Minsu Longiaru

she/her

Senior Staff Attorney for Worker Power

Oakland, CA

Minsu provides legal support and strategic thought partnership to organizing and policy campaigns in the PowerSwitch Action Network that build worker power through the interaction of organizing, comprehensive campaigning, direct representation, impact litigation, and policy and administrative strategies.

Minsu has dedicated her career to learning to be—what lawyer, legal scholar, and advocate Amanda Alexander calls— an “organizer with legal skills,” who can provide wide-ranging support to movements, social justice groups, and organizers. After graduating from law school, Minsu spent ten years directly supporting workers centers and worker-led movements. During this time she served as a Skadden fellow and staff attorney in legal aid and clinical law programs, a Fulbright Garcſa-Robles fellow researching transnational advocacy networks, and held local and national leadership positions at Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, in which she was responsible for weaving together workplace justice, research, and policy campaigns.

Minsu devoted the next ten years of her career to honing her skills as a seasoned workers’ rights attorney with experience in investigations, litigation, and policy. This included four years representing workers and labor organizations at a union-side law firm, and nearly six years working in government enforcing workers’ rights laws. Most recently she served as a Deputy Attorney General with the State of California’s Worker Rights and Fair Labor Section, addressing systemic business practices that undermine the working conditions of app-based workers, warehouse workers, and others. For their work, Minsu and her colleagues were awarded the Attorney General Team Award in 2021 and 2022 for demonstrating the highest professional work standards.

But whatever Minsu has done pales in comparison to what she has seen workers and communities do time and time again: put everything on the line to stand up for transformative justice. Whenever a challenge seems daunting, she thinks of their call to all of us to dwell in and act from a place of hope and radical possibility.

Minsu holds a BA and JD from Harvard University. Outside of work, Minsu enjoys spending time with her family, and playing the cello, which she does mostly in her basement but occasionally elsewhere.