Our Work
Sur Legal Collaborative is a legal nonprofit in Atlanta, GA working at the intersection of labor and immigrant rights.
By collaborating directly with communities and grassroots groups, we seek to democratize legal knowledge and provide legal support to movements fighting for economic, racial, and social justice in the Deep South.
Some examples of these efforts include educating thousands of workers about their labor rights through our popular education program and successfully obtaining immigration status and employment authorization documents on behalf of vulnerable workers.
Programs
Popular Education
Sur Legal Collaborative’s Popular Education programming centers the experiences of our communities and supports the needs they need to be met.
Educational Materials: In alignment with our values of democratizing legal knowledge for vulnerable workers within the Deep South, our Popular Education program seeks to create and proliferate educational materials.
Leadership Development: Leadership Development is crucial to ensure that popular education is spread, and that impact is felt throughout Georgia. Because of that we have created the Worker Advisor Committee (WAC)* initiative which includes current and former poultry workers and allows them to engage in programs led by our Workers Rights Organizer. They provide us with direct insight and context into the communities we serve.
Trainings
There are no workers centers in Georgia, and very few workplace health and safety resources in the South. organizations throughout the South with expertise in workplace health and safety. Sur Legal fills this gap by equipping communitiesequipingproviding communitiesworkers and organizers with information about their rights in the workplace and equipping them with tools and information they need to protect themselves from potential exploitation by abusive employers.
Know Your Rights (KYR) Training: We offer KYR training designed to educate individuals about their legal rights and how to exercise them. Our KYR sessions are designed to break down complex legal concepts, especially related to issues at the intersection of labor and immigration, into accessible, industry-specific, and culturally-responsive content that supports marginalized workers and individuals to understand their legal rights.
Train-the-Trainer Sessions: We also offer train-the-trainer workshops to organizers, students, and worker leaders alike in order to build their expertise and organizing skills to increase their capacity are also at the core of our popular education. Our team creates curriculums aimed at expanding the knowledge base of our communities and so that those communities are empowered through self determination to take a stand not just for themselves but to build the capacity to train more workers.
To schedule a Know Your Rights training with Sur Legal, please contact us at info@surlegal.org.
Technical Assistance
As a part of our mission to put legal tools in the hands of the community, Sur has implemented technical assistance programming. As lawyers are often unaffordable and wield an outsized role in access to justice for immigrant and working class communities, we want to “de-lawyer” this work.
Templates: We provide templates directly to the communities we serve, giving them the tools they need to exercise their rights in the work space. The tools we have created for our communities allow them to file their own labor complaints and request immigration relief without the assistance of an attorney.
Legal Guidance: We support organizers, attorneys, pro-se clients, and others with guidance on how to access a potential legal pathway of recourse, or how to file an effective labor complaint.
Navigation Services: We support workers in navigating legal pathways for recourse, particularly by liaising with federal labor agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA); U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC); National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), etc.
Direct Representation
Sur Legal provides limited direct representation to workers who have experienced harassment, abuse, or other violations within the workplace. Obtaining protection from immigration enforcement is a critical strategy for building worker power.
Labor-Based Immigration Relief: Part of our legal services work entails assessing pathways and avenues for legal recourse–such as u-visa certifications, work permits, and t-visas, for undocumented workers that have faced abuse, exploitation, and/or harassment within the workplace.
Limited Representation: In alignment with our values of increasing accessibility for those marginalized at the intersection of labor law, immigration law, and systems of mass incarceration, Sur Legal provides limited direct representation to workers who have experienced harassment, abuse, or other violations within the workplace. How?
Direct Representation: The majority of our direct representation clients have been a community of over 30 immigrant poultry workers in Gainesville, Georgia who survived a deadly nitrogen leak in January 2021 that killed six of their coworkers. We were the first organization in the country to obtain labor based deferred action (DA), a temporary form of immigration relief for immigrant workers involved in labor investigations. We have obtained DA for approximately 18 of the survivors of the leak, and continue to receive requests for assistance on an ongoing basis.