Agatha Schmaedick, Esq. is a labor and human rights advocate with over twenty years of experience both in the United States and internationally.

Schmaedick currently serves as the Senior Staff Attorney at the Human Trafficking Legal Center (HTLC), a nonprofit based in Washington, DC. Prior to joining the HTLC, 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 in global supply chains. Schmaedick has also served as a staff attorney at the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center, Polaris, and most recently at the University of Maryland SAFE Center for Trafficking Survivors, where she has represented dozens of survivors of human trafficking in seeking immigration relief, as well as, pursuing their civil remedies under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Trafficking Victim Protection Act.

Prior to becoming an attorney, Schmaedick was a founding staff member of the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) and United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). 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.