Get Radical in the South, colloquially known as GRITS, is a student-run, public interest law conference at the University of Texas School of Law that organizes panels about immigration, climate change, criminal justice, and other public interest issues in the context of the U.S. South.
Fifteen students planned this year’s annual conference, which was virtual, by way of the pandemic. GRITS organizer and law student Nicole Steinberg reminisced about her pre-law school involvement in a union campaign at work, noting it was one of a few times she felt that correcting some kind of social injustice was possible.
“Once I got to law school, I was disappointed by the lack of opportunities available to southern-based law students interested in workers’ rights. A Texas Law alumnus told me I would have to go back to the northeast after graduation to pursue this work. During a workers’ rights conference last year, which organized regional workshops, a southern-based workshop was not available, even though the South is by no means a small region! I know that this work is possible in the South by the very nature of our panelists doing the work.”
This year’s GRITS conference arrives at a time when the global pandemic has laid bare the exponential effects of poverty, institutional racism, and the acceleration of capitalistic power.
The conference contextualizes topics like housing, environmental justice, and decarceration within the unique U.S. Southern organizing experience.
The “Labor Organizing: From the U.S. South to the Global” panel discusses the theoretical and practical work labor lawyers will need to do to organize and stand up for workers in increasingly hostile environments. While employers have received trillions of dollars in COVID-19 aid and continue to exploit vulnerable communities, many workers continue to work in unsafe conditions without government protection.
Moderator Texas labor law legend Professor Bill Beardall is joined by panelist General Counsel Matthew Stark Blumin of the internationally acclaimed Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), and CUNY Law workers’ rights trailblazers Professor Chaumtoli Huq and CUNY Law alum Judge Jaribu Hill ’95, who recently concluded another year of co-teaching The Mississippi Project Delegation.
Bill opens the discussion by asking panelists to outline obstacles lawyers face in doing labor justice work in the U.S. South and to offer potential solutions they use to meet these challenges.
Jaribu reflects on Mississippi and the many obstacles they face when advocating for labor rights. In many contexts, Mississippi is a hostile environment for laborers. In addition to being reactionary and anti-worker, it’s also anti-people — especially anti-dispossessed people, anti-poor people, and anti-people whose skin is Black or Brown. The political climate and culture are other obstacles. She notes that even when people refer to the group “Democrats,” they often are referring to Dixiecrats.
Under the political climate of the Confederate flag and the illusion that Black folks had taken everything away from them, folks vote for and labor under this symbol of the Klan. Mississippi is also operating in an anti-union climate, where union density rests around 4.2%, and, in many cases, those most affected by labor injustices do not have a vote nor the human right to unionize. All of these obstacles, coupled with a lack of political accountability and courage on the part of elected officials of all colors to make changes, create a hostile, anti-union environment that houses some of the worst culprits of worker abuses.
Chaumtoli surfaces the existence of the global system of exploitation where workers are connected by corporate interest and dispossessed through a transnational labor frame. She urges lawyers to look beyond industrial labor to agriculture and rural workers globally, to witness the global exploitation along the supply line.
Matt underlines that laws on the books systematically disempower and disenfranchise workers, and the laws meant to protect workers are often hard to enforce. For instance, farmworkers are excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act, and while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) purports to protect workers, they don’t protect the immediate family members of farmworkers, nor can they inspect farms that have ten or less employees. This lack of coverage impedes the pursuit of retaliation action. He laments that over 70% of farms subject to investigation have wage and labor violations, but only 1% of those are investigated.
After assessing the climate and subsequent obstacles around which lawyers will work with organizers to bring about change, Bill asks panelists what they think their ideal roles are in supporting and empowering workers in the U.S. South and beyond.
Chaumtoli’s legal inquiry in shaping those roles first asks if the legal strategy sought intends to build worker power, or if it strives to curate the political and economic conditions needed for power to emerge to support dignity and autonomy.
In both cases, finding the lever of power through law and then fashioning a precise legal strategy around those levers to empower workers require a more nuanced understanding of conditions beyond the individual to the global systems in which they exist and operate. Together, those levers, strategies, and the contexts in which both operate shape the roles lawyers will take on in these cases.
At its most fundamental level, Matt frames the work as “partnerships with humans to achieve basic dignity,” which ideally means that lawyers work with communities with which they feel most connected. That deep tie to mission digs beyond the intellectual to the visceral — where in what Jaribu calls an “act of suicide,” lawyers shed privilege by embodying the identities of the sufferers they serve at the cost of their own identities, in efforts to keep the client-centered and present. She calls that connection one of “privilege and honor” and, as a labor organizer, has been on both sides of that connection. Chaumtoli notes the dissonance between being raised in and supported by a union and later learning in law school that movement lawyering scholarship generally assumed lawyers were outside of, and separate from, the worker groups with whom they advocated.
In this hostile, anti-union environment where accountability is lacking and the legal tools are limited, labor lawyers must get creative in using the levers of law and power to build strong communities from the ground up. Blumin discusses the creation of a worker-driven social responsibility model through CIW that relies on a combination of market enforcement and disincentivizing forced labor to protect workers’ human rights.
The CIW has developed a code of conduct that farms must follow, in order to be considered in good standing with the CIW. The CIW has contracted with 14 of the largest global retailers, which ensures those retailers only buy from farms in good standing. Those retailers also pay a premium on top of purchases to go directly to the workers as bonuses. If a farm is found to be non-compliant, they lose access to all 14 retailers. In the case of trafficking, they uphold a zero-tolerance policy, which at first instance bans farms forever.
Chaumtoli asserted that the relationship of labor lawyers to workers was dependent on context and continually shifting. Lawyering was one tool in a more formal client-lawyer relationship. The ethics and politics of movement lawyering require deferential treatment of client needs, but some lawyers are part of these communities, and the roles aren’t as clear-cut. She also affirmed that personal tensions like families and children change a lawyer’s relationship to the work, and it would behoove students to become comfortable with the ebb and flow of movement lawyering.
Students should also look beyond their professors as their sole source of learning and work to co-create their own learning. In addition to engaging with faculty readily in efforts to expand the curriculum, she suggests using racial capitalism as a frame for labor rights. One of the main failures of law schools in teaching movement lawyering is presenting the law in a way that is disempowering to students — specifically working-class and first-generation students, who often feel alienated by their educational experience.
Jaribu highlights the need for law schools to create environments like the environment she experienced at CUNY Law, which she considers a “utopia.” She was able to use her education in furthering the cause of liberation — in this case, freedom from all barriers — and asserts that this environment needs to be curated, so students don’t have to pit their livelihoods against their heart’s work. She notes that while lawyers can’t create or make movements, they can force debate around law school pedagogy. Curricula can be more relevant to movement lawyering and to the students’ lives, who also often occupy the liminal space of community member and lawyer, as Chaumtoli previously mentioned.
Retaliation in law school for speaking out can and should be minimized. She centers the frame of intentionally examining what burgeoning lawyers will become in furtherance of people with whom they stand, and recommends that students take courses like civil rights litigation, criminal procedure, and race and the law.
Matt highlights that lawyers can help set up new organizations to assist with this work. He notes that classes like bankruptcy, antitrust, and corporations are all valuable to movement lawyering, as they grease the wheels of capitalism. Additionally, these subject areas are important for assessing workers’ and laborers’ needs.
In these increasingly hostile, anti-union environments in the U.S. South, movement lawyers and their access to a variety of strategies and tools are vital. As the pandemic cedes and those in the U.S. South and in similar environments globally wrestle with the now magnified effects of inequity and worker disempowerment, movement lawyers are tasked with enabling worker power and creating conditions for power to emerge, and they’ll not only need legal training, but affinity with local groups and an understanding of the unique conditions under which these inequities proliferate. The GRITS Conference is one of the spaces in which the emergent, interdisciplinary knowledge needed to tackle these global issues locally arises, and U.S. movement lawyers and movement-lawyers-to-be should check this conference out to get more involved.