In life and work, you never know when you’ll need a good lawyer. So you may want to remember the name Kaarthika Thakker.
Kaarthika is receiving her master’s degree in labor studies from SLU this spring and will soon be heading west to UC Berkeley Law School.Based on how quickly and thoroughly she became a New York City organizer and activist, it seems likely that she’ll be fluent in labor law in no time.
“It’s been an eventful five years,” said Kaarthika, reflecting on her many projects between getting a B.S. in Computer Science at Rice University in 2020, and now. From instinctively organizing fellow workers before she even knew about unions, to staffing the high-profile state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, Kaarthika is a doer. The SLU community will hear more from Kaarthika at Commencement on May 28: She was selected by a committee as Graduate Student Speaker from a group of strong applicants.
Following Her Instincts
Kaarthika was born in India and grew up in Ohio. At college in Texas, she studied technology and politics, which prepared her to engage where those topics intersect. She worked for Google during school and organized her fellow interns to write a letter to management when they realized they had been working on military contracts unknowingly.
After college she moved to New York and got a job doing political P.R. at a firm where workers were not being paid for overtime. “I found out that was against the law,” she recalled, and petitioned for fairness. “We did end up getting paid overtime, which was awesome.” While doing that work, Kaarthika first heard about the existence of unions.
Her next job was as communications director for Mamdani, a freshman member of the New York Assembly who began representing Astoria and Long Island City in 2021. Mamdani is currently running for NYC mayor, polling first among leftist voters and second overall after former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
“That was really cool because we were able to set up the office and do government in a different way,” Kaarthika said. One such innovation was turning constituents into advocates: When Mamdani’s office helped constituents solve problems, staff would also invite the constituents to help others with similar problems, in turn. A volunteer program was born that empowered local residents, strengthened bonds between them, and inspired an article in The Nation.
After Mamdani was reelected, Kaarthika decided to take a break. “It was just so intense, going to Albany every week for all of March and April” — and during the Covid pandemic at that.
But soon a neighbor told her that an employee of their local Starbucks had been fired for successfully organizing a union there, and she got involved again. “For like a month or so, he and I went every morning at 7 a.m. to flyer outside and we organized a rally with the workers. That was actually my first time engaging in union stuff. Right after that experience, I became a staff organizer at OPEIU (Office and Professional Employees International). I worked on this project called Local 1010 or Tech 1010, which is just organizing tech workers: Kickstarter, Code for America, Bandcamp.”
Digging Deeper
That project was intense too, and when Kaarthika was venting about it at a party, someone suggested that she consider attending SLU. She applied, won the Joseph S. Murphy Diversity Scholarship, and became a master’s student. She took the Labor Law class taught by Distinguished Lecturer Ellen Dichner, and — as other students have also said — it made a huge impression.
“The way that Ellen teaches, and her experience and orientation toward what a lawyer’s role in the movement should be, was really enlightening to me because it is about democratizing the information to help people organize themselves. To utilize the law to accomplish their own goals,” she said. “I wish every worker could take this class and understand their right to be able to take collective action: what’s across the line and what the risks are and what will protect them. I had never had access to that. I mean, there’s no lawyers in my family, let alone labor lawyers.”
Kaarthika recalls her parents suggesting that she become a lawyer, however, saying that she’s good at arguing. She’s especially excited about Berkeley because of its curriculum and vibrant Labor Center.
But New York City will be hard to leave. Kaarthika lives in a collective house in Brooklyn with four roommates who make group meals, and is a member of the Park Slope Food Co-op. She’s an expert cake-baker, and recently learned to D.J. from Micah Uetricht, the editor at large of SLU’s New Labor Forum journal. She’ll be leaving her extensive network, knowledge of local politics, and her many other involvements — from working for nail salon workers’ rights, to serving as co-chair of NYC Democratic Socialists of America, to supporting the Amazon Labor Union, to protesting the fracked gas plant in Queens that was recently voted down. Lately she’s been working as a paralegal for a labor and employment lawyer who fights wage theft cases in New Jersey.
Moving on from SLU is bittersweet, too. “The SLU community is so important. There are so many SLU alums that are so involved, and people just really take care of each other here,” Kaarthika said. “It just really means something to go here, I think. And it really changes who you are as a person.”