After a federal government career as a senior executive and attorney, I’m currently a worker protection advocate, consultant, and an opinion writer.
I spent 39 years at the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of the Solicitor in Boston. I began my career there as a trial attorney, and for 10 years handled litigation matters involving enforcement of the federal worker protection statutes for which the Labor Department has responsibility, including OSHA, the Fair Labor Standards Act, ERISA, and several other laws. I served as ERISA Counsel for 20 years, overseeing the Department’s enforcement of that pension and health plan-related law in the six New England states. For the last 9 years of my federal career, I led the Boston office, comprising 25 lawyers and 5 support staff, as Regional Solicitor. In that capacity, I was active in helping to develop new and innovative strategies for maximizing the effectiveness–given limited resources–of the Department’s worker protection enforcement efforts. A few years earlier, I served a six-month stint as Acting Senior Project manager in the Department’s International Labor Affairs Bureau, covering a number of DOL-funded worker protection projects in Poland and Ukraine. My interest in worker protection internationally remains keen, and I have begun doing consulting work in that field.
I received my BA magna cum laude in Social Relations from Harvard College in 1971, and my JD from Northeastern School of Law in 1978. I clerked for then-Associate Justice Paul Liacos of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court before beginning my DOL career, served as Chair of the Massachusetts Bar Labor and Employment Section Council and on Northeastern Law’s Alumni Board, recently received the Labor Guild’s Father Boyle Award for Excellence in Labor-Management Relations. Outside the lawyer context, I served for several years as president of Boston Workers Circle, a secular Jewish cultural, educational, and social justice organization, and have been active in promoting Jewish-Muslim relations in the Greater Boston area, along with a progressive American Jewish response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Since 2018 I have been an Access to Justice Fellow with Justice at Work, a small non-profit law office in Boston committed to supporting empowerment of low-wage workers, particularly through worker center engagement. I currently do consulting for Justice at Work as a Senior Advisor, and for the Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers University as a Strategic Enforcement Advisor. I also serve as an Advisor to the National Council on Occupational Safety and Health, and as a board member and legal committee co-chair with the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health. In the spring of 2021, I served as Labor Guild faculty for the Agency All-Stars course; on an American Bar Association OSHA Conference panel on OSHA Basics; and on a Massachusetts Bar Association panel on Labor and Employment Issues under the Biden Administration. On a pro bono basis, I have done intake screenings in ICE detention centers for asylum seekers, and have successfully represented a Rwandan refugee in his quest for asylum in the U.S.
My op-eds — on subjects that include workers’ rights, government responsibility, Israel/Palestine politics, and Jewish-Muslim relations — have been published in newspapers locally, nationally, and internationally.