OLSE, Branden has developed the innovative Workplace Justice Fund to help workers collect unpaid wage theft judgments, created the Good Faith Restaurant Owners Program requiring the suspension of food permits for unpaid wage theft judgments, and led the development of the San Diego wage theft dashboard that identifies employers with wage theft judgments. Additionally, Branden led the creation of a new policy to protect county contracted janitors from wage theft.

 

Prior to joining the County, Branden was the first Assistant Deputy Director of Outreach and Education for the California Civil Rights Department (CRD). During his state service at the California Civil Rights Department (CRD), Branden was involved in developing education, outreach, and enforcement programs regarding discrimination in the workplace. Branden co-created the Sexual Harassment Prevention Training for CRD which has been taken by millions of employees and supervisors in California.

 

Branden also led the state campaign to educate employers, community organizations, and law enforcement about the rights of the formerly incarcerated under the Fair Chance Act, a pioneering state law that seeks to reduce barriers to employment for justice involved individuals. Branden worked with community-based reentry organizations and employers to develop the Fair Chance Act Toolkit to assist both employees and employers follow the law. Additionally, Branden worked with the California Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections to develop an informational video on the Fair Chance Act that airs in all state prisons on Inmate TV. Branden’s Fair Chance Act work included leading an enforcement initiative using pioneering technology to conduct mass searches of online job advertisements for violations of the Act.

 

Prior to joining CRD, Branden was the Senior Attorney of the Fair Housing Center of the Legal Aid Society of San Diego, Inc. (LASSD), where for nine years he was instrumental in creating the first fair housing services program at LASSD that provides education, outreach, testing, and enforcement/ litigation. Branden graduated cum laude from Thomas Jefferson School of Law and received the Charles T. Bumer Civil Libertarian Award. Branden earned his B.A. graduating magna cum laude from California State University, Chico. Branden recently received the 2023 County of San Diego Excellence in Leadership Award. Branden also published an article in the California Bar Real Property Journal entitled, “40 Acres and a Mule. Broken Promises, Black Wealth Inequality, Persistence of Housing Segregation and Exclusion, and How to Right (Some of) These Wrongs.”

 

Rachel Deutsch

Rachel Deutsch is Legal Director at Local Progress and Local Progress Impact Lab. Before joining Local Progress, Rachel led successful campaigns with the California Coalition for Worker Power to strengthen California’s labor standards and align worker organizations across the state. Previously, at Popular Democracy, Rachel anchored passage and implementation of Fair Workweek policies; advanced innovative policy for collective enforcement of workplace rights; and in 2020 launched Unemployed Action, a digital organizing initiative, leading a national coalition to win extension of federal pandemic unemployment benefits for 14 million workers. Rachel also spent five years litigating cases involving labor and employment, environmental standards, and consumer protection. Before law school, Rachel organized hospital workers with the Service Employees International Union. Rachel graduated from Columbia Law School and Yale College, and lives in Los Angeles.

 

Matthew Goldberg

Matthew Goldberg is currently the Chief Attorney of the Worker Protection Team at the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office. Prior to their current role, Matthew served as a Special Assistant Attorney General at the California Department of Justice. With a background in employment law and public policy, Matthew has held roles such as Deputy City Attorney at the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office and Director of the Unemployment & Wage Claims Project at the Legal Aid Society Employment Law Center. Matthew holds a Juris Doctor from the University of California, College of the Law, a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, and a Bachelor of Science from the University of San Francisco.

 

Betty Hung

Betty Hung is the Assistant Deputy Chief of the California Labor Commissioner’s O;ice (LCO) where she oversees the LCO’s legislative and policy portfolio and promotes crossprogram collaborative enforcement initiatives. Before joining the LCO, Betty was Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Labor at the U.S. Department of Labor, where she focused on good jobs, equity, and worker safety net issues. A longtime advocate for workers’ rights and responsible business practices, Betty’s previous leadership roles included serving as Policy Director at Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles; Sta; Director at the UCLA Labor Center; and Directing Attorney of the Employment Law Unit at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

 

Betty has worked on a spectrum of social and economic justice campaigns and initiatives in the areas of workers’ rights, racial justice, immigrant rights, education equity, workforce development, and gender justice. Betty began her career representing workers in low-wage industries with wage claims in Labor Commissioner proceedings and has extensive experience in law and organizing. She served on the legal team that litigated the El Monte Thai and Latina garment worker case, as well as the legal team supporting the leadership of Dream Team LA in the successful campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). On the policy and legislative front, Betty played an integral role in several successful campaigns, including securing $10 million in the California state budget for the state labor agency’s SEED Initiative supporting immigrant entrepreneurship and worker cooperatives; enacting landmark state legislation allocating $240 million to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the K-to-University of California graduation pipeline; establishing protections for immigrant students in K-12 schools throughout California; defeating proposed legislation that would have required the equivalent English-only business signs in a predominantly immigrant municipality; winning $22 million in additional annual income for Los Angeles taxi workers; obtaining reauthorization of the Car Wash Worker Law; and passing state legislation to address racial and identity profiling by law enforcement.

 

Betty has extensive experience in coalition building and fostering government-communitylabor partnerships, including helping to co-found the Coalition of Low Wage and Immigrant Worker Advocates (CLIWA). She has a long history of community engagement and previously served on the boards of the LA Black Worker Center, CLEAN Carwash Worker Center, Worksafe, Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and ACLU of Southern California. Betty is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.

 

Winnie Kao

Winnie Kao is Senior Counsel for impact litigation at the Asian Law Caucus (ALC). Winnie served as ALC’s Litigation Director from 2012 – 2020. She also directed ALC’s Workers’ Rights Program from 2011 – 2024. Prior to joining ALC, Winnie worked at a union-side labor and employment law firm where she primarily represented hotel, restaurant, and food and commercial workers and unions in a wide variety of labor, employment, constitutional, and class-action cases. Winnie was previously a trial attorney for the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division where she litigated housing and public accommodation discrimination cases, and has worked as a community organizer for labor and civil rights groups. She has won commendations and awards for her work from numerous organizations including the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the University of Michigan Law School.

 

Minsu Longiaru

Minsu provides legal support and strategic thought partnership to organizing and policy campaigns in the PowerSwitch Action Network that build worker power through the interaction of organizing, comprehensive campaigning, direct representation, impact litigation, and policy and administrative strategies.

 

Minsu has dedicated her career to learning to be—what lawyer, legal scholar, and advocate Amanda Alexander calls— an “organizer with legal skills,” who can provide wide-ranging support to movements, social justice groups, and organizers. After graduating from law school, Minsu spent ten years directly supporting workers centers and worker-led movements. During this time she served as a Skadden fellow and staff attorney in legal aid and clinical law programs, a Fulbright Garcſa-Robles fellow researching transnational advocacy networks, and held local and national leadership positions at Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, in which she was responsible for weaving together workplace justice, research, and policy campaigns.

 

Minsu devoted the next ten years of her career to honing her skills as a seasoned workers’ rights attorney with experience in investigations, litigation, and policy. This included four years representing workers and labor organizations at a union-side law firm, and nearly six years working in government enforcing workers’ rights laws. Most recently she served as a Deputy Attorney General with the State of California’s Worker Rights and Fair Labor Section, addressing systemic business practices that undermine the working conditions of app-based workers, warehouse workers, and others. For their work, Minsu and her colleagues were awarded the Attorney General Team Award in 2021 and 2022 for demonstrating the highest professional work standards.

 

But whatever Minsu has done pales in comparison to what she has seen workers and communities do time and time again: put everything on the line to stand up for transformative justice. Whenever a challenge seems daunting, she thinks of their call to all of us to dwell in and act from a place of hope and radical possibility.

 

Minsu holds a BA and JD from Harvard University. Outside of work, Minsu enjoys spending time with her family, and playing the cello, which she does mostly in her basement but occasionally elsewhere.

 

Ellen Love

Ellen Love focuses on strengthening local and state labor law enforcement, working directly with labor enforcement agencies as well as their community-based partners. Ellen has 10 years of hands-on experience implementing local labor laws with the San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement. Ellen facilitated outreach on new labor laws, led data collection and analysis, managed contracts with community groups, and conducted investigations. She has also assisted state and local governments with socially responsible public procurement at the Responsible Purchasing Network and supported the start-up of worker-owned businesses with Prospera in Oakland, California. Ellen holds a master’s degree in public policy from the Goldman School at the University of California, Berkeley and a BA from Brown University.

 

Nayantara Mehta

Nayantara Mehta was most recently the Director of the Worker Power Program at the National Employment Law Project (NELP). She worked on a range of economic justice policy issues, such as improving conditions and identifying pathways to build power for workers in precarious and underpaid jobs, from “gig work” to issues affecting workers with arrest and conviction records. She represented NELP in various roles in the California Strategic Enforcement Partnership (CSEP), the California Coalition for Worker Power (CCWP), and the Coalition for Low-Wage and Immigrant Worker Advocates (CLIWA). During her 10 years at NELP, Nayantara was a proud member of the NELP Staff Association, NOLSW, UAW, LOCAL 2320.

 

Before working at NELP, Nayantara spent almost nine years with the Alliance for Justice’s Bolder Advocacy program, where she advised organizations and coalitions on the legal issues related to their campaigns for economic justice, immigrants’ rights, environmental justice, reproductive justice, and more.

 

Nayantara has a JD from Berkeley Law, an MA from the University of Chicago, and a BA from the College of William and Mary.

 

Brenda Muñoz

Brenda Muñoz has over 20 years of experience working with labor unions and organizations in the nonprofit, public, and private sectors to improve the lives and well-being of working people. She has diverse skills as an organizer, strategic researcher, policy analyst, and manager.

 

Prior to joining the Labor Center, Brenda led the strategic and programmatic direction of the Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership’s Labor Liaison Program. She served as a bridge between public and private sector union leaders and Kaiser Permanente leaders on health benefit and worker well-being issues. Earlier, Brenda worked as a policy analyst at the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO), and, as a graduate student, with the San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement researching and analyzing employer compliance with the historic San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance. As a staff member at the Berkeley-based nonprofit Labor Project for Working Families, Brenda conducted outreach and education among union members around work and family balance issues. She also worked at AFSCME in several states, including California, Maryland, and New Mexico, as both an organizer and a strategic researcher. Brenda has a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She enjoys hiking, crafting, and photography.

Satoshi Yanai

Satoshi Yanai is the Senior Assistant Attorney General of the Worker Rights and Fair Labor Section at the California Department of Justice. The mission of the Worker Rights and Fair Labor Section is to utilize the broad legal powers of the Office of the Attorney General to conduct investigations, litigation, and policy advocacy in order to combat systemic business practices that undermine the economic security, health and safety, and dignity of California workers, and to maintain a level playing field for legitimate businesses operating in the State. Prior to joining the California Department of Justice in 2007, Satoshi advocated on behalf of workers at the U.S. Department of Labor, Office of the Solicitor; at the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (now the California Civil Rights Department); and in private practice at a firm representing labor unions and multiemployer employee benefit plans.