Who’s behind the lawsuit that could slow Micron’s chipmaking project in Upstate NY?

Syracuse, N.Y. – On the day Micron Technology broke ground on its chipmaking complex in Clay, two groups – one national, one local – filed a lawsuit in Albany seeking to slow or stop the project.

They argue the company must do much more to protect the environment before building what would be the largest investment in a manufacturing site in state history.

“We want Micron to make guarantees, not promises,” said Bonita Siegel, president of the residents group that is a co-plaintiff in the suit.

But there’s more behind the suit, syracuse.com | The Post-Standard has found.

Jobs to Move America, the national group bankrolling the lawsuit, wants more specific guarantees from Micron about future wages for its workers. It wants Micron to make binding promises to hire local residents, especially people who come from poor and disadvantaged communities.

California-based Jobs to Move America has emerged as the most visible group publicly pushing back on the Micron project, which has received relatively little organized opposition.

The group has established a track record of fighting for, and sometimes securing, workers’ rights in high-profile manufacturing projects across the nation. In the past five years alone, the labor group has sued carmakers Hyundai and Kia over alleged unfair labor practices, and the New York City subway system over failure to disclose wages paid by contractors.

To give the Micron lawsuit a local footprint, the California group went door-to-door in Clay to find local plaintiffs. Jobs to Move America persuaded six local residents to form a new group called Neighbors for a Better Micron. That neighbors group is now the lead plaintiff in a legal fight against a company that had $37 billion in revenues last year.

Before the suit was filed, the group had never held a meeting or a vote. Some members didn’t even know who the others were.

The Micron lawsuit asks the court to annul the approval of Micron’s environmental impact report and the regulatory permits granted on the findings of the report.

If the suit succeeds, it could stop Micron’s site clearing and construction work until the suit is resolved. The lawsuit seeks to force county, state and town agencies to reopen the study and address a number of environmental and jobs concerns.

At the same time, the jobs group is pursuing another strategy against Micron to win hiring and environmental guarantees from the Idaho-based company.

Just five days after filing the Micron lawsuit, Jobs to Move America announced a coalition of nearly two dozen groups calling on Micron to sign what’s called a community benefit agreement. That binding contract would hold Micron accountable for decisions about the chipmaker’s future workers and environmental impacts in Central New York, the group said.

It’s a strategy that has worked elsewhere for Jobs to Move America. The labor group has reached similar agreements with two California bus manufacturers.

JMA, and the six Clay people it recruited to the legal fight, say they are not trying to stop Micron’s chipmaking complex. Instead, they want to ensure that the massive Micron development has as little impact and as much benefit as possible for the region.

“What we’re seeking for the community includes environmental mitigation measures as well as good jobs,” said Meredith Stewart, the group’s litigation director. “That would include local hire commitments, commitments to hire from historically disadvantaged communities, commitments related to wages and benefits that those workers will be making.”

Stewart said the group also wants Micron to slash its projected greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the harms caused by destroying wetlands, including the potential flooding of nearby properties.

The court case will play out in Albany, where the lawsuit will be handled by a state judge who’s a member of the Conservative Party and once won a religious liberty case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the meantime, Micron contractors are still felling trees. They began clearing the site Jan. 19.

The lawsuit names Micron, the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency, the town of Clay, the state Department of Environmental Conservation and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Micron and the DEC declined comment. Justin Sayles, spokesman for County Executive Ryan McMahon, called the lawsuit “frivolous.”

Who is Jobs to Move America?

The nonprofit Jobs to Move America incorporated a decade ago in Los Angeles. Today it has about 60 full-time employees in offices from California to Alabama to New York.

The group says it fights for workers’ rights and the environment, especially in major industrial projects with substantial public funding.

“We seek to advance a fair and prosperous economy with good jobs and healthier communities for all,” the group’s mission statement says.

In 2024, the organization had a budget of about $10 million, according to documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

The largest donor was The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which gave the jobs group just over $1 million. The Michigan-based group works to “propel vulnerable children to achieve success as individuals,” according to the foundation website.

The IRS records show that Jobs to Move America received about $31 million in contributions from 2019 to 2024.

About 80% to 85% of contributions come from 25 to 30 foundations, said Madeline Janis, the executive director and founder of the jobs group.

Those include large, well-known institutions such as the MacArthur, Ford, Hewlett and McKnight foundations.

Last year, Janis said, Jobs to Move America also received about $735,000 in contributions from individuals. That money is what’s being used to pay for lawyers, legal fees and local representatives working on Micron, she said.

While Jobs to Move America sometimes refers to itself as JMA, it has no connection to JMA Wireless, the company whose name is on the Syracuse University dome.

Jobs to Move America is closely tied to labor unions. About half of the group’s 17-member board of directors are leaders of unions, including the United Auto Workers, AFL-CIO and Communications Workers of America.

“Jobs to Move America absolutely supports unionization of manufacturing workforces,” Stewart said.

CWA has been trying to work with Micron for more than two years to ensure the company allows employees to join unions.

JMA has had success in both courtrooms and in boardrooms when it comes to getting companies to make promises about environmental stewardship and hiring. That’s why it’s pushing Micron to sign a community benefits agreement. The group has already signed two such agreements with bus manufacturers in California.

One of those agreements was signed in 2022 with a bus builder New Flyer, which had won a $500 million contract to supply buses to the Los Angeles transit system. The company signed an agreement with JMA in 2022 promising to hire more women and racial minorities. The agreement applied to the company’s plants in California and Alabama.

That agreement came after Jobs to Move America filed a whistleblower lawsuit against New Flyer, claiming that the wages and benefits being paid to workers were less than New Flyer had promised.

In 2023, JMA took on the Metropolitan Transportation Agency, which runs the New York City subway system. JMA said the agency was deliberately withholding public records that would show whether Kawasaki was abiding by the terms of its $4.5 billion contract to build MTA subway cars in the U.S.

That lawsuit is pending.

In the meantime, JMA teamed up with Cornell University’s Climate Jobs Institute to survey 180 Kawasaki workers in Yonkers and Nebraska. Their report, issued in September 2025, said the “findings from this research reveal low pay, hazardous conditions, and widespread experience of discrimination.”

Kawasaki did not respond to a request for comment.

Last fall, JMA filed suit against Hyundai and Kia, alleging that suppliers for the two South Korean car companies use child and prison labor in factories with deadly working conditions.

A Hyundai spokesman said the “allegations are without merit.” Kia did not return messages.

Opposition in Clay

JMA established a presence in Central New York shortly after Micron announced in late 2022 it planned to build up to four massive factories to produce millions of memory chips annually. Micron says it could hire up to 9,000 people and create an additional 40,000 indirect jobs.

JMA has helped build a coalition of local community, education and environment groups to lobby for stricter environmental and worker protections. The organization in August filed a 127-page comment letter on the draft environmental statement. The letter said the report failed to adequately study the handling of solid and hazardous wastes, greenhouse gas emissions, wetlands, traffic, and other environmental issues.

In the lawsuit, the labor group said government agencies need to more carefully study how Micron will replace the 200 acres of wetlands to be destroyed' by the project, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deal with so-called “forever chemicals” widely used in semiconductor manufacturing.

On Jan. 21, just five days after the lawsuit was filed, Jobs to Move America sent a letter to Micron Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Mehrotra, asking to meet with him or another Micron representative to talk about a community benefits agreement.

While Micron has agreed to fund workforce development programs and a community investment fund, the jobs group said in a new release, those agreements “remain short on specifics with no meaningful transparency and accountability mechanisms.”

A Micron spokeswoman did not confirm whether the company would meet with JMA, but said the company has already pledged to support the Central New York community with funding for community and workforce development.

“Micron is committed to being a great member of the community and a responsible environmental steward,” said Anna Newby, Micron’s director of global policy communications, in an email. “We have pledged to fund $250 million of the $500 million Community Investment Fund, and have already invested over $15 million in local educational institutions and community organizations as we contribute to building the workforce of the future in Central New York.”

Sayles, the county executive’s spokesman, criticized the labor group as potentially threatening future jobs in Central New York.

“For a group called ‘Jobs to Move America,’ they seem far more focused on moving jobs out of America,” Sayles said in an email.

Micron is based in Idaho, but most of its factories and 55,000 employees are in Asia. With more than $30 billion in taxpayer subsidies, Micron is building new factories in Idaho and New York.

Knocking on doors

In early January, a lawyer and local representative of JMA knocked on doors in Clay to recruit residents to join the lawsuit.

The group needed people affected by the Micron project to file the lawsuit. In legal terminology, it’s called “standing”: You can’t sue unless you can prove you’re being directly affected.

The president of the group is Bonita Siegel, who lives about a mile from the Micron site. A retired doctor, she’s been involved with the Urban Jobs Task Force in Syracuse for several years. She said Micron brings great opportunities to Central New York, but she’s concerned about potential pollution.

Siegel said she joined the lawsuit to force Micron to put into writing what benefits it would bring to the region.

“We thought perhaps that would be the best way to go about really having our voice heard, being taken seriously,” Siegel said. “I want something that’s legally enforceable and a commitment that shows that Micron does want to move into Clay and be a good neighbor to those of us who live here.”

Siegel said the idea of forming a neighbors association came up organically as residents and activists traded notes over the past few months, but it was JMA that assembled the group.

The labor group found six people willing to file statements with the lawsuit. The residents all live within 1.5 miles of the Micron campus and said in legal filings that the project’s noise, traffic, stormwater runoff and other impacts will affect their lives.

One of them is Timothy Roulan, who lives on Verplank Road, about a half-mile west of the Micron site. Roulan said he put his name on the suit because Micron needs to do more for the community and environment.

“Syracuse has the highest child poverty rate in the country. What is Micron doing about that?” asked Roulan, a retired lawyer who represented abused and neglected children for decades. “If they’d like to be a good neighbor, help us.”

Roulan is no NIMBY. He supported construction of the sprawling solar farm that abuts his back yard. He supports the Micron project.

He supports the lawsuit against Micron, too, because he believes government agencies need to look harder at Micron’s potential effect on the environment.

“What I want is to see all the environmental concerns addressed,” Roulan said, “and that the wheels of progress include a quality of life for our children.”

The lawyers and the judge

JMA has retained the law firm Rupp Pfalzgraf, which has offices from Buffalo to Albany. The lead attorney on the lawsuit is William Demarest III, who specializes in environmental planning and sustainability, according to the law firm’s website.

The judge in the case is Thomas Marcelle, 63, a member of the Conservative Party, according to voter registration records.

Before winning election to the state bench in Albany in 2022, Marcelle had been a Cohoes City Court judge and Albany County attorney.

In 2001, Marcelle argued and won a religious liberty case at the U.S. Supreme Court. He represented the Good News Club, of Otsego, in its fight to allow elementary students meet in school after hours for prayer and Bible study.

He was nominated three times for a federal judgeship. In 2008, President George W. Bush nominated Marcelle, but Democrats didn’t confirm him. President Trump nominated Marcelle twice. Democrats didn’t act on Trump’s first nomination, in 2018, and the second Trump nomination, in 2019, was withdrawn after U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat, objected because of Marcelle’s opposition to abortion, according to The Times-Union in Albany.

Jobs to Move America has asked for a March 16 court date, but none has been set.