Legal Advocate and Membership Coordinator

**Overview**:
The Worker Solidarity Network (WSN) is a non-profit worker center dedicated to ending precarious work in B.C. Our goal is to build collective worker power through the key pillars of our work, which include: support, education, and advocacy for workers whose rights are violated; workplace based direct action campaigns that are worker-led and help recover stolen wages; and broader province-wide campaigning to raise workplace standards and strengthen labour protections.

This position is a hybrid position including outreach and membership building and legal advocacy within our Solidarity Stewards Program. Your role as the membership coordinator will be key to growing our membership, building WSN’s worker center movement and organizing for change that impacts precarious workers. This will primarily be done through our Street Team, a chapter-based volunteer outreach program focused on building member skills and presence across the Province. In your legal advocacy role, you will provide support and advocacy to people facing workplace injustice. The Solidarity Stewards Program is our front-line support for low wage, precariously employed, non unionized workers who contact WSN for help or with questions about their rights at work. The purpose of the Solidarity Steward Program is to help workers take action to get workplace justice and build worker power to organize for change.

**Duties and Responsibilities**:
**Outreach and Membership Development**
- Work with WSN staff, board, and membership to develop and put into action a membership engagement outreach strategy across the province to build WSN’s worker membership, with a focus on the lower mainland.
- Create and support WSN worker membership engagement activities broadly, with a focus on the lower mainland (movie nights, skills trainings, etc)
- Coordinate WSN’s Street Team Outreach program by managing, supporting, and organizing volunteers broadly, with a focus in Vancouver and Victoria
- Collaborate with WSN staff and members to grow and amplify campaigns and broaden WSN’s physical presence in the province (e.g., leafleting, postering, conducting outreach to workers etc.)
- Work with WSN staff and members to build the leadership of workers through membership organizer training for members across the province (e.g support the growth of regional training opportunities to help build community organizing skills among memberships)

**Solidarity Steward Response - Legal Advocate**
- Help workers navigate accessing justice and learn about their legal rights
- Actively listen to the worker’s story while acknowledging the injustice they are facing, and make a bureaucratic processes more human
- Share ways workers can take action and organize for better working conditions
(e.g. union drive, worker-led direct action campaign, filing complaints with
government agencies)
- Advocate for workers going through Employment Standards Branch investigations and processes to recover stolen wages
- Assist workers filing Human Rights Tribunal complaints and WorkSafe BC complaints
- Keep workers’ files organized and updated (i.e training case numbers, collecting evidence, update limitation periods for complaints etc.) using the Practice Panther case management software while following privacy laws concerning the protection of personal information
- Refer workers to other forms of support that fall outside WSN’s scope (e.g. civil
claims)
- Maintain ongoing contact with workers to build relationships and invite workers to participate in WSN events, workshops, programing
- Participate in on-going communication and weekly meetings with Solidarity Stewards Project Coordinator and Executive Director

**Qualifications and Skills**
- This position is suited to someone who enjoys building relationships and coordinating/facilitating activities and outreach events;
- Strong proficiency navigating government administrations (i.e Employment Standards Branch, Human Rights Tribunal, WorkSafe BC, etc);
- Commitment to justice;
- Ability to work collaboratively in a team environment and contribute to a positive office culture.

**Flexibility to accommodate meetings and action days that extend into the evenings and weekends is required.**

**Values Alignment**:

- Commitment to workplace justice and grassroots worker organizing
- An understanding that the WSN operates with a decolonizing framework that respects relationships with the original people and spirit of this territory, and reflects on how our work at WSN may be bound up with systems and processes of ongoing colonization

**Our commitment to employment equity**:
Employment equity practices are used to work towards the inclusion of all people in paid work. Employment equity practices recognize that capitalism, racism, colonialism, ableism, sexism, and other isms and forms of systemic discrimination shape people’s work experiences and result in unfair and unequal employment situations that include: under-employment