Shannon Liss-Riordan (''
née
The birth name is the name of the person given upon their birth. The term may be applied to the surname, the given name or to the entire name. Where births are required to be officially registered, the entire name entered onto a births registe ...
'' Liss; born 1969) is an American labor attorney. She is best known for her
class-action
A class action
A class action is a form of lawsuit.
Class Action may also refer to:
* ''Class Action'' (film), 1991, starring Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
* Class Action (band), a garage house band
* "Class Action" (''Teenage R ...
cases against companies such as
Uber
Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides Ridesharing company, ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, a ...
,
FedEx
FedEx Corporation, originally known as Federal Express Corporation, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate holding company specializing in Package delivery, transportation, e-commerce, and ...
, and
Starbucks
Starbucks Corporation is an American multinational List of coffeehouse chains, chain of coffeehouses and Starbucks Reserve, roastery reserves headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It was founded in 1971 by Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gor ...
.
Liss-Riordan was a candidate in the
2020 United States Senate election in Massachusetts
The 2020 United States Senate election in Massachusetts was held on November 3, 2020, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, concurrently with the 2020 U.S. presidential election, as we ...
, unsuccessfully challenging incumbent
Ed Markey
Edward John Markey (born July 11, 1946) is an American politician serving as the Seniority in the United States Senate, junior United States Senate, United States senator from the state of Massachusetts, a seat he has held since 2013. A member of ...
for his senate seat.
Liss-Riordan also unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic nomination for
Massachusetts attorney general
The Massachusetts attorney general is an elected constitutionally defined executive officer of the Massachusetts government. The officeholder is the chief lawyer and law enforcement officer of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The officeholder ...
in the
2022 Massachusetts Attorney General election.
Early life and education
Shannon Liss grew up in
Houston, Texas
Houston ( ) is the List of cities in Texas by population, most populous city in the U.S. state of Texas and in the Southern United States. Located in Southeast Texas near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, it is the county seat, seat of ...
. She graduated with a bachelor's degree from
Harvard College
Harvard College is the undergraduate education, undergraduate college of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Scienc ...
in 1990, after which she went to work for women's movement leader,
Bella Abzug
Bella Abzug (; née Savitzky; July 24, 1920 – March 31, 1998), nicknamed "Battling Bella", was an American lawyer, politician, social activist, and a leader in the women's movement. In 1971, Abzug joined other leading feminists such as Gloria ...
. An activist during the early 1990s and the
feminist movement
The feminist movement, also known as the women's movement, refers to a series of social movements and political campaigns for Radical politics, radical and Liberalism, liberal reforms on women's issues created by inequality between men and wom ...
, Liss-Riordan co-founded the Third Wave Direct Action Coalition with writer
Rebecca Walker
Rebecca Walker (born Rebecca Leventhal; November 17, 1969) is an American writer, feminist, and activist. Walker has been regarded as one of the prominent voices of Third Wave Feminism, and the coiner of the term "third wave", since publishing ...
to "mobilize young women." She was coordinator of a seminar at
Hunter College
Hunter College is a public university in New York City, United States. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools ...
in 1992, which featured lawyer
Anita Hill
Anita Faye Hill (born July 30, 1956) is an American lawyer, educator and author. She is a professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University and a faculty member of the university's Heller School for Social Policy and ...
and other
feminist
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...
leaders.
While a first-year student at
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, Harvard Law School is the oldest law school in continuous operation in the United ...
, in 1994 Liss organized an
auction
An auction is usually a process of Trade, buying and selling Good (economics), goods or Service (economics), services by offering them up for Bidding, bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from th ...
that featured a copy of the
Constitution
A constitution is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organization or other type of entity, and commonly determines how that entity is to be governed.
When these pri ...
signed by Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg ( ; Bader; March 15, 1933 – September 18, 2020) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until Death and state funeral of Ruth Bader ...
and a copy of the ''
Roe v. Wade
''Roe v. Wade'', 410 U.S. 113 (1973),. was a List of landmark court decisions in the United States, landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protected the right to have an ...
'' decision signed by Justice
Harry Blackmun
Harold Andrew Blackmun (November 12, 1908 – March 4, 1999) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 to 1994. Appointed by President Richard Nixon, Blackmun ultima ...
and other items. She also wrote a column in the law school newspaper. In 1996,
[ Liss graduated from ]Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, Harvard Law School is the oldest law school in continuous operation in the United ...
.
Career
After law school, Liss-Riordan clerked for two years for Judge Nancy F. Atlas of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. In 1998, she joined the Boston labor law firm, Pyle Rome Lichten & Ehrenberg, where she became a partner in 2002, litigating employment rights, First Amendment, and other labor cases. In 2009, Liss-Riordan co-founded the firm Lichten & Liss-Riordan, where she has been recognized as one of the nation's leading attorneys protecting workers' rights.
Early in her career, Liss-Riordan won two disability discrimination trials in federal court, in 2002 against the Boston Police Department on behalf of a hearing-impaired police recruit, and later that year for a deaf airline mechanic who had been denied a job from United Airlines. In 2002, she won a First Amendment case reinstating a State Police recruit who had been disqualified because he owned two adult bookstores. Starting in 2001, Liss-Riordan began a string of more 40 cases representing waitstaff challenging their employers for taking a share of their tips. This line of cases developed a previously unused 1952 Massachusetts law protecting tipped employees and resulted in verdicts against the Hilltop Steak House
The Hilltop Steak House was an American restaurant located on Route 1 in Saugus, Massachusetts. Founded in 1961 by Frank Giuffrida, it was one of the busiest restaurants in the United States during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The Hilltop closed ...
, the Federalist restaurant, and other settlements including against the Four Seasons Hotel, the Weston Golf Club, Northeastern University, the Palm, Ruth's Chris, and Starbucks. She then sued establishments in other states and won victories and settlements in New York, Florida, Hawaii, and California. In 2006, Liss-Riordan won a class action discrimination lawsuit against the state of Massachusetts, where the court ruled that a civil service cognitive ability test discriminated against minority applicants. A federal judge ordered fire departments across Massachusetts to offer jobs to about 50 minority firefighter applicants. In 2008, Liss-Riordan brought a series of cases for skycaps against American Airlines, United Airlines, and US Airways claiming they had retained a $2 baggage fee that passengers believed was a tip for the workers. In the case against American Airlines, a jury ruled for the skycaps and found that American had violated the Massachusetts tips law. After the trial, the airlines dropped the charge nationwide. The cases received extensive coverage from the Boston Globe, including an editorial “Kicked at the Curb”, and earned Liss-Riordan the nickname “Sledgehammer Shannon”.
In 2005, Liss-Riordan began suing many companies for misclassifying their workers as independent contractors. She sued FedEx, ultimately winning for drivers in Massachusetts and obtaining multimillion dollar settlements. She challenged the cleaning industry for misclassifying mostly immigrant workers as franchisees, winning victories against companies including Coverall and Jani-King. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that these companies misused the franchise model to “sell low-paying jobs”, a practice they then stopped in Massachusetts. Liss-Riordan continued to challenge them in other states, including California, where she won rulings that Jan-Pro misclassified franchisees and had to reimburse them for expenses. Liss-Riordan also sued many strip clubs for misclassifying dancers and taking part of their tips. She headed more than a dozen class action lawsuits, which led to litigation that swept the country. Some strippers, including Stormy Daniels
Stephanie A. Gregory Clifford (born Stephanie A. Gregory; March 17, 1979), known professionally as Stormy Daniels, is an American pornographic film actress, Film director, director and former stripper. She has won many industry awards and is a ...
, a spokesperson for the chain Deja Vu, argued that a change in employment status would hurt dancers, but the Boston Globe praised the litigation in an editorial, writing “Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, a labor law specialist, can now add strippers to the list of skycaps, baristas, wait staff, and other workers who sought her counsel and received justice.” In 2010, Liss-Riordan sued Upper Crust, a Boston-area pizza chain, for demanding that its Brazilian workers repay sums that their employer was ordered to pay them following an overtime investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor. That case led to the certification of a class action and ultimately the company filed for bankruptcy. Liss-Riordan then purchased the Harvard Square location of Upper Crust at the bankruptcy auction with her husband. They renamed the shop "The Just Crust," which they ran as a worker-friendly pizza shop for several years. Senator Elizabeth Warren attended the grand opening.
Beginning in 2013, Liss-Riordan filed suits against a number of tech companies in the "gig economy
The gig economy is the economic system by which a workforce of people (known as gig workers) engage in freelance and/or side-employment.
Description
The gig economy is composed of corporate entities, workers and consumers. The Internal Reve ...
", including Lyft
Lyft, Inc. is an American company offering ride-hailing services, motorized scooters, and bicycle-sharing systems in the United States and Canada. Lyft sets fares, which vary using a dynamic pricing model based on local supply and demand a ...
, Uber
Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides Ridesharing company, ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, a ...
and Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...
. Other suits were filed against GrubHub
Grubhub Inc. (stylized in all caps) is an American online and mobile prepared food ordering and delivery platform based in Chicago, Illinois.
Founded in 2004, it was a subsidiary of the Dutch company Just Eat Takeaway since 2021. In 2024, Wond ...
, Doordash
DoorDash, Inc. is an American company operating online food ordering and food delivery. It trades under the symbol DASH. With a 56% market share, DoorDash is the largest food delivery platform in the United States. It also has a 60% market sha ...
, Square, Inc., Caviar, PostMates
Postmates Inc. is an American food delivery service, founded in 2011, and acquired by Uber in 2020. It offers local delivery of restaurant-prepared meals and other goods. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
, Postmates operate ...
, Shyp, Washio, Handy, Homejoy, and InstaCart
Maplebear Inc., doing business as Instacart, is an American retail media and delivery company based in San Francisco that operates a grocery delivery and pick-up service in the United States and Canada accessible via a website and mobile app. ...
. These cases involved the question of whether the companies improperly classified their workers as independent contractors
Employment is a relationship between two parties regulating the provision of paid labour services. Usually based on a contract, one party, the employer, which might be a corporation, a not-for-profit organization, a co-operative, or any other ...
. Liss-Riordan is best known for leading a class action case on behalf of Massachusetts and California drivers against ride-sharing company Uber
Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides Ridesharing company, ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, a ...
, filed in 2013 and known as ''O'Connor v. Uber''. The case argued that Uber drivers were misclassified as independent contractors, which she said allowed the company to "save massively by shifting many costs of running a business to the workers, profiting off the backs of their workers” Because of that case and similar ones she litigated against other gig companies, in 2015 the Wall Street Journal called her "one of the most influential—and controversial—figures in Silicon Valley." Politico included her in 2016 on the "Politico 50" which is list of the people who are "transforming American politics." In 2016 San Francisco Magazine said that “Liss-Riordan has achieved a kind of celebrity unseen in the legal world since Ralph Nader sued General Motors.”
In 2016, Liss-Riordan advocated for a controversial settlement against Uber estimated at totaling up to $100 million. Nine different competing attorneys representing drivers argued against the deal, and about thirty drivers out of 385,000 filed objections to the settlement or sought to remove Liss-Riordan as the leader of the class action lawsuits. Liss-Riordan defended the settlement based on the risks that the case may not win before a jury and that the appeals court could overturn the class action certification she had won for the drivers at the district court, based on her defeating Uber's arbitration clause. She also requested to reduce her firm's fee by $10 million in a bid to save the settlement. The court nevertheless rejected the settlement and, several months later, as Liss-Riordan had warned, the appeals court reversed her victory. In 2019, she reached a final settlement for $20 million covering a much smaller class. She defended her choice to settle the case in order to get money back for drivers, after some drivers were dissatisfied with still being classified as independent contractors.
After gig companies in 2020 passed “Proposition 22”, a California ballot initiative for which they spent $200 million to declare gig workers to be independent contractors, Liss-Riordan co-founded "Massachusetts is Not For Sale", an organization that opposed Uber and Lyft's push to enact a similar measure in Massachusetts. In 2022, Liss-Riordan was part of the effort that succeeded at the Supreme Judicial Court in blocking the measure from appearing on the Massachusetts ballot.
In 2018, Liss-Riordan brought an age discrimination class action against IBM, alleging that the company was working to "build a younger workforce" by laying off thousands of older workers. Through the litigation, Liss-Riordan uncovered documents showing top executives referring to older workers as “dino-babies” and plotting how to make them an “extinct species,” which were reported in ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
''.
In 2022, Liss-Riordan started representing former Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
employees in a class action
A class action is a form of lawsuit.
Class Action may also refer to:
* ''Class Action'' (film), 1991, starring Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
* Class Action (band), a garage house band
* "Class Action" (''Teenage Robot''), a 2002 e ...
lawsuit against Twitter for violation of the Federal and California Warn Act
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988 (the "WARN Act") is a United States labor law, U.S. labor law that protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring most employers with 100 or more employees to provi ...
.
Political career
2020 U.S. Senate campaign
On May 20, 2019, Liss-Riordan announced that she was running for the United States Senate
The United States Senate is a chamber of the Bicameralism, bicameral United States Congress; it is the upper house, with the United States House of Representatives, U.S. House of Representatives being the lower house. Together, the Senate and ...
for Massachusetts
Massachusetts ( ; ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode ...
as a Democrat in the 2020 election. She told journalist Jim Braude
James Spencer Braude (born May 7, 1949) is a lawyer, former union official, Hoerr, John P.''We Can't Eat Prestige: The Women who Organized Harvard'' Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1997. Cfp.6-9, &c./ref> and Boston radio and television p ...
that she was inspired by Representative Ayanna Pressley
Ayanna Soyini Pressley (born February 3, 1974) is an American politician who has served as the United States House of Representatives, U.S. representative for Massachusetts's 7th congressional district since 2019. This district, which was once re ...
's win against an incumbent congressman. Liss-Riordan reported raising $1.1 million by the Federal Election Commission
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an independent agency of the United States government that enforces U.S. campaign finance laws and oversees U.S. federal elections. Created in 1974 through amendments to the Federal Election Campaign ...
deadline on June 30, 2019, which included a $1 million personal loan from Liss-Riordan and $145,481 in individual contributions. On January 17, 2020, she withdrew from the race.
2022 Attorney General campaign
In 2021, it was reported that Liss-Riordan was considering a candidacy for Massachusetts Attorney General
The Massachusetts attorney general is an elected constitutionally defined executive officer of the Massachusetts government. The officeholder is the chief lawyer and law enforcement officer of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The officeholder ...
. On January 25, five days after incumbent Maura Healey
Maura Tracy Healey (born February 8, 1971) is an American lawyer and politician serving as the 73rd governor of Massachusetts since 2023. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, she served as Massachusetts Attorney Ge ...
announced that she would vacate the seat in order to run for governor, Liss-Riordan launched her campaign for attorney general. She was endorsed by the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, in addition to more than 50 other unions, including the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the Massachusetts Nurses Association, and the Professional Fire Fighters of Massachusetts. She was also endorsed by over 80 elected officials, including US Senator for Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren
Elizabeth Ann Warren (née Herring; born June 22, 1949) is an American politician and former law professor who is the Seniority in the United States Senate, senior United States senator from the state of Massachusetts, serving since 2013. A mem ...
and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu
Michelle Wu ( zh, t=吳弭, first=t; pinyin: ''Wú Mǐ''; born January 14, 1985) is an American lawyer and politician who has served as the mayor of Boston, mayor of Boston, Massachusetts, since 2021. She is the first woman and the first person ...
. Liss-Riordan lost in the primary to candidate Andrea Campbell.
References
External links
Profile
, Lichten & Liss-Riordan, P.C.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Liss-Riordan, Shannon
1969 births
21st-century American women
Activists from Massachusetts
American feminists
American labor lawyers
American women lawyers
Candidates in the 2020 United States Senate elections
Harvard College alumni
Harvard Law School alumni
Lawyers from Houston
Living people
Massachusetts Democrats
Women in Massachusetts politics