JJ Rosenbaum is an attorney and organizer who currently serves as executive director of Global Labor Justice, where she advocates for human rights, decent work for all, and fair migration. Rosenbaum has used legal, policy and advocacy strategies for more than two decades to win access to rights and collective power for low-wage workers and advised workers’ centers on transnational grassroots collaborations. She 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. 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 has testified before Congress, writes and speaks globally, and is regularly consulted by national and global media. 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. She previously held a Robina Fellowship at the Orville H. Schell. Jr. Center for International Human Rights with a focus on the intersection of global supply chains and labor migration. She began her legal career as a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney with Southern Migrant Legal Services in Nashville and has taught courses in human rights and immigration law at the Tulane and University of Nevada law schools.
Immigration law, law of the workplace, law and social change