The National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA) is pleased to announce Gregory Schell, managing attorney, of Florida Legal Services, Inc.’s, Migrant Farmworker Justice Project, as this year's winner of the prestigious Reginald Heber Smith Award (the “Reggie”). Schell will be honored during the NLADA 2004 Annual Conference Awards Luncheon on Friday, December 3, at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The "Reggie" celebrates the outstanding achievements and dedicated services of an attorney for contributions made while employed by an organization providing civil legal services or indigent defense services. Revered by all in the migrant farmworker community, Schell has dedicated his entire 25-year career to advocating against the injustices inflicted on his clients. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1979, Schell chose instead to dedicate his life’s work to fixing the wrongs of the rich on low-income, migrant farmworkers.

In a supporting nomination letter from James Knoepp of the Virginia Justice Center for Farm and Immigrant Workers, he states that “Greg is truly an exceptional attorney who has devoted his 25+ year career to serving migrant farmworkers, one of the most vulnerable and exploited populations of clients served by the legal aid community. …In my opinion, …Greg has done more to advance the cause of farmworkers through the use of the law than any other person in the farmworker advocate community during the last 25 years.”

Schell is a hero to the migrant farmworkers, and rightly so. His list of accomplishments on behalf of the migrant farmworker community is vast and voluminous. He has secured several landmark decisions from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals that have advanced the cause of justice for farmworkers. These decisions made it easier to hold growers liable as joint employers of the workers brought to labor in their fields by labor contractors and expanded coverage of the Agricultural Worker Protection Act to the thousands of workers who harvest and bale pine straw in the Southeast. The decision also found employers responsible for reimbursing expenses incurred by guestworkers in traveling to distant jobsites, to the extent that the expenses reduced the worker’s wages below minimum wage.

Some of the cases in which Schell provided counsel include Antenor v. D & S Farms, 88 F.3d 925 (11th Cir. 1996), which reversed the lower court’s ruling that the growers were not joint employers of the farmworkers who picked beans for the defendants. Schell brought the case on behalf or more than 600 farmworkers as individual plaintiffs for a class of 10,000 bean pickers. The lawsuit alleged violations of minimum wage, failure to pay social security and unemployment taxes to the government and failure to maintain payroll records. After the successful appeal, the plaintiffs received one of the largest back wage payments ever made to farmworkers within the United States. In addition, millions of dollars of the farmworkers’ earnings were reported to the government, qualifying and/or increasing the workers’ eligibility for Social Security, SSI, food stamps and Medicaid benefits.

In a nomination letter, Staff Attorney Rachel Micah-Jones of Florida Rural Legal Services, Inc. credits him with the success of numerous migrant farmworker cases and says, “Greg’s commitment to migrant farmworkers is strong and long-standing despite being vilified by growers and threatened by farm labor contractors with fists and at least one gun. …The Antenor case is not only a testament to Greg’s legal brilliance, but also to his tenacity and willingness to go above and beyond expectations. As the only lawyer representing the workers, Greg could have brought the class action on behalf of the few initial plaintiffs. But Greg signed up all 612 individual plaintiffs in order to increase the workers’ individual recovery….” Schell’s work in this case illustrates his selfless devotion and commitment to the cause. In fact to prevail in Antenor, Schell spent every Sunday, every Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s for years traveling to Homestead, Florida, to meet with each of the 612 individual plaintiffs. He literally accommodated their work schedules to make the case an unequivocal success.

Schell’s other cases include Jorge E. Arriaga, et al. v. Florida Pacific Farms, LLC, et al., 305 F.3d 1228 (11th Cir. 2002), one of the most important and potentially far-reaching minimum wage cases in recent years. Another case, Dagoberto Morante-Navarro, et al. v. T&Y Pine Straw, Inc.,350 F.3d 1163 (11th Cir. 2003), extended coverage of the Agricultural Worker Protection Act, the principal law governing farmworkers, to thousands of workers who harvest and bale pine straw. In addition to his court victories, Schell has also been successful in administrative channels. While working for the Legal Aid Bureau in the 1980s, Schell filed complaints citing serious violations of health and safety codes in Virginia’s migrant labor camps. These complaints led the Virginia Department of Labor to investigate approximately 100 migrant labor camps on the Eastern Shore, imposing $67,875 in civil penalties on growers.

For more information on NLADA awards, visit www.nlada.org.

# # #

The National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA) champions effective legal assistance for people who cannot afford counsel, serves as a collective voice for both civil legal services and public defense services throughout the nation and provides a wide range of services and benefits to its individual and organizational members. Founded in 1911, NLADA is the oldest and largest national, nonprofit membership organization devoting all of its resources to advocating equal access to justice for all Americans.