Fran Ansley

Fran Ansley

Fran Ansley (died 2023) was a Knoxville, Tennessee activist. Her expertise reaches beyond the law school and into the community. While teaching at the College of Law, she often found ways to involve her students in collaborative projects aimed at working with communities to tackle problems of injustice, and her scholarly research tended in a similar direction.

Since retiring from teaching in 2007, she has continued both her active scholarship and community engagement. She still works with faculty and students from the College of Law on projects of mutual interest. Over the years Professor Ansley’s writings have explored a range of issues. Most recently she has focused largely on immigrants’ rights and labor rights and the relationship between the two.

Professor Ansley’s articles have appeared in a number of law reviews, including California, Colorado, Cornell, Georgetown, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. She co-edited a 2009 book on Latino immigration to the Southeastern United States, and she has contributed chapters to several interdisciplinary books on issues of race, gender, poverty, and workers’ responses to globalization.

In addition to her legal scholarship, Professor Ansley is co-author of a memoir concerning a 1989 coal miners’ strike in southwest Virginia, co-editor/author of an oral history of labor struggles in several East Tennessee coal mining communities, and co-author of the original edition of Our Bodies, Our Selves. She served as principal humanities adviser to a documentary film on impacts of globalization in East Tennessee that was directed and produced by independent filmmaker Anne Lewis.

With regard to professional service, Professor Ansley has a special commitment to lawyering for and with organizations that are working to bring about grassroots, bottom-up social change. She has provided pro bono representation, done legal and empirical research, and worked as a community legal educator with a range of such groups throughout her career.

Professor Ansley received a 2008 Heroes Award from the Latino Task Force of the Community Economic Development Network of East Tennessee, the 2007 Great Teacher Award from the Society of American Law Teachers, the 2007 Danny Mayfield Champion of Change Award from Community Shares of Tennessee, and she received from the College of Law the 2006 Harold C. Warner Outstanding Teacher Award, the 2003 Carden Award for Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship, the 1994 Marilyn V. Yarbrough Faculty Award for Writing Excellence, and the 2002 and 1993 W. Allen Separk Awards for Superior Achievement in Scholarship.

Education

• BA, 1969, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (formerly Radcliffe College)
• JD, 1979, University of Tennessee College of Law
• LLM, 1988, Harvard Law School

"Here Comes a Wind"

The Institute for Southern Studies' Southern Exposure issue Vol, 4 no 12 issue was entitled "Here Comes a Wind", and focused on labor organizing in the South. Contributors were Groesbeck Parham, Gwen Robinson, Jim Green, Sean Devereux, Carolyn Ashbaugh, Dan McCurry, Mike Krivosh, Jennifer Miller, Don Stillman, Melton McLaurin, Michael Thomason, James E. Youngdahl, Chip Hughes, Len Stanley, Clem Imhoff, Bill Becker, Bill Bishop, Tom Bethell, Elizabeth Tornquist, Ed McConville, Jim Grant, Fran Ansley, Sue Thrasher, David Ciscel, Tom Collins, Larry Rogins, Myles Horton, Higdon Roberts.

Support for Barack Obama

In 2009 Fran Ansley was listed as a signerof the Progressives for Obama website and as affiliated to the University of Tennessee.

Fair wage products

Does a person have the right to sustain himself?

In an increasingly global marketplace, clothing manufacturers contract the lowest labor costs available to remain competitive, regardless of the repercussions. Direct vendors like the UT bookstore commonly deal with intermediaries that outsource production to manufacturers overseas with poor labor practices.

Gretchen Chromas and Jayanni Webster want to change that.

“A fair wage ... supports the right for all individuals and workers to receive payment for their work that reflects their hours and effort and helps them live more than impoverished lives,” Webster said in a statement. “I personally believe it’s a human right and everyone’s responsibility to support fair wages.”

Both women believe that philosophy should be applicable to UT’s sales model.

“Fair wages should be the bottom line for human rights when we’re looking at how UT’s apparel business is directed,” Webster said.

Chomas sees the life-changing benefit that an appropriate wage can bring to an individual.

“People who are paid a fair wage are able to purchase clean water and adequate food and other necessities of life,” Chomas said. “Therefore they have a higher quality of life, less disease and fewer health problems. It also increases self worth knowing that they are going to really be able to live on that wage and not just exist.”

Possessing a drive to promote change, both young women were driven to play some role in improving global working conditions.

“Since my freshman year I’ve been working with Amnesty International at UTK and about two years ago we were in the midst of a sweatshop-free campaign at UT,” Webster said. “It ended with the university affiliating with the Workers Rights Consortium, which is a third-party watch-dog organization that monitors where our UT apparel is being made. Students worked really hard to instate WRC affiliation, but we recognize it is just a step in the right direction. Even with WRC, violations, like the one adidas is implicated in at the PT Kizone factory, continue to occur.”

Alta Gracia, a fair-wage manufacturer in the Dominican Republic, promotes a different type of business model.

“We like Alta Gracia because it goes above and beyond anything else offered in the bookstore by paying living-wages, embracing its factory union and allowing WRC unrestricted access to monitor its business in a way no business has ever opened itself up to before.”

After that success, both students continued in their cause. Chomas’ focus on improving working conditions in apparel factories sparked their quest to see fair-wage manufactured products supplied by UT’s bookstore.

“Dr. Fran Ansley, law professor emeritus, was our initial faculty supporter and has been a great source of support,” Webster said. “Now we have over 50 faculty sponsors. Groups backing us include Amnesty International @ UTK, Community Partnership Service Corps, SPEAK, Progressive Student Alliance and the United Campus Workers.”

United Campus Workers/show me $15

December 2014, United Campus Workers supports Knoxville's first #strikefastfood #showme15! Solidarity! — with Kris Bronstad, Anne Barnett, Ben Allen, Fran Ansley, Karly Safar, Melanie Barron, Thomas Wayne Walker, Joan Croce Grim, Tony Harris, Janet Miles, Anna Masson, Debbie Helsley, Josh Smyser, Elizabeth Owen, Lucy Jewel, Bob Hutton, Patrick Keaney, Matt Cook, Michelle Christian and Ben Lee.

Anti-privatization campaign

According to Chris Brooks and Rebecca Kolins Givan witing in In These Times “The first real task was to go back and talk to everyone on campus about what was happening,” says Ed McDaniel, a locksmith who has worked at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, for 10 years and is now president of the union. “We all went out and tried to get more people to join because we knew that the union was going to be leading this fight.” The effort brought hundreds of new members into UCW.

The union sounded the alarm about the privatization plan through rallies, press conferences, editorials and town halls. It fact-checked Governor Haslam’s claims about the supposed benefits of privatization. It amplified explosive media reports about his financial ties to JLL and the ways he might personally benefit from the deal. While running for governor, Haslam had disclosed a “major investment” in JLL, of an unspecified amount.

“We had a little of everything,” Doris Conley says. “We did flyers and cards. We were out on the highway, in parking lots, in the mall, on campus getting folks to sign postcards for their legislators.”

UCW also collected over 5,000 signatures on a petition opposing outsourcing.

“We put them on a sheet of paper that was 150 feet long and 3 feet wide,” McDaniel says. “We took it to the legislative plaza and rolled it down the hall, chanting ‘Tennessee is not for sale.’ The legislators were coming out of their offices and committee meetings to see what was happening. Legislators were trying to get by and they were having to jump over the scroll.”

The most crucial strategic decision of the campaign was to hone in on populist Republican suspicion of rich elites by choosing the governor as the target. Many legislators were sympathetic to working-class constituents who could have their jobs privatized by a company in which the billionaire governor had invested.

“It turns out that class is a big issue inside the Republican Party,” says Jeffrey Lichtenstein, UCW secretary and part-time worker at the UT Health Science Center. “Even Republicans saw the governor as misusing his office to strip away jobs and personally enrich himself. It split the party open.”

“We actually have a lot of direct access and leverage with Republicans [because] we have members in rural and suburban areas throughout Republican districts,” explains Thomas Wayne Walker, a former rank-and-file member who now works as the union’s communications coordinator.

UCW members met with lawmakers in their districts and capitol offices to build a bipartisan coalition to stop outsourcing. Twenty-eight Democrats and 47 Republicans, more than half of the state legislature, signed a letter authored by the UCW calling for a halt to the outsourcing.

Republican lawmakers even sponsored legislation—inspired by UCW model language, according to Lichtenstein—that begins to provide greater scrutiny of the outsourcing process. It passed both houses of the state legislature unanimously.

Under mounting pressure, Haslam agreed to give state agencies and colleges a choice to opt in or out of privatization. So the UCW took the fight back to its home turf of college and university towns, getting local governments and businesses to weigh in and tip the scales against outsourcing. In August 2017, the state agency responsible for managing the state’s parks abandoned the plan. Two months later, the entire University of Tennessee system publicly opted out. To date, the only college to opt in is Austin Peay University in Clarksville, which had already outsourced its janitorial services.

The UCW has its roots in the high-profile living wage campaigns of the 1990s. In Knoxville, the Tennessee Industrial Renewal Network (TIRN) worked with Jobs with Justice of East Tennessee to launch an unsuccessful living wage campaign for city workers.

The campaign didn’t raise wages for city workers, but it did catch the eye of activists in the University of Tennessee’s Progressive Student Alliance, who received training through the AFLCIO’s 1999 “union summer” program. The student organizers began to talk with campus workers, especially in the housekeeping department, where many students had summer jobs.

“At the time [2000] we had gone four years without a raise,” says Sandy Hicks, 66, who worked in housekeeping at the university for over 25 years and was the UCW’s first president. “The university had been downsizing to the point that the work was too much for us to handle. We were disgusted and didn’t think there was any way out.”

Fighting outsourcing

Jon Shefner April 16, 2017 ·

Tried to share a post now that is a year old - showing how long and hard we've worked against outsourcing. I couldn't make it work, because apparently I am a FB moron. But this is important to say: We've done it all - in the legislature and in the streets, with our allies and on our own. And not only are we not finished, we are stronger than ever, in Knoxville and across the state. I am so proud of working with Cassie Watters, Melanie Barron, Jayanni Elizabeth, Tom Anderson, Tom Smith, Thomas Wayne Walker, Ed McDaniel, Josh Smyser, Diana Moyer, Jeffrey Lichtenstein, Sarah Eldridge, Fran Ansley, Jim Sessions, Jason Dawsey, Bob Hutton, Troy Smith, JB and everyone I may have left off. I looked at the post from a year ago - and I'm pissed. We've worked really hard at this against a governor who has no reason to outsource other than to attack working people. No data confirms his plan, no need drives it, and no truth is behind it . C'mon April 24, and every other day of struggle until we win! Goddamnit, we are not done yet!