More legal services employees are trying to unionize as they face working without a contract.
Staff at the Children’s Law Center (CLC) held a three-day strike in late July, protesting management’s delays in coming to a contract agreement with its workers.
“No contract? No work! No peace!” staffers chanted as they marched along Brooklyn’s Court Street with picket signs and a symbolic giant inflatable rat.
“We have not had a contract in the entire time that we’ve been negotiating, for over two years,” Carly Coats, a CLC staff attorney, told the AmNews.
Staff have been asking to establish a contract with the management at CLC, a nonprofit, direct legal services agency that has never had contracts with any of its employees since its founding in 1997.
After voting to unionize with the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, UAW Local 2325, in 2020, CLC workers proposed a contract on March 31, 2021. They wanted job securities and protections, and an increase in salaries to make sure that their incomes were more commensurate with average rates in the city.
But staffers say management has been bargaining in bad faith: They don’t appear to be genuinely interested in negotiating a true contract. Workers registered their complaints against CLC management with the National Labor Relations Board.
“We are attorneys, social workers, paralegals, and administrative staff, so there are several different levels of experience and levels of education that staff members have, but that doesn’t always factor into our salaries,” Coats said.
“We wanted to make sure that that was indicated in a contract, as well as practices for our employment in general. We represent children and it’s exhausting work, but none of us get into it without really, really caring about the work that we do, and we wanted some protections for our caseloads and our case counts and for our supervision. Right now, we have extensive employee evaluations, but we don’t have any way to offer any feedback for our supervisors, and that can be very difficult and frustrating when we are working so hard, and we want to weigh in on the organization’s day to day operations.”
The not-for-profit CLC describes itself as a “legal services agency [that] provides zealous and effective representation to children in custody, visitation, domestic violence, guardianship, paternity, and related child protective cases.” They say their focus is on providing legal representation to vulnerable children.
CLC attorneys say that on average, they are assigned to work on more than 150 legal cases at a time—but that can mean more than 150 actual clients, who aren’t always accessible during standard work hours.
“We have to interact with every single one of our clients, and our clients are children, so we have to interview them after school or late in the night or when they’re not in school,” Coats explained. “We have to come in on school holidays and speak to them to provide the direct representation that we provide. And 150 cases doesn’t necessarily mean 150 clients: We have several cases where we represent four children in a family or even five or six children in a family…Right now, I think that most of us have between 140 and 170 cases, but there have been several times, especially in our less-staffed boroughs, where we’ve have had as many as 200 cases at any given time.”