Agatha Schmaedick

Agatha Schmaedick is the senior staff attorney at the Human Trafficking Legal Center. She is a labor and human rights advocate with over fifteen years of experience both in the United States and internationally.  

Prior to joining the Human Trafficking Legal Center, Schmaedick was a founding staff member of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC). She played a crucial role in developing a model code of conduct for the labor standards of collegiate apparel manufacturing and established an independent monitoring system to enforce this code. For over seven years, Schmaedick served as a field director and ultimately as the director of field operations for the WRC, investigating and implementing code compliance at dozens of factories across Asia and other parts of the globe. As a staff attorney of the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center, Polaris, and most recently at the University of Maryland SAFE Center for Trafficking Survivors, Schmaedick has served numerous survivors of labor trafficking in seeking immigration relief, as well as, pursuing their civil remedies under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Trafficking Victim Protection Act. For near four years, Schmaedick served as the associate general counsel of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a human rights, farmworker-based organization in Immokalee, Florida globally renowned for having pioneered the “worker-driven social responsibility” approach to combating forced labor. 

Schmaedick earned her JD from Georgetown, where she attended as a Public Interest Law Scholar and was awarded the ABA Award for Excellence in Labor and Employment Law.