Training and Education
We train workers, organizers, and attorneys to ensure workers can understand and assert their rights, engage in individual and collective action, and win justice.
Educating Workers and Organizers
Justice at Work educates workers and organizers about workplace rights, helps them strategize methods for asserting those rights, and provides training on how to protect themselves from retaliation while doing so. We also educate and advise attorneys and other advocates, so they can more effectively assist workers and advance the kinds of claims that are endemic in immigrant and working class communities.
Multilingual Training Services
We design custom legal training for workers and organizers in Spanish, Portuguese, and English and welcome training requests. Our core training programs include:
Workers Rights
We offer a wide range of workplace know your rights trainings and train-the-trainer sessions. In addition to general workers’ rights, topics include wage-and-hour, health and safety, discrimination, organizing rights, and more.
In some cases, Justice at Work is available to provide monthly, inhouse workers’ rights clinics for community partners. We also organize a monthly, open wage theft clinic in East Boston and help staff a free monthly wage theft clinic organized by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.
Legal How-To
We provide substantive legal training, helping organizers and workers learn legal tools for asserting their rights. Past topics include filing in small claims court, identifying discrimination claims, and using mechanic’s liens in wage theft cases.
Policy Literacy
We make sure organizers and workers understand the policies that affect them. This has included teaching temp workers in seafood factories about the earned sick time law that went into effect in July 2015, and providing residential construction workers access to information on a legislative fight to hold general contractors responsible for wage theft.
Leadership Development
We work alongside worker center staff to create and facilitate leadership courses. Workers gain the knowledge, confidence and experience necessary to demand their own dignity on the job, and support other workers who seek out the worker centers when disrespected or injured on the job.
Capacity Building
We provide worker centers with training on tools to help improve the impact of their work. Previous trainings have focused on the use of good and bad actor lists in industry organizing, and considerations and techniques for forming worker committees.
Attorney Education
We welcome training requests from law schools, clinics, legal aid, and the private bar. We specialize in wage and hour law (especially in small claims court), community lawyering, immigration status issues in labor-and-employment cases, illegal immigration-related retaliation, and protected concerted activity for nonunion workers. In partnership with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, Justice at Work provides periodic trainings on using small claims court to resolve wage theft claims.
Interested in Justice at Work Training?
Please direct all training inquiries to our Director of Strategic Partnerships Alex Galimberti at [email protected]
