Grassroots Law & Organizing for Workers

Year Founded: 2019

Grassroots Law & Organizing for Workers aim to shift the balance of power toward equity by leveraging legal strategies to build worker power and enhance the low-wage worker movement.

Rooted in deep partnerships with worker centers, base-building organizations, and movement lawyers, GLOW combines legal and organizing strategies to capacitate and embolden the low-wage worker movement by:

• Providing Technical Support to Base-Building Partners: This includes providing legal, policy, and research support for campaigns; representing worker leaders in strategic enforcement actions; convening coalition and network-building spaces to build solidarity, share best practices, and advance collective fights; and engaging in thought partnership around campaign strategy and best practices for organizational resilience and sustainability. 
• Building a Worker Center Bar: Developing a scalable legal infrastructure for the low-wage worker movement, that is capable of withstanding authoritarian attacks and advancing the struggle for a bold, vibrant multiracial democracy that prioritizes people over profit, through the strategic recruitment and mobilization of lawyers and legal workers to support low-wage workers and their organizations. 
• Democratizing the Law: Creating materials, trainings and workshops that empower worker-leaders and organizers to understand the law and the systems that perpetuate exploitation, challenge oppressive conditions directly, and participate in building a more just, sustainable, and equitable economy and society. 

GLOW was previously known as the National Legal Advocacy Network, a fiscally sponsored project of the National Employment Law Project (NELP), created in 2018 to provide movement aligned legal support to worker centers, their members, and their campaigns.

In 2024, NLAN spun off from NELP and became an independent non-profit organization – Grassroots Law & Organizing for Workers (GLOW). Since 2019, GLOW has reached over 75,000 workers with information about their rights and opportunities to engage in collective action, put over $10 million back into the hands of low-wage workers and their communities, and provided legal support for more than 35 worker organizations and campaigns.