Jennifer Gordon

Jennifer Gordon is an attorney and a community organizer who founded the Workplace Project in 1992 as a worker’s center to fight employment abuse and discrimination against immigrant workers. The Project provides legal services, designs educational programs, carries out organizing campaigns, and develops cooperative business initiatives in a coordinated effort to protect immigrant workers’ rights. The Project model fosters mutual support and exchange; workers must become actively involved in the Project’s educational and community programs in order to receive support and legal representation. In 1997, the project won its campaign in New York State to pass the strongest, wage-enforcement penalty laws in the country. In 1998, Gordon stepped down as head of the Project to explore new strategies for worker and community organizing. At that point, the Project had provided legal services to over 1,400 immigrant workers. She left a flourishing institution that trains and relies on immigrant-worker leadership and that has one of the few all immigrant-worker boards in the United States. Gordon is an associate professor of law at Fordham University’s Law School. She is the author of Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights (2005). Gordon received a B.A. (1987) from Harvard/Radcliffe College and a J.D. (1992) from Harvard Law School.