Comprehensive Campaigns: Basic Legal Trainings and Techniques

Comprehensive campaigning entails the balance of opportunity and risk. Join Richard McCracken, legendary labor attorney, for this two-session workshop showing how to conduct effective, innovative information-based campaigns while controlling legal risk.

Richard became Senior Counsel to McCracken, Stemerman & Holsberry on January 1, 2023. He was the principal counsel to the Culinary Workers and Bartenders unions in Las Vegas from 1987 to 2020. He was General Counsel of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART) from 2014 until 2023, and principal outside counsel of the Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association from 1999 until 2014. He was Special Counsel and then General Counsel of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Union from 1998 until the merger forming UNITE HERE in 2004, when he became International Counsel to UNITE HERE and then General Counsel from 2009 to 2020. He has represented many local unions and councils affiliated with these internationals as well as other international unions and their affiliates. He was the principal counsel to the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor from 2008 to 2023. He continues to advise these and other clients on special assignments.

The cases Richard has handled include landmarks in securities and corporations law, as well as labor law, in the supreme courts of the United States, California, Nevada and Oklahoma, and the United States appeals and district courts. Highlights include the Supreme Court case holding that state labor standards laws must apply equally to union- represented employees and successful defense of card check/neutrality agreements as a means of organizing and of “labor peace” government policies. His emphasis, however, has been not so much on litigation but on helping to design powerful new union organizing techniques that conform to and make use of the law but do not involve litigation.