Watching the Workforce
Andrew Elmore brings over two decades of experience in advocating for low-wage workers and studying the role of law in protecting workplace standards and of social movements in advancing workers’ rights.

Photo courtesy of Jon Tyson via Unsplash.
Watching the Workforce
Andrew Elmore brings over two decades of experience in advocating for low-wage workers and studying the role of law in protecting workplace standards and of social movements in advancing workers’ rights.
“We live in interesting times in a lot of ways,” says Professor Andrew Elmore, who joined Boston University School of Law this spring. “One way is that the drum beat of demands from regular workers for better work conditions in recent years has broken through to the national conversation in a way that we haven’t seen in a long time.”

Since graduating from Swarthmore College, Andrew Elmore has been fascinated with the workplace and the ways that work structures life, particularly how people can both gain autonomy—but also have their freedoms restricted—by workplace conditions. His scholarship explores the failures of labor and employment law and tort law to effectively regulate low-wage workplaces and how social movement actors can advance workers’ rights.
Before starting law school, Elmore’s interest in labor organizations and work centers led him to work for several unions and research groups. Narrowing his focus to the labor rights of low-wage workers, Elmore moved to Mexico for a year to work with different nonprofits on issues including the failure of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to protect maquila workers. “I became fascinated with the ways that lawyers have and use power,” says Elmore, “not just in the sense of gaining legal entitlements for clients, but also in shaping national conversations about justice and equality and fairness.”
When Elmore began law school at UCLA in the late 1990s, he was surrounded by campaigns led by unions and worker centers to improve the workplace conditions of low-wage, immigrant workers in Southern California, including Justice for Janitors and the living wage movement. Inspired by these campaigns, he founded a student organization to provide legal assistance to low-wage workers and published an article in the UCLA law review proposing theoretical and practical reforms aimed at lowering the legal barriers that prevent garment workers from vindicating workplace rights. “I felt very privileged to be in that space and to learn from wonderful faculty and also movement lawyers working with organizers and low-wage workers seeking to improve their working lives,” says Elmore.
After law school, Elmore was awarded a Skadden fellowship to start an employment law project at the Legal Aid Society in New York City, where he provided legal services to clients experiencing workplace violations. “It gave me a ground level view of what I wanted to focus on in a systemic way,” says Elmore. The experience at Legal Aid Society emphasized the need for more systems-based advocacy, prompting Elmore to clerk for The Honorable Nicholas G. Garaufis, Eastern District of New York, and later move to the New York State Attorney General as Section Chief in charge of Civil Rights and Labor initiatives. At the New York OAG, Elmore supervised and led many labor and employment law investigations, including workplace discrimination against people with criminal record histories, systemic wage and hour law violations in fast food stores, and abusive treatment of Mexican guest workers in a traveling carnival.
Elmore’s fascination with the legal problems that contribute to low workplace standards fueled his transition to the academy. Through the New York OAG, Elmore taught externship seminars on public enforcement of civil rights and labor laws as an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School and Cardozo School of Law. He also published scholarship as a practitioner, one article on the need for immigration law to protect guest workers’ liberty interest in free movement while preserving workplace standards, and another on the interest of people after incarceration in freedom from arbitrary barriers that prevent reintegration into society. In 2015, Elmore entered the academy full time as a teaching fellow in the NYU School of Law lawyering program, where he taught for three years before joining the faculty at the University of Miami School of Law.
In Florida, Professor Elmore was exposed to a different environment for unions and worker centers than what he had experienced in California and New York. “It helped me understand just how different it is to be a movement lawyer in spaces where the state is often hostile to your goals,” says Elmore. “That led me to focus my research both on the failure of these states to protect low-wage workers from precarious work conditions and also on how worker centers in these spaces mobilize local labor law to scale up power in urban areas.”
Boston is one of the best cities in the country to be in when it comes to seeing how labor law is practiced on the ground. There are many exciting ways to practice labor and employment law here.
Having joined Boston University School of Law this spring, Professor Elmore is looking forward to seeing up close how Massachusetts state and local governments partner with unions and worker centers on shared goals, from fair work practices to safe and healthy workplaces. “Boston is one of the best cities in the country to be in when it comes to seeing how labor law is practiced on the ground,” he says. “There are many exciting ways to practice labor and employment law here.”
This semester, Professor Elmore is teaching labor law, a once declining subject in law schools that has recently sparked renewed interest. From the “Red for Ed” movement and the struggle of essential workers to protect themselves during the pandemic to union campaigns by employees of corporations like Starbucks and Amazon and major strikes by the Writers Guild of America, SAG-AFTRA, and the United Auto Workers, labor and employment law has been brought back to the forefront of legal conversations.
Formatting his coursework to include real-world scenarios and topics from the news, Professor Elmore emphasizes building community in the classroom and encouraging students to engage in inclusive discussions that incorporate their unique experiences with the workforce. “Work law affects everyone, and so everybody has a unique contribution to make. What’s important is to be able to express opinions in a way that leads to learning,” he says.
Professor Elmore also makes sure to emphasize how labor and employment laws intersect with both private and public interest work. “I’m passionate about labor and employment law because I care about the welfare of people who are vulnerable to unfair treatment, including in the workplace,” says Elmore. “If you want to advance social welfare and social justice in your legal practice, this is one pathway you can choose.”