Human Rights for the People: The Gig Economy, Precarity and the Right to Healthcare

Thursday, October 17
1 pm to 5 pm
at the Law for the People Convention
21c Museum Hotel Durham
111 Corcoran Street, Durham, North Carolina

This CLE is being presented by the National Lawyers Guild’s International Committee and Labor and Employment Committee.

This CLE will explore contemporary legal strategies for advancing human rights in the “gig economy” amid rising precarity. Speakers will discuss current cases challenging companies like Uber and unique legal strategies to confront precarity. It will also address key human rights issues like the right to healthcare. Discussion will highlight ongoing work around a range of labor issues that address fundamental human rights, including migration, prison labor and the right to organize.

Register online here:

CLE Faculty will be:

• Martha L. Schmidt, Employment/Labor Attorney and Educator based in Seattle, was a chair of the NLG former Peace and Disarmament Subcommittee and RVP for the Northwest Region. She served several terms as chair of the World Peace Through Law Section of the Washington State Bar Association and has worked for more than a decade with the human right to health movement. She was a union organizer and educator for service sector unions and the King County Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Since the 1990s, she has taught in undergraduate liberal arts and graduate public policy programs at public universities in Washington State. Curricular areas have included international human rights, political economy, international relations of Latin America and the Caribbean, labor policy and law, race, class and gender studies, and sociology of social movements. Schmidt has a certificat in international human rights law from L’Institut International des Droits de l’Homme in Strasbourg and interned at the London secretariat of Amnesty International, working on the death penalty. She earned an LL.M. at University of Washington Law School (Law and Marine Affairs), J.D. at Wisconsin Law School and Master of International Administration from the School for International Training.
• Suzanne Adely is the Regional Organizer for the Food Chain Workers Alliance and the co-chair of the NLG International Committee. She is a member of the Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers.A former NYC educator, with a background in community organizing, public interest law, and international worker advocacy. Suzanne worked with several community-led organizations in Chicago and New York before beginning her global labor rights work. From 2011-2014 she was the UAW Global Organizing Institute India project coordinator and since has collaborated with many local and global organizations on behalf of workers.
  
• Zubin Soleimany is a staff attorney at the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (“NYTWA”). The NYTWA is a union of professional New York City drivers who work in the yellow taxi, black car, and green cab industries that fights for fair working conditions for drivers in all sectors of New York’s taxi and for-hire vehicle industries by challenging employee misclassification where it exists, and fighting for the creation and enforcement of livable income standards for drivers through City regulation.
• Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan is past President of the National Lawyers Guild and co-chairs its Puerto Rico Subcommittee. She is an Associate Counsel at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, focusing on working with low-wage Latina immigrant workers as part of the organization’s economic justice platform, legal support in the face of the economic crisis in Puerto Rico and human rights advocacy before regional and international bodies. Natasha has worked on gender and racial justice issues, including access to reproductive health, sexual violence and violence against women in conflict zones. Prior to joining LatinoJustice PRLDEF, she worked in the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic at CUNY School of Law and the Center for Reproductive Rights.  She clerked for the Hon. Ronald L. Ellis in the Southern District of New York and was an Ella Baker Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Natasha graduated from CUNY School of Law, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the CUNY Law Review and a Fellow at the Center for Latino/a Rights and Equality. She is a member of the New York City Bar Association’s Task Force on Puerto Rico and Inter-American Affairs Committee and is a board member of MADRE. Natasha is barred in New York and New Jersey