I knew that I wanted to major in history, ever since I was a junior in high school. In May of this year it will be five years since I graduated from the U of R with a history major, and I still think it's one of the best majors out there. I have always been drawn to a historian’s mission of revisiting a past event, place, or person and recreating the narrative of what must have happened. This drew me in because of the time I spent translating and advocating for Spanish speaking families in Queens where I grew up. Due to the fact that they did not know the English language, these families often could not communicate the challenges that they were facing, and I wanted to find a way to make their stories heard.
History, I thought, would be a way for me to make a career out of telling stories about the people I cared about. What I did not expect when I got to the University of Rochester was the weight of the responsibility a historian has to tell those stories as accurately as possible. As a history major, I was consistently drilled by my professors not only on the accuracy of the statements I was making but also on the evidence I was using to make those statements. This has endured with me well past my graduation.
As an investigator at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, it is my job to investigate allegations of labor law and worker’s rights violations. Once a complaint has been picked up by the office for investigation, it is my job to start collecting evidence that could point me in the direction of what must have happened. Sometimes this job is simple. You can see exactly what happened by comparing a company’s timesheets with its payroll records. Other times it is not. A lack of company records necessitates creativity, and I must look for what is either not there or for records an employer might not have been able to scrub clean.
For example, in a case where an employer of a convenience store told us he had no employees (despite us having received a complaint from an employee), we requested the tobacco certification sheets from the MA board of health to verify who was at the store signing off on this paperwork, to see if there were employees present.
It is crucial that I let the evidence lead me without bias towards either party in order to gain a fair and accurate picture of what happened, because impartiality by the state is key. What comes next is the hardest part. This is connecting the dots between what the evidence tells me and what the law says, ultimately answering the question: were the protections set in place for this worker violated? Answering this question is where I use my skills as a history major the most.
The narrative I craft from the evidence I gather and its connection to the law, is the story that eventually gets told to an employee, employer, and ultimately the courts. In essence this is equivalent to the conclusion reached by a historian in the narratives they build. Similar to a historian, the strength of my arguments is in the evidence and how it matches the policies implemented by the law. So I must be a meticulous steward of evidence, analyzing each piece on its own merits. Who was working? What type of work was performed? Who was there with them? What patterns does the evidence show if any? What information was made available?
What information was withheld? The answers to these questions change not only the type of violation that might have occurred but also its severity, and likewise the conclusion of what must have happened. It is crucial that my investigation is as airtight as possible, since unlike when I was an undergraduate studying history and reaching conclusions in my papers, my conclusions now have immediate consequences on the people I am analyzing: whether it is in the form of penalties for employers, or life changing restitution for workers.
In many ways, the responsibility to tell stories accurately, extends beyond history.
Whether you are writing a cover letter, a graduate school application, or even coding a computer program, there is a story there that is being told. The ability to take a step back and understand whether the story you are telling is accurate and knowing whether the connections you are drawing are genuine, is important for being able to communicate any message with a sense of truthfulness. This lesson, which was reiterated to me by all of my history professors at the U of R, is what helped me get in the door at Morgan Stanley despite not having any financial experience, to tell my personal story effectively when securing a Binational Business Fulbright grant, and lends me circumspection and fairness as a labor law investigator. This continues to be my biggest history life lesson.