Al Meyerhoff, legal voice for the poor, dies at 61

Al Meyerhoff, a leading labor, environmental and civil rights lawyer who brought a landmark case to stop sweatshop conditions for 30,000 workers on the Pacific island of Saipan, died on Sunday in Los Angeles, where he lived. He was 61. As a civil rights litigator, he successfully challenged a California law that prevented illegal immigrant children from attending public school. As an environmental lawyer–he worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council for 17 years–he challenged the continued use of cancer-causing pesticides. As a labor lawyer, he was co-lead counsel in suing Gap, Nordstrom, Ralph Lauren and 20 other retailers, accused of obtaining garments from Saipan factories that used guard dogs and had barbed-wire fences. Many of the workers, some of whom Mr. Meyerhoff said were indentured servants, were immigrants from China who had paid several thousand dollars to work in Saipan and were forced to toil 12 hours a day, seven days a week, often without overtime pay. "Saipan is America's worst sweatshop," Mr. Meyerhoff said in an interview with The New York Times in 1999, referring to the island in the Northern Marianas Islands, an American commonwealth near the Philippines. The lawsuit was one of the most ambitious ever brought against sweatshops, sending a signal to sweatshop owners in dozens of countries to improve conditions. As part of the $20 million settlement, the apparel companies agreed to pay back wages, follow a code of workplace conduct and pay for an independent monitor to inspect the Saipan factories. Mr. Meyerhoff waived any fees. Over the decades, Mr. Meyerhoff produced numerous op-ed articles for The Los Angeles Times and The Huffington Post Web site, many letters in The New York Times and The Washington Post and articles in law journals and environmental magazines. He also testified 50 times before Congressional committees. "I was meant to do this work," Mr. Meyerhoff told online magazine of the Cornell University Law School this year. Albert Henry Meyerhoff Jr. was born in Ellington, Conn., on Sept. 20, 1947. He told the Cornell Web magazine that as a boy he was harassed by bullies and that as a result he developed "an active dislike of the abuse of power." Mr. Meyerhoff graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1969 and from the Cornell law school in 1972. After law school, he turned down a high-paying corporate law job to take a $60-a-week position with California Rural Legal Assistance, which represented migrant workers and the rural poor. In one lawsuit, he challenged the University of California over its underwriting of research on farm mechanization, saying it hurt farm workers and family farms. In 1981 Mr. Meyerhoff joined the Natural Resources Defense Council and became director of its public health program. He helped pressure the chemical industry to adopt tougher standards on pesticides by invoking a rarely used amendment under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that prohibited the use of animal carcinogens in processed foods. His litigation helped persuade the industry to ban several dozen carcinogenic pesticides. In 1988, he joined Coughlin Stoia, a class action law firm, from which he brought the Saipan lawsuit, sued Enron and challenged Mexican cross-border trucking, asserting that it violated United States health and safety standards. "He was a warrior against the chemical industry," Frances Beinecke, president of the N.R.D.C., said of Mr. Meyerhoff. "He was a champion of the underserved. He fought long and hard to make the world a safer place for farm workers, for kids, for people working in factories and for people living in poverty who couldn't represent themselves."