Stacy Villalobos (she/her/ella) is the Director of the Racial Economic Justice Program at Legal Aid at Work. Stacy has been advocating for workers’ rights for over two decades, beginning during her undergraduate years as an organizer with the university’s immigrant workers. Her practice currently focuses on fighting race discrimination in the workplace, including representing job seekers with arrest and conviction records. In this work, she has litigated many legal questions of first impression, leading to judicial decisions that have solidified and expanded federal and California law protections for workers who are discriminated against and economically exploited.

Most recently, Stacy was involved in arguing and briefing, as amici curiae, an important victory before the California Supreme Court. In Bailey v. San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, the California Supreme Court broke new legal ground when it held that a single use of a racial epithet, even when uttered by a coworker, can be severe enough to be actionable harassment under the California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA). Stacy and her colleagues also won two important victories in the Ninth Circuit. In Arias v. Raimondo, co-counseled with California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. (CRLA), the court created national precedent when it found an employer’s attorney could be held personally liable for unlawful retaliation when he contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to have an undocumented immigrant worker deported after he had sued the employer to recover his unpaid wages. And in Guerrero v. California Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), the Ninth Circuit upheld a groundbreaking U.S. District Court judgment that CDCR violated a job applicant’s federal civil rights by rejecting him solely because he had used an invalid Social Security number to obtain work while he had been undocumented.