Donia Human Rights Lecture | Labor and Human Rights

Attend in person or via Zoom. Zoom registration at https://myumi.ch/zXkQR

Migration is a critical battleground in the struggle to shape the economic future. In the contemporary economy, the exploitation of labor operates through global networks of migration, mobilization, and forced labor. Capital leverages regional legal restrictions on mobility, the threat of deportation and the violence of immigration enforcement, gendered violence, and supply-chain specific strategies of control in order to keep workers contingent, vulnerable, and compliant. At the same time, the workers of the world have developed new strategies and raised new demands to fight for dignity and collective power against this exploitation. Global Labor Justice (GLJ) is a strategy partner with transnational worker groups and works to support campaigns for labor rights, collective bargaining, and worker dignity across the world. Some of GLJ’s specific current campaigns include work on gender-based violence and harassment in the garment supply chain, wage theft and work conditions in the seafood industry, and the financing of hospitality industry development. In her lecture, GLJ Executive Director JJ Rosenbaum will discuss campaigns, strategies, and tactics for holding employers and governments accountable. Specific strategies include transnational advocacy approaches, enforceable supply chain agreements (EBAs), and legal strategies that GLJ is currently deploying.

JJ Rosenbaum is an attorney, organizer, and human rights strategist advocating for human rights, decent work for all, and fair migration. For over two decades, JJ has used legal, policy, and advocacy strategies to win access to rights and collective power for low-wage workers and advised workers’ centers on transnational grassroots collaborations. Global Labor Justice follows a more than ten-year record in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast where JJ created a new model of movement lawyering as the founding legal and policy director for the National Guestworker Alliance and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. JJ has extensive experience with human rights investigations, legal strategies that build collective power, and advising worker, immigrant, and community organizations. She has litigated cases before trial and appellate courts and led the human, labor, and migrants rights strategy for campaigns including the Signal workers, who exposed labor trafficking from India to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, and the Justice @ Hershey’s campaign, where hundreds of foreign students won new regulations for the cultural exchange visa program. She is the co-chair of the American Bar Association’s International Labor and Employment Committee and lectures on labor migration and comparative social justice lawyering approaches at Harvard Law School.

MODERATORS

Ravi Anupindi, PhD
Colonel William G. and Ann C. Svetlich Professor of Operations Research and Management, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
Ravi Anupindi’s main research areas include technology and business innovation, global supply chain management, health care delivery in low and middle-income countries, economic development, and environmental & social sustainability. He was founding Faculty Director of the Center for Value Chain Innovation (2017-2020) and co-Director of the Technology and Business Innovation Forum (2015-18) at Ross. He is a member of the Governing Council of the Supply Chain Risk Leadership Council (SCRLC) and of the Board of the Fair Labor Association, among other professional leadership roles. He has served as Chair of (UM) President’s Advisory Committee on Labor Standards and Human Rights since 2013.

Leila Kawar, PhD
Associate Professor of American Culture and in the Residential College, University of Michigan
Leila Kawar is a socio-legal scholar whose comparative research examines the intersection of legal knowledge with the politics of migration, citizenship, and labor. She is the recipient, with co-PI John Valadez, of a 2024 Vital Impact Project Award through the LSA Meet the Moment Research Initiative for their project The Jungle, a short documentary film, intended for national broadcast on PBS, about the horrific experiences of children in American agricultural work. She serves as a Faculty Member of (UM) President’s Advisory Committee on Labor Standards and Human Rights.

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at wesleywr@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.