Fran Ansley

Fran Ansley

Template:TOCnestleft Fran Ansley is 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.

References

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