The Center for WorkLife Law is an advocacy and research organization at UC Hastings Law that seeks to advance racial, gender, and class equity. At WorkLife Law, we address inequality at a structural level by developing and implementing concrete, evidence-based interventions in schools and workplaces and changing public policy at the state and national levels. We are extremely strategic in how we approach each structural intervention, forging partnerships with grassroots groups and field experts to identify the best change levers to tackle the problem at hand. With our interventions, we aim to produce dramatic changes within a two to five year timeframe. Our main areas of impact are economic security, maternal & child health, education equity, and racial and gender justice in the workplace. Throughout the pandemic, our team has also mobilized a COVID-19 emergency response, applying our legal expertise to help protect workers’ rights during the crisis.
Our latest report Protecting Parents During COVID-19: State and Local Laws Prohibit Discrimination at Work outlines state and local laws throughout the U.S. that protect parents from work discrimination. According to the report, nearly 30% of workers are protected under these laws.
Our latest report, Exposed: Discrimination Against Breastfeeding Workers, analyzes breastfeeding legal cases from the last decade to document patterns of discrimination, and analyzes new data on the scope of existing state and federal laws to protect against discrimination. We found that 27.6 million women of childbearing age don’t have the basic protections needed by all breastfeeding workers.
With the help of the Society of Women Engineers, the Center for WorkLife Law produced a comprehensive survey documenting in the real world what social psychologists have long observed in labs: that women and people of color experience workplace hurdles that do not exist for white men.
