Brandworkers connects retail and food employees with concerned citizens to win justice!

About Us

The Brandworkers Mission

Brandworkers is a New York City-based 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization protecting and advancing the rights of retail and food employees.  By training workers in social change tools and facilitating member-led workplace justice campaigns, Brandworkers promotes employer compliance with the law and challenges corporate misconduct in the community.

Brandworkers Programs

Focus on the Food Chain

Brandworkers' Focus on the Food Chain program is a member-led campaign to create good local jobs and a sustainable food system in New York City.  Focus on the Food Chain helps recent immigrant workers challenge and overcome sweatshop conditions in the food processing factories and distribution warehouses that supply the City's food retailers.  Through grassroots organizing, advocacy, and legal actions, Focus members are winning workplace justice campaigns and building a powerful base of leaders to create a sustainable food system in New York.  Focus on the Food Chain is carried out jointly with the Industrial Workers of the World (New York City).

Legal Defense-Plus

The Brandworkers Legal Defense-Plus program provides free legal and strategic representation, advice, and referrals to retail and food employees nationwide.  Legal Defense-Plus works to remedy legal problems on the job while identifying opportunities for systemic change through class action litigation, worker center campaigns, or union organizing.  The program has assisted workers in a wide variety of areas including minimum wage & overtime; discrimination; health & safety; workers compensation; and the right to organize.  Legal Defense-Plus is powered by a network of over 300 attorneys nationwide.

Brandworkers History

Brandworkers was founded in 2007 by retail and food employees who identified a need for an organization dedicated to protecting and advancing their rights.  The organization was launched based on a simple prinpciple: that working people themselves, equipped with powerful social change tools, were uniquely positioned to make positive change on the job and in society.

By empowering retail and food employees with social change tools, Brandworkers' Focus on the Food Chain and Legal Defense-Plus programs have recovered close to $1 million in unpaid wages and compensation for discrimination; improved working conditions for hundreds of workers; and have helped workers develop as powerful social change leaders.

Brandworkers' singular dedication to worker-led change quickly led to critical acclaim.  In 2009, Brandworkers received the Union Square Award for its commitment to grassroots activism.  The following year, the North Star Fund honored Brandworkers with its Frederick Douglass Award for furthering racial and economic justice. 

Brandworkers has also been influential in the broader movement for worker justice.  The organization is a founding member of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, the first-ever coalition of food worker organizing groups across the supply chain, from farm to plate.  Brandworkers helped convene May Day United, a network of over 60 worker centers, unions, and community groups dedicated to increasing power and participation in May 1st actions and beyond.  Finally, the organization helped initiate the Immigrant Worker Justice group of Occupy Wall Street to increase recognition of immigrant workers within the 99% and to challenge the role of Wall Street in the wage theft epidemic and private immigration prisons.

Brandworkers International

Empowering retail and food employees with social change tools to win justice on the job and in the community