Legal aid lawyers band together in pursuit of better pay and more funding

It wasn’t until 1969 that attorneys in the Legal Aid Society, which has represented indigent New Yorkers since the 1870s, unionized, forming the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys. The members walked out on strike repeatedly in the union’s first quarter century, looking to improve working conditions and pay. They were also seeking additional city and state funding to allow them to better service clients.

The ALAA struck again in 1994 after the Rudy Giuliani administration declined to provide funding to meet members’ demands for raises and benefits. Giuliani, threatening to defund the organization, largely managed to bust that effort. In its aftermath, several other legal aid organizations formed without unions, and received government funding formerly earmarked for Legal Aid.

In the last 10 years, however, hundreds of lawyers in those organizations have unionized with the ALAA, growing the union’s ranks and increasing the union’s density and power in the legal services sector. With its sectoral density now reestablished, the union is aiming to deploy a sectoral bargaining strategy to unite and capitalize on that power ahead of city elections in 2025 and state elections in 2026.

Lawyers, organizers and negotiators at the ALAA have, over the last several years, quietly lined up many of their contracts across multiple bargaining units to expire on the same day just about a year from now — June 30, 2025. Members and union officials believe that by having contracts expire simultaneously and engaging in coordinated, sectoral bargaining, they will be more empowered to extract concessions from management and to secure increased funding from city and state governments.

It’s a strategy that unions, and especially the UAW, have used across various sectors. The UAW’s contracts at the Big Three American automakers are all aligned, and the union was able to win big raises for workers at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis following their six-week strike last year.

1,700 members aligned

“There’s really a limit when we’re all bargaining in our individual capacities and in our own individual organizations," said Navruz Baum, an ALAA staffer hired out of the rank-and-file specifically to organize the union’s sectoral bargaining. “When workers bargain together instead of separately there’s more power.”

Baum said that more than 1,700 members across nine ALAA bargaining units and from one Legal Services Staff Association — the ALAA’s sibling union — bargaining unit have contracts expiring next summer, and that a few more bargaining units in the ALAA could join them soon. The ALAA counts roughly 3,000 members total.

Sectoral bargaining has the potential to “change the funding for the whole industry, to get the working conditions that workers deserve and also improve service conditions for our clients,” Baum added.

Brandon Mancilla, a former ALAA staff organizer who’s now on the UAW’s international executive board as the director of UAW Region 9A, argued that the other legal aid organizations created after the 1994 strike were explicitly set up as “ways to get funding, representation and cases to non-union shops.”

Workers in those organizations being brought into the ALAA’s fold allows the union members in all the organizations to work together to try and increase state and city funding for public defenders instead of competing against each other for the same pot of money, he said. Mancilla pointed out that there’s now only one legal services firm in the city — New York County Defender Services — that is not unionized with the ALAA or the LSSA.

"I hope more sectors and more industries in the UAW and beyond start thinking like this, sectorally and in a coordinated way,” Mancilla said. “That’s where your power is, rather than bargaining alone or in a silo from other workplaces."

Convention this weekend

This weekend, nearly 30 years after the 1994 strike, members of ALAA will gather for the union's first ever sectoral bargaining convention, where members will be able to coordinate bargaining priorities for upcoming negotiations. Near the top of the list are protections from taxing workloads — a chronic problem in the legal services industry — and raises that prevent turnover in the organizations.

Extreme turnover harms both lawyers and the clients they serve, Baum said.

“ALAA has a proud history of fighting for social and economic justice for the communities we serve and for all workers,” the ALAA’s president, Lisa Ohta, said in a statement. “Our union holds an immense amount of power in our sector, and we have always been willing to stand up for what’s right. We are excited to collectively determine how we will wield that power in our first round of sectoral bargaining in 2025.”

Baum argued that the convention is “the first step in formulating our demands” for a contract campaign that, if a deal isn’t concluded by then, could result in a strike of over 1,700 lawyers on July 1, 2025.

In recent years, ALAA members at the New York Legal Assistance Group struck for several days and members at the Legal Aid Society have held lunchtime pickets. LSSA members at Mobilization for Justice walked out on strike for three months earlier this year.

"Members want to start coordinating in a very intentional way around winning more ambitious demands around cost of living and benefits and retirement,” Mancilla said. "This is the first coordinated, organized effort to address collective bargaining but also our members’ vision for what justice should look like through their contract campaign."

dfreeman@thechiefleader.com