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Expanding Economic Justice: State and Local Innovations in Worker Protection
March 13 @ 9:30 am - 2:30 pm
Join us to discuss how state and local governments are responding to federal rollbacks of labor protections and advancing new models of economic justice. The event will also feature movement lawyers and organizers who are mobilizing to protect workers’ rights in the face of federal challenges.
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:
|
| 11:00 am – 11:15 am |
Break |
| 11:15 am – 12:30 pm |
Panel #2 – Movement Lawyering in Action: Building Worker 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:
|
| 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm | Lunch and Keynote Address – Betty Hung |
| 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm | Networking Session |
RSVP
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 campaign director at the California Coalition for Worker Power. Previously, at the Center for Popular Democracy, Deutsch anchored passage and implementation of Fair Workweek policies and built a national campaign hub to fight forced arbitration and advance innovative policy for collective enforcement of workplace rights. In 2020, Deutsch launched Unemployed Action, a digital organizing initiative, and led a national coalition to win extension of federal pandemic unemployment benefits for 14 million workers. Deutsch previously litigated cases involving labor and employment, elections, and environmental protection. Before law school, Deutsch organized hospital workers with the Service Employees International Union. Deutsch is a graduate of 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.
Winnie Kao
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
Worker Power Director Nayantara Mehta joined NELP in 2015 as a senior staff attorney, focusing on policies that improve and expand workplace protections for low-wage and immigrant workers and on eliminating unfair barriers to employment for people with criminal records.
NELP’s Worker Power team includes a national program supporting worker centers and a California program supporting a statewide community-public agency partnership to challenge wage theft in seven industries. Nayantara also supports the efforts of NELP’s Work Structures team to advance policies that make work more stable and secure and to challenge policies and practices that abuse complex work structures to push responsibility and risk away from employers onto workers.
Nayantara joined NELP after almost nine years at Alliance for Justice, where she advised nonprofits and foundations on legal issues related to advocacy, lobbying, and electoral campaigns. During that time, she also spent two years as a fellow with the Women’s Policy Institute, a program of the Women’s Foundation of California, advocating on economic and reproductive justice issues in the California legislature.
Outside of NELP, Nayantara acts in an advisory role to the Forefront Project, which provides legal support to reproductive rights and justice organizations nationally. She served for six years, including two years as board president, on the board of directors of Oakland-based APEN (Asian Pacific Environmental Network), an environmental justice organization that builds leadership within immigrant and refugee communities and advocates for policies that make communities healthier and stronger. She also served for 11 years on the Executive Board of the Bay Area lawyer chapter of the American Constitution Society.
Nayantara is a proud member of the NELP Staff Association, NOLSW, UAW, LOCAL 2320.
Satoshi Yanai
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