GLJ-ILRF employees are affiliated with The Nonprofit Professional Employees Union (NPEU), a local of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.
Legal Director
Allison Gill is a human rights lawyer, researcher, and advocate She joined ILRF in August 2019 as the Senior Cotton Campaign Coordinator, leading strategy for a multi-stakeholder coalition to eliminate forced and child labor in cotton production in Central Asia, and to open space for organizing and workers’ rights.
She has deep experience as a human rights investigator and advocate with more than 20 years’ experience working in the countries of the former Soviet Union. In additional to forced and child labor, Allison has researched and advocated on issues such as torture and ill-treatment, rule of law, religious persecution, arbitrary detention, migrant labor, freedoms of speech and association, and national security laws. Before joining ILRF, she was Senior Research and Policy Advisor to the Uzbek Forum, where she authored numerous reports and submissions to international bodies on forced labor in the cotton sector in Uzbekistan among other issues, developed research methodology and trained field monitors, oversaw independent monitoring of cotton farms participating in a sustainable cotton pilot program, and served on the steering committee of the Cotton Campaign.
Previously, Allison has consulted for numerous human rights organizations, was the Russia director for Human Rights Watch, based in Moscow and the Uzbekistan researcher for Human Rights Watch, based in Tashkent. She holds a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University with concentrations in international human rights law and conflict resolution; a Juris Doctor from Northeastern University School of Law; and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Swarthmore College.
Finance Associate
Bhakti is an accomplished finance professional with a proven record of driving financial excellence and strategic growth. She refined her analytical skills and financial expertise by receiving a CMA certification and Master's degree in Finance from the University of Pune - India. With over 7 years of finance experience, Bhakti adeptly navigates intricate financial landscapes. Proficient in financial modeling and data visualization, she communicates effectively with diverse stakeholders. Bhakti's collaborative spirit forges strong partnerships with cross-functional teams, aligning financial strategies with business goals. Actively pursuing the CFA Certification, she contributes significantly to the GLJ-ILRF team, shaping budgeting, forecasting, and risk assessment, as well as driving long-term sustainability and growth.
Chief Operating Officer
Caitlin Hoover is a nonprofit management professional. She is committed to building teams and core organizational strength to support grassroots work advancing migrants' rights, women's rights, and labor rights. She has managed budgeting and compliance for research, film, and advocacy programs and has experience coordinating communications, logistics, and workflow with staff across five continents. She also brings a strong lens of how to make technology work for global teams and organizations. Caitlin is determined, energetic, and focused on building secure practices which strengthen organizational and advocacy outcomes. Caitlin holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before transitioning to nonprofit management, Caitlin worked as a researcher on gender-based violence in fast fashion and developed content for original interactive documentaries on the urbanization of Mumbai, India. She also served as a caseworker defending students' work-study and healthcare rights. She is thrilled to bring her passion, life experiences, and organizational talent to GLJ.
caitlinhoover@globallaborjustice.org
Labor Migration Campaign Coordinator
Dani Douglas is a researcher, advocate, and educator serving as Labor Migration Campaign Coordinator at GLJ, where she draws on her background in qualitative research and policy analysis to support work around labor migration. Dani has contributed to projects for domestic and international organizations on topics ranging from labor rights, to migration, rural economic development, and access to social services. She is passionate about community engagement, and has provided direct support to the families of migrant farmworkers in upstate New York, taught English as a second language with AmeriCorps in Colorado, and spent time as a journalist in Morocco writing on the local impacts of solar energy development projects. Dani holds a M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University and a B.A. in Anthropology and International Relations from the University of Rochester.
danielledouglas@globallaborjustice.org
Hospitality Organizing Director
David Assouline spent five years organizing academic workers before becoming an organizer with Unite Here. He worked with Unite Here as an organizer for 15 years working on campaigns to unionize hotel, airport, and casino workers across the United States. For the last two years he has been organizing workers at hotels financed by development banks such as the World Bank. Within GLJ-ILRF, David is continuing his work to build worker power and assist unions and workers’ rights groups in Africa and the Caribbean. David lives in Washington, DC, and enjoys riding his motorcycle and making furniture in his spare time.
dassouline@globallaborjustice.org
Field Director
Jacob Horwitz has built membership-based worker-led organizing programs in the US South and Global South for fifteen years. He’s led dozens of workplace and community campaigns against multinational corporations including Hershey, McDonalds, and Wal-Mart. He’s organized at the intersection of migration and forced labor and spent over nine years co-developing a transnational membership-based worker organization that became the National Guestworker Alliance (NGA).
Jacob developed a specialty in guestworker organizing and has directed guestworker campaigns in key sectors including seafood supply chain, oil and gas, and hospitality. Before joining GLJ-ILRF, Jacob was working with UNITE HERE to build union power at the Charlotte Douglas Airport, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Jacob led the airline catering workers and airport concession workers in a fight to win a contract for living wages and affordable healthcare.
Jacob also served as Interim Executive Director and Organizing Director at the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ). In both of those roles, Jacob directed multidisciplinary organizing teams of Black and immigrant workers to build power in the workplace and in the City. Under his leadership, thousands of people, largely African American, targeted by racist policing and saddled with unpayable fines and fees won relief; members won significant changes to federal and local migration policy targeting undocumented families. Thousands of guestworkers fought and won permanent immigration protections, increased wages and improved working conditions in food processing, hospitality and construction.
jacobhorwitz@globallaborjustice.org
Garment Campaign Organizer
As Garment Campaign Organizer, Jeeva works to co-strategize and execute powerful transnational labor rights campaigns with GLJ-ILRF’s core garment supply chain partners. Jeeva is deeply committed to building strong, transformational partnerships between unions and other grassroots worker organizations in the U.S. and garment worker unions in the Global South based on shared values, mutual self-interest, and a common understanding of the global economy. She learned to organize from the incredible rank-and-file leaders and staff members in two fighting unions, UNITE HERE and The Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Jeeva was a shop steward at UNITE HERE 274 while working as a bartender at the Philadelphia International Airport. Later, she became a strategic researcher at the SEIU 32BJ, where she co-developed campaigns to set and raise working standards in the property service sector. Jeeva has campaigned with workers from various sectors, including airport workers, restaurant workers, hotel workers, custodians, public sector workers, and security guards.
Jeeva became involved with international organizing through the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), where she coordinated rapid response support for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) union leaders under threat.
She still makes a mean margarita and has a deep and abiding love for Jackie Chan.
jeevamuhil@globallaborjustice.org
Executive Director
JJ is an attorney, organizer, and human rights strategist advocating for human rights, decent work for all, and fair migration. For over two decades, JJ has used legal, policy, and advocacy strategies to win access to rights and collective power for low-wage workers and advised workers’ centers on transnational grassroots collaborations. Global Labor Justice follows a more than ten-year record in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast where JJ created a new model of movement lawyering as the founding legal and policy director for the National Guestworker Alliance and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. JJ has litigated cases before trial and appellate courts and led the human, labor, and migrants rights strategy for campaigns including the Signal workers, who exposed labor trafficking from India to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, and the Justice @ Hershey’s campaign, where hundreds of foreign students won new regulations for the cultural exchange visa program.
JJ has extensive experience with human rights investigations, legal strategies that build collective power, and advising worker, immigrant, and community organizations. She has testified before Congress, writes and speaks globally, and is regularly consulted by national and global media. She is the co-chair of the American Bar Association’s International Labor and Employment Committee and lectures on labor migration and comparative social justice lawyering approaches at Harvard Law School. She previously held a Robina Fellowship at the Orville H. Schell. Jr. Center for International Human Rights with a focus on the intersection of global supply chains chains and labor migration. JJ is a graduate of the University of Tennessee and the Harvard Law School. Follow her on twitter at @rosenbaumjj
jjrosenbaum@globallaborjustice.org
Staff Attorney
Johanna Lee is a human rights lawyer focused on promoting migrant workers’ rights and advancing corporate accountability to eliminate child and forced labor in global supply chains. Before joining the team as a staff attorney, Johanna worked with GLJ-ILRF as a Legal Fellow, engaging in legal and policy advocacy efforts to support the organization’s Seafood Campaign, as well as serving as a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, in Thailand. Previously, during law school, Johanna engaged in anti-human trafficking efforts through her fellowship with the Human Trafficking Institute and summer internships with the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST) in Los Angeles and Legal Support for Children and Women (LSCW) in Phnom Penh. Johanna also contributed to human rights advocacy projects and immigration cases through Harvard Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic, The Ghana Project Clinic, Immigration and Refugee Advocacy Clinic, and an Independent Clinical at the Immigration Center for Women and Children. Johanna holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a M.A. in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), and an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard College.
johannalee@globallaborjustice.org
Seafood Campaign Organizer
Jonathan is a doctoral student (2020 - present) at the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies of the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. His doctoral research explores the employment practices, solidarity, and activism of Southeast Asian migrant fishers on Taiwanese fishing vessels and at the ports. He has published several peer-reviewed articles related to migrant workers in Taiwan. Previously, he worked as an interpreter for an Indonesian labor union and a researcher and consultant for Scalabrini International Migration Network (SIMN) (Jan-Dec 2022) and Humanity Research Consultancy (Nov 2022-May 2023) in Taiwan. He has worked voluntarily at Stella Maris Kaohsiung, providing free translations, case profiling, port visits, and advocacy work for migrant workers in Taiwan. Currently, he serves as GLJ-ILRF’s campaign organizer for the Wi-Fi Now for Migrant Fishers’ Rights! campaign.
Strategic Research Director
Mandi Isaacs Jackson has two decades of strategy, research, and leadership development experience in the labor movement, community and political organizing, and the non-profit sector. She worked as an organizer and researcher with UNITE-HERE, where she organized and led strategic research campaigns in the academic and hospitality sectors and led community and political programs to increase community access to good union jobs and build worker power within global corporations and institutions. She has also served as executive director of a community-based non-profit organization. She has worked as a teacher, professor, and community educator/activist and consulted on leadership development, research, and campaign strategy work in the non-profit and social movement sector nationally. She has published book chapters and peer-reviewed articles in the fields of urban studies, history, and labor and community studies, and her book Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven (Temple University Press, 2008) won the 2008 Jane Jacobs Publication Award from the Urban Communication Foundation. Mandi received her Ph.D. from Yale University, her BA from Northwestern University, and her education from the labor movement.
mandijackson@globallaborjustice.org
Operations and Logistics Associate
Natalie Turkington is passionate about labor rights, migrant rights, and supporting grassroots mobilization worldwide. She feels driven by the creation of more equitable and worker-centered global economic structures and approaches. Natalie holds experience and dedication to logistics, operational, communication, and programmatic support work for international grassroots and non-profit organizations. She prides herself of this experience and her ability to ensure productive outcomes. With a history in research specifically centered on Latin America and migration studies, Natalie brings a unique lens to her rights work as well as added passion in this area. Based in Washington, DC, Natalie has spent time in New England and Santiago, Chile, reinforcing her fluency in Spanish and affinity for international systems. She obtained a B.A. in International Studies and a translation certificate for Spanish.
natalieturkington@globallaborjustice.org
Development Manager
Lead Campaign Organizer - Americas
Noah took part in a mass civil disobedience for racial and worker justice when he was 17 years old and hasn’t looked back since. He spent 9 years as an organizer of hospitality workers in Chicago and Northwest Indiana with UNITE HERE, where he learned from an incredibly talented and gutsy team of organizers and rank-and-file leaders. Noah moved to Buenos Aires in 2019 and began several organizing projects with unions in the region before joining GLJ-ILRF in 2020. While he still feels more comfortable on a picket line than in a Zoom call, Noah is thrilled to once again work with an ambitious team to support workers who fight for equality throughout the Americas and the world. With GLJ-ILRF, Noah has collaborated with regional partners to train dozens of new organizers and build campaigns in Perú, Colombia, Jamaica, Chile, and elsewhere.
noah@globallaborjustice.org
Senior Cotton Campaign Coordinator
Raluca is a labor rights specialist focused on global cotton supply chains. She has experience in corporate accountability campaigns, policy advocacy, labor rights research, and training development. At GLJ-ILRF, Raluca is the coordinator of the Cotton Campaign, leading engagement with labor partners and global brands and retailers to end forced labor and promote decent work for cotton workers in Central Asia.
Before joining GLJ-ILRF, Raluca was, for 4 years, a part of the team coordinating and monitoring the implementation of the Bangladesh Accord, a legally binding agreement between over 200 global apparel brands and trade unions to improve factory safety in the garment industry in Bangladesh. Before this, she served as the Campaigns Coordinator at Child Helpline International, engaging with governments, telecom, and ICT stakeholders to fund and expand national child helplines.
Raluca graduated cum laude from the School of Advanced Studies, University of London (UK), where she obtained an MA in Human Rights. She also holds an MA in Comparative Arts from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL) and a BSc in Public Relations from the School of Political and Administrative Studies in Bucharest (RO).
raluca@ilrf.org
Staff Attorney
Reynolds is a human rights attorney and advocate, focused on building worker power to hold corporate actors and development finance institutions accountable for abusive labor and human rights practices. Prior to joining GLJ-ILRF, Reynolds spent several years with Corporate Accountability Lab, where she developed innovative legal strategies and policy frameworks for combating forced labor, child labor, sex trafficking, gender-based violence, and corruption in supply chains across East and West Africa and the United States. Reynolds holds a B.A. from the University of Oklahoma, an M.B.A. with a major in Finance from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, and a J.D. from Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law. In 2021, she was awarded the Michael and Mary Schuette Global Fellowship in Health and Human Rights.Previously, Reynolds was a nonprofit consultant with Arabella Advisors, where she managed a portfolio of nearly a dozen 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations operating across the health care, reproductive justice, climate action, housing, and tax policy sectors. She also has experience leading a financial analytics team, working with community-based investors in the United States, and partnering with entrepreneurs and civil society organizations serving displaced and migrant communities in Beirut, Lebanon and Lesvos, Greece.Reynolds is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia.
reynoldstaylor@globallaborjustice.org
Chief Financial Officer
Roger Ghatt is an operations and financial management professional with almost 20 years of experience working with non-profit and corporate clients. More recently, Roger has over a decade of experience supporting the activism of organizations engaged in social justice reform. Roger joined ILRF in March 2019, and he is excited to use his deep knowledge of financial management procedures and controls combined with his administrative skills to empower everyone in the organization to achieve their goals. Roger is a graduate of American University with a B.A. in Business Administration with a focus on finance.
roger@ilrf.org
Deputy Legal Director
Sahiba is the Deputy Legal Director at GLJ-ILRF, where she advocates for unions and workers in global supply chains, focusing on migrant, racial and gender justice. Sahiba holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College and is a graduate of New York University School of Law.
Previously, Sahiba provided legal support to organizations defending migrant worker rights in the Arabian Gulf as an Arthur Helton Human Rights Fellow. During law school, she was a student advocate in the NYU Law Global Justice Clinic and an Ella Baker intern at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Sahiba volunteered with the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) and the NYU Coalition for Fair Labor, where she wrote a report on workers’ rights at NYU Abu Dhabi. Sahiba’s writing has been published in the European Journal of International Law. She is admitted to practice law in New York.
sahibagill@globallaborjustice.org
Lead Campaign Organizer - Central America
Sandra is a labor and community organizer, and social justice advocate, with over fifteen years of experience working with unions, human rights, and advocacy groups across the United Sates to empower, organize and strengthen low-income communities and vulnerable populations. She has worked on numerous political, electoral, and organizing campaigns that included airport, food service, distribution centers, industrial laundries, and hospitality workers in the South with UNITE, UNITE HERE, and Workers United-SEUI unions. Sandra worked as a human rights investigator monitoring the Fair Food Program, a worker-lead, market-driven social responsibility initiative to ensure compliance of a human-rights code of conduct that included zero tolerance for forced labor and sexual assault. In this role, she conducted field investigations of human and labor rights violations in migrant worker camps, including incidents of discrimination, retaliation, and sexual harassment experienced by female farmworkers in tomato fields in Florida. Before GLJ-ILRF, Sandra was Senior Manager of Community Impact with United Way Suncoast where she built strategic collaboratives and managed community partnerships to successfully established a family resource center and an after-school program, both place-based initiatives which provided community resources and services, and education equity to low-income neighborhoods that greatly reduced social and economic barriers to access. Sandra is originally from El Salvador and fluent in Spanish.
Deputy Director
Valery Alzaga is a labor and migrant rights campaigner and organiser with more than 20 years of organising experience across a range of different sectors - including property services, care, transport, health, retail, IT, renewable energies and auto-manufacturing. She started as an organiser with the Justice for Janitors campaign before becoming the Property Service Director at Local 105 in Denver, where she also was the president of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. She then worked for SEIU’s global department helping win and implement breakthrough global cleaning and security organising agreements (ISS, Securitas, G4S). From 2008 to 2015 she was the European organising coordinator with the Change to Win European Organising Centre (CTW-EOC) based in Amsterdam, working with many European unions and sectors to help them develop their own strategic organising campaigns and programs - including FNV (NL), UNISON and Unite (UK), IG Metal and ver.di (DE), 3F (DK), Solidarnoc (PL), SATAWU (SA) and GUFS (ITF and UNI). Since 2015 she has worked in UK public sector unions organising anti-privatization and EU and non-EU migrant rights campaigns. From 2018 to 2021 Valery was a field campaign strategist and advisor to Barcelona and Catalynia en Comu in Spain. She has a B.A. in International Studies from the University of Denver, and the Libera Universita Internazionale Degli Studi Sociali (LUISS) in Rome, and studied at the Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS). She is a proud mom of two and a great fan of the arts, philosophy, quantum physics, and the beautiful game.
Senior Seafood Campaign Coordinator
Zacari Edwards brings a wealth of experience working on labor rights issues in the Seafood sector. In previous roles, Zacari have overseen the implementation of social responsibility improvements in tuna supply chains, demonstrating his leadership in guiding market actors, NGOs, and advocacy groups towards fostering greater accountability in the global industry. Zacari also currently holds board positions in two prominent organizations focused on conservation and better transparency in fisheries. Now at GLJ-ILRF, Zacari serves as the Senior Seafood Campaign Coordinator, responsible for spearheading efforts to strengthen partner labor unions and worker organizations, ensuring corporate and government accountability, and protecting labor and human rights in seafood supply chains. Leveraging his extensive experience and commitment to labor rights in the Seafood Sector, Zacari coordinates the Seafood Working Group (SWG), its subgroups, and its advisory board, facilitating the development and implementation of coordinated plans to advance program objectives.
zacariedwards@globallaborjustice.org