While viewing our timeline, you can listen to a selection of movement music specially curated by NELP staff to celebrate our 55th anniversary.
Since 1969, NELP has been a leading voice in the workers’ rights movement, committed to transformative legal and policy solutions, research, and advocacy that has impacted millions of workers and their families across the country.
NELP will continue to lead the movement for a good-jobs economy—an economic future where every job is a good job, everyone who wants a job can get one, and everyone has economic security between jobs.
View our interactive timeline and explore NELP’s long commitment to racial and economic justice.
1969
NELP is founded by students who create a law clinic for workers at Columbia Law School in New York City. Later, as a legal services backup center, NELP provides litigation assistance, employment law training, written reports, and expert testimony to legal aid attorneys throughout the United States.
Photo credit: Columbia University Archives
1970
Congress enacts the Occupational Safety and Health Act, establishing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to ensure workers’ right to a safe and healthful workplace. Today, NELP is fighting for stronger occupational safety standards and better working conditions in some of the nation’s harshest workplaces, including poultry and meat processing plants.
Learn MorePhoto credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture
1973
NELP argues a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, and federal employees win the due process right to a full evidentiary hearing on their unemployment insurance eligibility.
Learn MorePhoto credit: Wikimedia Commons
1974
Signed into law on Labor Day 1974, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, sets the minimum standards for retirement, health, and other benefits. NELP defended federal rules protecting retirement savers from investment advice that cost them billions annually, and continues to fight for state-level reforms after the Trump Administration abandoned its defense of the federal rules.
Photo credit: Colorado State University Archives, Everett Collection
1974
Congress establishes the Legal Services Corporation, a publicly funded nonprofit, to finance civil legal aid for low-income Americans. Founded five years earlier as a Columbia Law School clinic, NELP becomes an LSC “back-up center” in the 1970s and 80s, offering technical support to legal services attorneys and taking on workers’ rights class-action litigation.
Photo credit: Legal Services NYC
1979
NELP employees vote to join UAW, District 65 (formerly the United Wholesale and Warehouse Workers Union, Local 65). Today, NELP continues to be unionized, and its staff belong to UAW Local 2320 National Organization of Legal Service Workers.
1982
NELP filed a lawsuit in 1973 (Walls v. Mississippi State Dept. of Public Welfare) for Black workers who were being discriminated against due to hiring practices that violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. After nine years of complex litigation, the court ruled in favor of the workers in 1982.
Photo credit: Associated Press
1992
NELP hosts the first Employment Task Force, a Capitol Hill convening of 70 of the nation’s leading employment specialists from legal services, industrial and service unions, and community-based groups organizing low-wage and unemployed workers.
1993
Congress enacts the Family and Medical Leave Act, providing 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave for new parents, caretakers of injured or ill relatives, and workers with personal health problems. NELP remains staunchly committed to extending these rights into paid family and medical leave and paid sick leave.
1994
After the City of Baltimore adopts an influential 1994 living wage ordinance, the movement to raise wage standards through city and county contracts gains nationwide momentum. Current and former NELP staffers play key roles as community organizers, lawyers, and researchers providing rapid response legal, policy, and communications support for campaigns.
1994
NELP loses all its federal funding when Congress eliminates funding for Legal Services Corporation backup centers.
1996
NELP was among the many organizations and individuals who worked long and hard to increase the federal minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.15 an hour. Working with grassroots partners, NELP was able to bring affected workers directly into the campaign.
Photo credit: Walter P. Reuther Library
1997
NELP provides years of legal advocacy and research to support the national welfare rights campaign, culminating in a landmark guidance from the U.S. Department of Labor and the EEOC concluding that most people in workfare jobs are due labor protections just as any other workers would be.
2001
NELP responds to the 9/11 attacks in New York City with an initiative to help the clean-up workers protect their health and safety rights, and to advocate for broad access to Disaster Unemployment Assistance for workers employed in the disaster area but who were denied because their jobs also involved work outside the disaster area.
Learn MorePhoto credit: U.S. Navy
2005
NELP takes action in response to the tragedies, working with unions and Louisiana’s unemployment agency to advocate for federal extensions of the disaster unemployment program. NELP also testifies at a U.S. Senate committee hearing on responses to Hurricane Katrina. This organized response births the New Orleans Worker Center.
Photo credit: New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice
2008
NELP joins forces with a team of attorneys, policy advocates, and researchers from the Economic Justice Project of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. The newly expanded NELP launches a minimum wage advocacy program and significantly deepens its policy research and design capacity.
2008
NELP works with lawmakers to develop the Unemployment Insurance Modernization Act, which provides $7 billion in incentive funds for states to adopt underpaid worker, part-time, and women worker reforms. It is enacted in February 2009 as part of the Recovery Act, along with the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program.
Learn MorePhoto credit: Mon Valley Unemployed Committee
2011
NELP wraps up an 11-year lawsuit filed on behalf of 1,000 delivery workers from West Africa who worked for major grocery and pharmacy chains in Manhattan. Partnering with law firm Outten & Golden to represent the class, NELP recovers more than $6 million in back wages and fees, and the bonds forged between workers in the case, Ansoumana v. Gristedes, leads to unionized delivery positions at the stores sued.
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2012
Thanks to strong organizing led by NELP in partnership with allies, the EEOC issues an “arrest and conviction” guidance for employers, reinforcing the employment rights of people with records and leading to the adoption of fair-chance hiring policies by President Obama’s Reentry Council and by numerous states and localities.
2012
Launched in New York City in 2012, when fast-food workers walked off their jobs demanding $15 an hour and union rights, the Fight for $15 movement has spurred minimum wage increases around the country—and placed the need for higher pay atop the national agenda. Today, NELP provides key support to numerous Fight for $15 efforts and is a proud partner and leader in the fight to #RaiseTheWage and win union rights for underpaid workers.
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2015
NELP helps lead a multi-year campaign that culminates in a historic victory for home care workers when the Labor Department issues a long-awaited rule extending federal minimum wage and overtime protections to more than two million workers.
2016
Persistent advocacy by NELP, EPI, and allies results in the Obama DOL issuing its 2016 overtime final rule, which strengthens overtime protections for more than 12 million middle-class workers. Right-wing opponents blocked the 2016 rule through litigation, but our fight to strengthen overtime protections carries on.
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2018
NELP, along with a strong coalition of civil and labor rights groups, wins legislative protections ensuring tips belong to workers after a Trump Labor Department proposal tried to take ownership of tips away from workers.
Read morePhoto credit: Restaurant Opportunities Center
2019
NELP continues to promote efforts to pass $15 minimum wages around the nation. In 2019, Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland joined California, New York, and Massachusetts in adopting $15. NELP also fights right-wing efforts to preempt localities from raising wages, helping to win a state appellate court decision upholding Minneapolis’s $15 city wage.
2019
NELP convened 186 organizations composed of 300 worker leaders and advocates at our We’re All In! National Conference in Las Vegas.
2020
NELP welcomes new President and CEO, Rebecca Dixon—and her vision for economic, racial, and gender justice.
2020
NELP’s President and CEO, Rebecca Dixon, testifies at a U.S. Senate hearing urging Congress to ensure corporations are held responsible for the health and safety of workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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2021
During the COVID-19 pandemic, NELP advocated for reauthorization of federal unemployment insurance supplemental payments and expansion of benefits through the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan Act, which resulted in sending more than $666 billion in funds to workers and families experiencing unemployment.
2021
NELP supported partner campaigns to rein in at-will firings by helping win a precedent-setting just cause law protecting 70,000 fast food workers in NYC.
2021
NELP successfully pushed for the USDA to withdraw a proposed Trump-era rule to speed up poultry lines impacting 250,000 workers—the majority of whom are Black, Latinx, and immigrant workers.
2022
NELP launched The Truth About the CWI, a website dedicated to exposing the Coalition for Workforce Innovation, a corporate lobby group trying to pass laws that lock workers into “independent contractor” status. The website uncovers the truth about the CWI. NELP leveraged the website to further worker-led efforts that advance employer accountability and universal access to good quality jobs.
2022
NELP’s UI Policy hub is a collection of resources for state UI policy advocates to support their efforts to strengthen the economic security of workers and their families and create a just economy.
Learn MorePhoto credit: Mon Valley Unemployed Committee
2023
Following many years of workers’ demands and advocacy by NELP and our partners, the Department of Homeland Security created new guidance on the agency’s procedures for granting temporary work authorization to immigrant workers who experience or witness violations of workers’ rights.
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2023
NELP worked in coalition in New Jersey to help pass the strongest temp worker legislation in the country, which impacted 127,000 workers.
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2023
NELP teamed up with Project Hustle to document the working lives of Black women and femmes in New Orleans, focusing on the impacts of criminalization, care work, and occupational segregation.
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2023
Understanding that climate change is shifting what a good job looks like, NELP is helping workers fight for increased rights in an era of climate change, including a right to refuse dangerous work, better safety measures, and strong anti-retaliation protections.
2024
NELP and our partners advocated for stronger protections for misclassified workers who were subject to a Trump-era rule that made it easier for employers to misclassify employees as independent contractors. The new rule helps ensure all people who work for someone else have access to foundational labor protections.
Learn MorePhoto credit: Gig Workers Rising
2024
NELP’s testimonies, research, and advocacy highlight the harm of non-compete agreements, which impact 30 million workers . Anti-competitive non-compete agreements are used to depress worker wages on state and regional levels. NELP contributes to a national conversation and the FTC ban in 2024.
2024
We updated our logo and launched a new website that reflects our growth, our commitment, and our bold vision for the future.
2024
NELP releases a groundbreaking report, Desegregating Opportunity: Why Uprooting Occupational Segregation is Critical to Building a Good-Jobs Economy. The report highlights the need to eliminate occupational segregation to build a good-jobs economy.
Learn MorePhoto credit: Sarahbeth Maney, Detroit Free Press
