Public defenders call for city to boost funding as potential mass strike looms
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With a potential mass strike of public defense attorneys on the horizon, representatives of the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys on Thursday called on the City Council to boost funding for their employers so that the money could be used for wage increases. File photo via ALAA
By Jacob Kaye
The city’s largest public defender union on Thursday said that the city needs to boost funding for legal services providers if it wants to help avert a mass strike that has the potential to bring the city’s courts to a screeching halt this summer.
Representatives from the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys, the union that represents public defenders at nearly two dozen legal services providers throughout the New York City metropolitan area, called on the city to allocate at least $70 million in additional funding to the Legal Aid Society, the largest employer of public defenders in the five boroughs.
The funding could go a long way toward preventing a major strike that could potentially see 2,500 attorneys working in the city’s various courts walk off the job, the union said.
The threat of a strike comes as ALAA’s contracts with nearly a dozen legal services organizations simultaneously approach their expiration date.
The union has said its members won’t work beyond the contracts’ June 30 expiration, and that if a new contract agreement isn’t reached before then, they’ll go on strike.
“If negotiations do not improve in the next month, we are prepared to withhold our labor and interrupt essential city services to win a fair contract,” Jane Fox, ALAA’s Legal Aid Society chapter chair, told the City Council during a budget hearing on Tuesday. “You have the power to value your own communities by investing in us.”
According to Fox, negotiations between the union and the Legal Aid Society – which began in March – have faltered with only a month before the current labor agreement ends.
The union representative said the public defender organization has told their attorneys that they won’t present them with an economic offer until June 24, six days before the contract expires.
“While we are committed to bargaining in good faith with our employers, and while we do not want to strike, we are prepared to withhold our labor to win better wages for the long term,” Fox said. “And we do not intend to work on an expired contract.”
A spokesperson for the Legal Aid Society said that the organization was “doing everything we can to advocate for additional funding to support their salaries” and that they “will continue to push the city and state to make this a reality.”
“Every single day our staff work around the clock in every borough fighting for the people we serve,” the spokesperson said. “We look forward to continuing our productive discussions in collective bargaining with our unions."
Attorneys working at organizations including the New York Legal Assistance Group, Bronx Defenders, Center for Appellate Litigation, Appellate Advocates, Office of Appellate Defenders, RiseBoro, Goddard Riverside Law Project, Urban Justice Center and CAMBA Legal Services are all currently negotiating their contract with their employer.
The alignment of contract negotiations is by design – the union encouraged their chapters in recent years to negotiate labor agreements that expire in 2025 as a way to boost their negotiating power this year.
The Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, which has contracts with a number of the organizations to provide legal services on behalf of the city, said on Thursday that it was aware of the potential strike.
Deanna Logan, who leads the city agency, said that her office had been working with the Office of Management and Budget to reach a deal to allow public defender organizations whose attorneys are threatening to strike to use some funding they are going to receive in the next fiscal year to pay for some of the salary increases demanded by the union.
“We have been working with our indigent defense portfolio to understand what their needs are,” Logan said. “We continue to work with the indigent defense portfolio teams to understand where and how funding may or may not be needed, so that we can have those discussions with OMB and afford additional flexibility.”
Logan was asked about the city’s efforts to help the organizations meet the union’s demands by City Council Finance Committee chair Justin Brannan, who is also running for city comptroller.
“We want to stave off a possible court shutdown in July, which would be chaotic,” Brannan said.
The city recently proposed sending an additional $7.5 million for appellate providers, $12.7 million for criminal defense trial providers, and $375,000 for additional legal services personnel in the Fiscal Year 2026 budget. None of the proposed funding was included in the mayor’s original budget plan unveiled in January.
Negotiations over a new contract between the union and legal services providers come as high rates of attrition continue to affect public defense groups in New York City. While staff retention has long been a struggle for public defender organizations, the issue reached a crisis level during the pandemic, and few organizations have yet to fully address the problem.
Wages for public defenders in New York City rank 14th when compared to other major cities and adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis conducted earlier this year by the union.
Fox told the Council on Thursday that while the public defender organizations are the ones at the negotiating table, the failure to reach an agreement will have consequences for lawmakers, the courts and low income New Yorkers who rely on legal services providers to defend them in court.
“When you devalue us, you devalue the people we serve, and if you continue underfunding us, we will see the attrition crisis speed up,” Fox told the City Council. “Your constituents will be increasingly represented by less and less experienced attorneys with higher case loads. They will not get justice, and that is not an acceptable outcome to us, and it shouldn't be acceptable to you.”
Any strike by ALAA attorneys this summer would likely be the largest strike of public defenders since 1994, when around 1,100 Legal Aid Society attorneys walked off the job.
In response to the strike, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani terminated the city’s contract with the Legal Aid Society and asked other legal services providers to apply for the contract. A number of new public defender organizations without unionized attorneys were created in response to Giuliani’s request, including Queens Law Associates, which is now known as Queens Defenders. Many of the organizations hired by the city to replace the Legal Aid Society have since been unionized, including Queens Defenders.
