LEGAL AID AT WORK
180 Montgomery St Ste 600, San Francisco, CA 94104 www.legalaidatwork.org

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Organizations Filed Purposes: LAAWs mission is to advance justice and economic opportunity for poor and low-income people and their families at work, in school, and in the community. We fight to ensure that all workers are afforded equal and fair treatment pursuant to local, state, and federal laws. Our staff and Board believe that work and workplace conditions are critical social determinants of health and that employment is essential to self-sufficiency, affords dignity, and facilitates civic engagement. LAAW acts on these principles through a variety of strategies, including: conducting targeted community outreach and education, building the capacity of grassroots organizations, medical service providers, and community-based partner organizations around California to understand and advocate for their rights on the job and beyond. providing brief legal advice and counsel to low-wage workers through in-person legal clinics and legal telephone helplines engaging in strategic litigation to both improve the law for w

We seek justice on the job and in the community by protecting and expanding the rights of low-wage workers and their families.

In 2019, we continued to aggressively pursue wage theft violations. For example, we settled a class action lawsuit representing 240 burrito makers and other workers at Gordo Taqueria for $690,000. This case was one of several cases LAAW brought against high-profile restaurants in the Bay Area to raise awareness about the all-too-common problem of wage theft in the restaurant industry and to galvanize efforts to end it. Under the settlement, the class members will get $2000 on average and over 40 workers will receive more than $5,000a tremendous amount of money for anyone, and an especially significant amount for our low-wage worker clients. We helped lead the charge for legislation that makes paid family leave accessible to low-wage workers. In a significant policy victory, Governor Newsoms 2019 budget included an expansion of the Paid Family Leave program from six to eight weeks, which was enacted into law and takes effect in 2020.We and our co-counsel at CRLA obtained a $1,000,000 settlement for clienta dairy worker from San Joaquin county who had experienced egregious immigration-related retaliationafter making powerful new federal case law that protects countless undocumented workers from retaliation at the hands of third parties acting in their employers interest. (See Arias v. Raimondo, 860 F.3d 1185, 1187 (9th Cir. 2017).)We helped combat racial injustice, for example by assisting Nelson Henry, a 95-year old black military veteran rectify a decades old wrong. He, like more than 47,000 other service members (a disproportionate number of which were black or gay) was given a discriminatory blue discharge after World War II. The discharge carried a powerful stigma for Mr. Henry throughout his lifeexcluding him from many jobs, cutting off GI benefits, and resulting in him driving a cab for 13 years instead of enrolling in dental school (where he had already been granted a conditional acceptance before he had enlisted). Advocacy by LAAW and co-counsel with the Golden Gate Law School Veterans Advocacy Clinic resulted in an upgrade of his discharge to honorablesomething Mr. Henry described as a miracle after nearly 75 years.

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Data for this page was sourced from XML published by IRS (public 990 form dataset) from: https://s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990/202032879349301238_public.xml