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Lung, S --- "Developing a Course on the Rights of Low-wage Workers" [2005] LegEdDig 57; (2005) 14(2) Legal Education Digest 13

Developing a Course on the Rights of Low-wage Workers

S Lung

[2005] LegEdDig 57; (2005) 14(2) Legal Education Digest 13

54 J Legal Educ 3, 2004, pp 381–393

The intersections between race, gender, class, immigration and citizenship have produced a highly stratified workforce. In today’s workplaces, as has been true historically, immigrants, women, and people of colour are segregated in jobs with the worst conditions. Immigrants and women of colour also number disproportionately among those who toil in sweatshops, contending with sub-minimum wages, non-payment of wages, compulsory overtime, and long hours leading to damaged health. Although these workers may rejuvenate the labour movement, their legal struggles remain marginal to law school discourse.

Drawing upon her experience in teaching a course at the City University of New York Law School, called The Rights of Low-Wage Workers, the author offers suggestions for broadening law school coverage of low-wage workers’ issues. Expanded offerings on the efforts of low-wage workers to invigorate an agenda for economic justice will give lawyers-in-training an understanding of the strategies that workers are using to achieve some measure of collective justice. Such offerings will also contribute to the development of economic justice as a serious legal academic discipline that unifies several doctrinal strands. Students are better positioned to represent low-wage workers and provide legal assistance to workers’ organising campaigns when they understand how the intersectionality of class, gender, race, immigration and citizenship shapes oppression in the workplace.

The author’s course had two main goals. One was to create a discourse that put at its centre the struggles of workers, whose stories are left out of most casebooks. The other was to give lawyers-in-training tools and strategies for representing immigrant and contingent workers. While much of the course was about identifying deficiencies in our labour laws, important themes about law and community also recurred as organising principles.

The course began with an overview of the role of immigrant labour in industrialised and newly industrialised nations to discern patterns in the worldwide migration of labour. In this context, it explored the impact of immigrants on the job opportunities and wages of those who are native-born, especially African-Americans, since this is a hotly contested issue that figures prominently in immigration and labour policy debates. The course looked at the rights of subcontracted workers to see how the downgrading of conditions of workers has unfolded.

The absence of a casebook on the topics to be covered appeared at first daunting but turned out to be an advantage. Unfettered by the constraints of a standard casebook, a teacher is both freed and forced to make deliberate choices about how to situate and frame issues. In addition, because current events and new developments keep course materials always in flux, a teacher may have more flexibility to reorganise her course accordingly when operating outside the framework of a casebook. A teacher might also feel freer to make changes to the course based on an evaluation of how students have responded to specific reading assignments.

The readings were structured to offer a multidisciplinary perspective on the rights of low-wage workers. The primary texts in most law school classrooms are appellate cases, which often present a rarefied and limited perspective on complex social problems. The aim was that the assembled readings would give students many opportunities to step out of their role as lawyers-in-training, to think outside the legal box. Most important, the voices of workers and organisers would be part of the course.

The course requirements were structured to acknowledge that students had varied reasons for enrolling in the course and that the course could mean something quite different for each student. The students’ enthusiasm for the course has been a heartening reminder that we can enrich law school courses if we are willing to experiment with what we teach and how we teach.

More broadly, the enthusiastic response to the course suggests there are plentiful opportunities for recasting law school curricula to tap into student interest in labour and employment. Students who were specifically interested in representing workers on labour and employment issues recognised that, with less than ten percent of the workforce unionised, they must add to what they learned in their labour and employment law courses.

Just as important, students welcomed additional opportunities to critically examine law from a distinctly workers’ perspective. They learned immensely from recognising the multiple interests and identities of workers and the complexities that all those create for workers’ collective struggles. Finally, expanding law school curricula about low-wage workers can help students develop insights about the role of lawyers in social movements. This process of reflection can give rise to respectful and fruitful collaborations between law students and workers’ organisations.

Studying the struggles of low-wage workers to invigorate an agenda for economic justice will enhance the training of law students to represent the rising numbers of workers who are exploited. In the process, we will help students acquire a deeper understanding of themselves as workers and lawyers and contribute to a jurisprudence that seriously examines how law reinforces notions of class and power between workers and employers.


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