Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California

Founded in 1983 as the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC) following the killing of Vincent Chin, AJSOCAL serves more than 15,000 individuals and organizations every year. Through direct services, impact litigation, policy advocacy, leadership development, and capacity building, AJSOCAL focuses on the most vulnerable members of Asian American and NHPI communities while also building a strong voice for civil rights and social justice.[3] Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California is part of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, a national affiliation of four civil rights nonprofit organizations whose members also include Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Chicago, Asian Americans Advancing Justice - AAJC (National Affiliate) and Asian Americans Advancing Justice - ALC (San Francisco).[3]

AJSOCAL serves its clients in numerous languages including Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Khmer, Indonesian, Tagalog, and Vietnamese, along with English and Spanish. AJSOCAL is one of the only legal organizations in Los Angeles County that maintains this breadth of language capacity, and thus is an important resource to limited English proficient speakers who are in need of legal assistance. AJSOCAL also advocates through the courts and legislature on many issues, including: voting rights, workers' rights, immigration, domestic violence, race discrimination, and language rights. AJSOCAL is also noted for its interethnic relations and multiracial coalition building through youth, parent and community-focused leadership development programs, as well as its work in hate crimes prevention, race relations, and LGBT alliance building.[4]

In 1995, AJSOCAL served as the lead counsel in a groundbreaking federal civil rights lawsuit, Bureerong v. Uvawas, on behalf of 80 Thai garment workers who had been trafficked into the United States, held illegally, and forced to work behind barbed wire and under armed guard in an apartment complex in El Monte, California. Once freed from the apartment, the workers were taken by the U.S. government and thrown into federal detention. Eventually, the work of AJSOCAL, along with a coalition of advocacy groups in Los Angeles, led to the release of all the workers. AJSOCAL, along with other advocates, then led the successful workers' rights lawsuit against the manufacturers and retailers responsible for the sweatshop conditions.[5][6]

In early 2019, the organization's senior management and board of directors discovered AJSOCAL was in a financial crisis due to the senior management and Board's own financial mismanagement.[13] Internal emails to staff revealed the organization's leadership had failed to detect a steady decline in revenue and concurrent rise in expenses spanning, at minimum, the preceding five years.[13] The estimated deficit for 2019 was $2 million.[14][13] The Board of Directors retained an interim Executive Director, Sylia Obagi. At the start of 2019, there was approximately 115 staff.[15] By November 2019, due to an exodus of staff throughout the year, and a mass layoff of 20% of the staff in October 2019, the size of the staff shrank to approximately 60 employees.[16] Numerous programs and units were impacted by the loss of staff, including the extinction of the Immigrant Rights program, the Youth and Parent Leadership program, English Language Learning program for applicants seeking to apply for citizenship, Impact Litigation Team, the elimination of interpreter staff to serve monolingual Hindi, Vietnamese, and Cambodian speakers, as well as a reduction in staff serving on the Communications Team and Health Access Project.[17]

Simultaneous with the financial crisis, several staff alleged the mass layoffs and other conduct by senior management and the Board of Directors was in retaliation to staff organizing to form a union with the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.[18][19] The union was recognized in April 2018.[20] By November 2019, the organization had yet to agree to a union contract.[20] Staff alleged the organization's senior management and Board of Directors used the self-generated financial crisis to justify layoffs to eliminate union leaders.[21] Of the nineteen staff members laid off, only one staff member was not a union member. Critical of the senior management and Board of Directors' decision to execute a mass layoff in the face of viable alternatives,[22] a number of directors resigned in protest.[23] Some of the laid off staff—those most active in the union drive—were given one day's notice to clean up years' worth of files and transition their cases before their work email and access to files were shut off.[21] Following the mass layoff and community outcry, student honorees for AJSOCAL's 36th Annual Dinner declined to accept the award in a show of solidarity with the laid off staff.[24] Because the organization's severance offer for laid off staff was as low as one weeks' pay in exchange for a waiver of all legal claims, non-disparagement, non-disclosure, and other conditions, a GoFundMe fundraiser page was set up to assist those laid off, some of whom were being living paycheck to paycheck.[25]