History Of The Association Of Legal Aid Attorneys Uaw Local 2325

History of
The Association
of
Legal Aid
Attorneys
UAW Local 2325
(Revised August 1999)
Introduction
Background To NYC
Legal Aid Society
ALAA's Early Years:
1968-1972
Mid-70s: Two Strikes
Win Continuity
Economic Recovery,
Stability In Late '70s
1982 Strike
Percolation In The '80s
Eruption In The Early
'90s
1994 Strike
Since 1994
Introduction(1)
The history of the Association of
Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local
2325 (ALAA)--the first significant
union of lawyers in the United
States--reflects the accumulated
sweat and tears shed by generations
of New York City Legal Aid

attorneys, each seeking to exercise
control over their conditions of
work. Like workers elsewhere, they
have found that these conditions can
be affected only through collective
action--union action. What makes
ALAA unique is that its members
have consciously and repeatedly
seen their own interests as
inextricably intertwined with those
of their clients.
This theme has found expression
in the union's fight for a broad
variety of improvements ranging
from continuity of representation,
workload limits, adequate training,
and more aggressive affirmative
action, to better salaries, and health
and safety protection. This same
vision has ultimately drawn ALAA
into broader battles for social justice
and labor solidarity, into alliance
with Legal Aid support staff
members of 1199 National Health
and Human Services Workers Union,
SEIU, and, ultimately, into the
UAW. While the union's tactics have
varied, its commitment to these
principles has remained firm, despite
frequently terrible odds.
This brand of unionism is due not
to the inherent saintliness of Legal
Aid lawyers--although some surely
qualify. Rather ALAA's birth date
and particular character is due
primarily to the Supreme Court's
1963 decision in Gideon v.
Wainwright, which dramatically
expanded the number of indigent
criminal defendants who are entitled
to counsel. As a result, by the late
1960s, The Legal Aid Society of
New York (LAS)--founded in 1876
to provide free legal services to
German immigrants--was soon
transformed from a largely volunteer

charity into the city's primary public
defender organization. Almost
overnight, hundreds of young
lawyers flooded the Society's ranks,
bringing with them an idealism
heavily influenced by the civil rights,
student, and anti-war movements.
This spirit quickly clashed with
assemblyline conditions in the
criminal justice system, which many
of ALAA's members and leaders--
frequently members of the National
Lawyers Guild--placed within the
broader context of institutional
racism and injustice. The egalitarian
ethos of the period also contributed
to an unusually high level of direct
membership participation and
democratic control, which, indeed,
has characterized ALAA to this very
day.
However imperfect, the attempt to
elevate quality over quantity, to
realize the promise of Gideon, and to
extend its spirit into civil and
juvenile representation, has been the
driving force of ALAA's history. It
remains so in 1999, no less than in
1969.

Background To The
New York Legal Aid
Society
With some 300,000 cases a year,
The Legal Aid Society is the world's
largest public interest law firm,
public defender or civil legal
services organization. The Society's
seven divisions--Civil, Capital
Defender, Criminal Appeals (CAB),
Criminal Defense (CDD), Federal
Defender, Juvenile (JRD) and
Volunteer/Community Law Office--
work out of some 25 offices around
the City. The Society is managed by

a President/Chief Executive Officer
and is overseen by the Legal Aid
Board of Directors, headed by a
Chair and composed primarily of
partners at New York's largest law
firms.
The Civil and Volunteer divisions
are funded by private donations and
government funds, but the Society
currently rejects about $1 million
from the Legal Services Corporation
(LSC) because of Congressionally-
imposed restrictions on its use.
Criminal representation provided by
CDD and CAB is funded almost
entirely by a City contract to provide
public defender representation
constitutionally mandated by
Gideon, for which some additional
funds are provided by the State. The
Capital Defender and Federal
Defense divisions are funded by the
state and the federal government,
respectively. JRD is funded entirely
by the state.

ALAA's Early Years:
1968-1972
1968-1972 was a key period
during which ALAA was first
established. Following recognition in
December 1969, and a brief strike in
1970, the union won its first
contract.
The wave of new attorneys hired
by Legal Aid in the years
immediately following Gideon was
shocked by the poor quality of
representation they found. In 1967,
recalls one of these lawyers, Jerry
Lefcourt, Society policy required a
plea bargain whenever a client had
admitted guilt to their lawyer:
Once that defendant quot;admittedquot; at
arraignment, he was going to get

pled. You were instructed when you
did calendars . . . to frighten the
defendants. . . . The deal was worked
out [with the assistant district
attorney] and the defendant was pled
almost instantaneously. Right then,
without any discussion between the
attorney and client. When I was
doing that I could not sleep at nights.
Preparation and resources were
virtually nonexistent:
I had no training at all. There was no
orientation. . . . There were no mock
trials. We did arraignments for a
month, and then we were thrown into
battle. I had no clue as to what the
right thing was to do. We had no
research tools. There was no real
offices, no telephones. We couldn't
call witnesses. There were no
anything. I never interviewed a
defendant except in the prison or on
the floor of the hallway right before
a hearing or trial. In the back of my
mind, I knew that I should do an
investigation, but there were only
one or two investigators operating
out of Manhattan for the whole
Society.
Moreover, a client saw a different
Society lawyer (nearly all of whom
were white and male) at each court
appearance.
In response to these conditions,
Lefcourt envisioned a union of Staff
Attorneys in which quot;we should
approach things in an organized way,
citywide, to improve the position of
our clients.quot; In response to
organizing efforts by Lefcourt and
others,
[s]ome guys at 120 Schermerhorn
[Brooklyn Criminal Court] were sort
of on board. This is early '68, and I
remember pounding the union into
[future CDD attorney-in-charge] Bill

Gallagher. . . . Finally, in April 1968
we called a meeting in the Hotel
Diplomat. I'd say that no more than
forty percent of the [total 175] staff
citywide turned out. . . . It was easy
within the Criminal Division because
we all knew people. Civil was the
hardest to get; the Criminal Appeals
people were pretty easy. At the
second Hotel Diplomat meeting in
May 1968, we had a much larger
number, like 75%.
Staff Attorneys, however, were far
from united on how to proceed, and
many rejected the idea that lawyers
should unionize:
I was one of the few staff people that
was supporting the idea that this was
a union . . . . Some people would
knock the notion that lawyers could
ever be in a union. They said that
you couldn't use typical union tactics
because you're assigned to represent
somebody. . . . Most people were
more comfortable with the word
quot;Association.quot; The early meetings
focused only on winning the most
basic tools of representation (offices,
phones, training, vertical[(2)]
representation), on involving more
Staff Attorneys, what form the
organization would take, and
whether to affiliate with anybody.
These initial discussions, however,
only took off when Lefcourt was
fired:
Everybody knew it was because of
the organizing meetings, and that I
refused to do what the supervisors
wanted me to do at a few calendar
calls. . . . [At] the third and final
organizing meeting in June of '68,
the union demanded a due process
hearing on the allegations against
me. Sam Dawson--who was in
Brooklyn, our hotbed of organizing--

became the first president.
Ultimately, however, the federal
district court opinion in Lefcourt v.
Legal Aid Society ruled that, absent
of state action or a union, the Society
could fire at will. quot;We might have
had a different ruling,quot; observes
Lefcourt, quot;if we had brought the
action under the National Labor
Relations Act, rather than the First
Amendment. But many attorneys
didn't want to think union.quot;
Yet, Lefcourt's firing galvanized
the organizing effort, and on
December 30, 1969, following an
election, ALAA was certified by the
state Labor Relations Board as
exclusive bargaining representative
for all Staff Attorneys. The impact,
says Lefcourt, was soon apparent:
[A]lmost immediately, [the union's]
effects were profound. Services to
clients started to change drastically. .
. . [There were] . . . more lawyers,
offices, telephones, larger
investigative staff. . . . Now the tone
was quot;why shouldn't they [indigent
defendants] have the absolute best,
why shouldn't Legal Aid lawyers be
on an equal footing with the private
bar?quot;.
And, says Lefcourt, collective
bargaining certification also helped
ALAA to resolve its identity crisis:
For many years there was no formal
declaration that it had become a
union, but that was clearly what it
was becoming. I mean, when you
start bargaining as a group--that's
what unions do. It looked like one, it
smelled like one, and then it became
one.
1970 Strike
But it took more than recognition
to get a contract, particularly since
the Society resisted ALAA's first

efforts to improve the quality of
criminal representation. Thus, when
city jail inmates rebelled in the
spring of 1970, one of their main
demands was for better Legal Aid
representation; the Society
responded by threatening to
terminate its criminal contract with
the city unless it received more
funding. After briefly toying with the
idea of a public defender system, the
city provided a small amount of
additional money.
In subsequent contract
negotiations, however, ALAA
charged that little had really
changed: quot;[I]nsufficient staff, a
virtually nonexistent training and
education program, lack of adequate
office facilities, inadequate clerical
and investigative staffs, inadequate
research tools and no time for
preparationquot; made it quot;virtually
impossible for us to provide
meaningful representation for our
clients and forced us to daily violate
our professional responsibilities.quot;
Without continuity of representation,
argued ALAA, quot;no attorney-client
relationship is possible.quot;
Again, it took larger events to
break the Society's resistance. In
early May 1970, the country was
shaken by Nixon's secret invasion of
Cambodia and by the murders of
four white antiwar protesters at Kent
State University in Ohio and two
African-American student protestors
at Jackson State University in
Mississippi. Across the country,
student strikes closed down colleges
and universities, while mass
demonstrations took place in every
major city.
On May 3-6, 1970, amidst this
rising revolt, Legal Aid Staff

Attorneys struck, the first such
action by American lawyers. The
legal establishment was
unsympathetic. The New York Law
Journal cited quot;authoritative sourcesquot;
who quot;blame[d] the strike on the
increasing number of so-called
'militant' attorneys who have joined
the society in recent years . . . [and
whose] attitude . . . is that only
through action can change be
accomplished.quot;
The 1970 strike yielded mixed
results. The first, two-year contract
established a 12-step salary scale
essential to combating favoritism
and to ensuring annual raises for
most lawyers. Client representation,
however, was not significantly
improved. Thus, when future ALAA
president Karen Faraguna first joined
Manhattan CDD in September 1971,
there was no supervision in the
courts. Rather, more senior staff
taught the ropes to junior attorneys. .
. . The staff turnover was amazing.
People would quit in a very short
time, and a person was senior after a
year!
The second contract, in 1972,
brought raises for the most senior
attorneys, but, as Faraguna explains,
improvements were limited:
For the first time, office space
improved. But attorneys still shared
desks. Books were purchased and the
staff was given access to the court
library. Our demand for private
interview facilities, however, was
not met for another decade or more.
Mid-70s: Two Strikes
Win Continuity
Representation
The 1973 and 1974 strikes deserve
the credit for breaking down the

Society's obstruction of continuity of
representation. Both strikes,
however, brought heavy judicial
retaliation against the ALAA and its
members. The union was further
weakened by uneven membership
support for the 1974 strike and by
deep municipal fiscal crisis in 1975.
1973 Strike
In 1973, a combination of
management intransigence, advance
planning by the union, and what
Faraguna describes as a quot;further
infusion of new attorneys prepared to
fight for a stronger public defender,quot;
set the stage for the union's second
strike.
Prior to the strike, which was
deemed inevitable, contact was made
with the media, in order to
familiarize them with the issues.
Reporters came to court, saw our
quot;office space,quot; and talked with staff.
Unions were contacted for their
advice; all supported us, hoping that
we would join their organization.
Upper Management took
indefensible positions. To announce
that the poor man's attorney did not
need a library or a desk of her own
proved destructive to its public
image. To take a philosophical
position opposed to the principle of
quot;one client, one attorneyquot; (continuity
of representation) was foolish.
In May 1973, the union's moral
high ground was further
strengthened by the decision in
Wallace v. Kern, a federal class
action brought by the Center for
Constitutional Rights (CCR), with
ALAA's support, on behalf of all
felony defendants incarcerated in the
Brooklyn House of Detention. The
court's decision painted an
unflattering portrait of conditions at

Legal Aid. quot;Legal Aid attorneys,quot;
wrote the court, quot;compare favorably
with private attorneys both in quality
of their work and in their results,quot;
but their workloads were simply
overwhelming:
The active caseload of [felony-
certified] Legal Aid attorneys. . . .
[averages] 94 total cases, or 56 cases
if those awaiting grand jury action or
sentences are excluded. . . . [N]o trial
attorney could handle more than 40
cases and cover assignments and
conferences.
Attorney training and longevity
remained in short supply:
The average Legal Aid attorney is
employed by the Society when he
graduates from law school, attends a
21-day training course, serves an
apprenticeship of a few months in
the Criminal Court, then begins
trying felony cases in the Supreme
Court, and leaves after about two
years for other employment.
Moreover, found the court, there
was little continuity of
representation, and lawyers were
forced to confer with their clients in
abysmal, non-confidential, interview
space:
[T]he third floor pen where she [a
Legal Aid lawyer] would meet a
defendant for the first time (four
floors below the courtroom where
the plea negotiations take place) is a
quot;horrendous situation, physicallyquot; an
quot;absolutely unbearable situation for
Legal Aidquot; and quot;a humiliating
experience for the defendant,quot; with
40 people listening to the defendant's
conversation with his counsel.
The court pointed out that the
Society's failure to reform these
practices had been the subject of
several highly critical recent reports.

A June 17, 1971 report of the
Subcommittee on Legal
Representation of the Indigent
appointed by the Appellate Divisions
of the First and Second Departments
had recommended continuity of
representation, finding that
The Society's practice of
fragmenting its representation so that
one defendant may have as many as
5 or 6 different attorneys during the
course of his case is most
undesirable and should be stopped . .
. . Insofar as the Society is not
meeting that standard, its
performance is, we believe
inevitably deficient.
In regard to caseload, the
Subcommittee found that:
It would then, in our view, be
appropriate for Legal Aid to decline
to accept assignments over the
number which it could treat in the
comprehensive way here proposed. .
. . the alternative is a continuation of
a type of representation grossly
overburdening to the Society, and
which all, including the Society's
attorneys, recognize as inadequate.
Another report, issued by Board of
Correction Chair William J. vanden
Heuvel in March 1973 found poor
interview conditions and
recommended quot;that maximum active
caseloads be established by Legal
Aid, beyond which it will refuse to
accept cases,quot; noting that quot;[t]his
proposal is not new.quot;
And in April 1973, the City
Criminal Justice Coordinating
Council Executive Committee
criticized the Society for lack of
continuity, finding that:
An acceptable one-to-one
relationship between client and
attorney has yet to be developed. At

present attorneys are assigned to
court parts rather than to individual
cases. Although this is a necessary
budget-saving device, it hampers the
intimate attorney-client relationship
available to those who can retain
private counsel. Moreover attorneys
are unfamiliar with a case until it is
assigned to them in court. There is
no time to order investigations or to
fully prepare case arguments.
Valuable court time is lost in this
manner for all parties--judges,
prosecution, attorney and client.
Clients are reinterviewed as they
pass from court part to part, from
one attorney to another. The rapport
between attorney and client suffers
in this process, impinging adversely
on plea-bargaining, trial strategy and
sentencing decisions.
Taking into account both its own
findings and those of these three
reports, the court ruled that, quot;the
overburdened, fragmented system
used by Legal Aid does not measure
up to the constitutionally required
level.quot; It was precisely on account of
such conditions, the 1968 Kerner
Commission found, that poor people
of color had developed a cynical
attitude toward the criminal justice
system: quot;[t]he belief is pervasive
among ghetto residents that lower
courts in our urban communities
dispense 'assemblyline' justice; that
from arrest to sentencing, the poor
and uneducated are denied equal
justice with the affluent. . .quot;
Thus, the court issued an
unprecedented injunction pursuant to
which quot;Legal Aid should not be
permitted to accept assignments in
any additional cases . . . until the
average caseload of its attorneys
assigned to trial parts is below 40 . .

.quot; On June 27, 1973, however, the
Second Circuit vacated this
injunction on the grounds that
quot;[a]lthough the members of this
court's panel were entirely
sympathetic with the purposes which
the district judge sought to
accomplish by his order. . . . the
court has no jurisdiction under
Section 1983 since the Society was
not acting under color of state law. .
.quot;
On July 2, 1973 therefore, with
hopes for judicial intervention
dashed, Staff Attorneys voted 178-79
to take matters into their own hands
by striking for lower caseloads,
private client interview facilities,
stenographic help, more time for
research, better salaries and--above
all--continuity of representation.
The judiciary lost no time in
attacking the strikers. Presiding
justices of both the First and Second
Departments of the Appellate
Division lined up private attorneys to
staff the Criminal and Family courts,
denounced the strikers for
quot;abandoning the responsibility to the
indigent which [ALAA] members
assumed upon their employment,quot;
and threatened that, if the strike did
not end, quot;we will be compelled to
take such action as is warranted by
the circumstances.quot;
Union president Faraguna retorted
that the Society's poor representation
had been quot;abandoning [clients] for
years,quot; and that quot;[w]e are on strike to
implement the very [continuity]
recommendations made by the
Appellate Divisions' own
committee.quot; She explained that quot;[i]n
the next five years we will represent
one million indigent clients. We are
determined to create conditions

under which they can be represented
justly and effectively.quot; She vowed
that quot;[t]his strike will be won when
no longer will you hear a judge ask a
defendant: 'Do you want a lawyer or
do you want legal aid?'quot;
Many quot;abandonedquot; criminal
defendants agreed. Forty-one of 129
inmates scheduled for sentencing at
the Brooklyn Men's House of
Detention supported the strike by
refusing to leave their cells. The
Manhattan Tombs Inmate Liaison
Committee issued the statement that:
[Y]our strike has brought to public
view the quality of legal
representation the city provides to its
poor and shows these services to be
extremely inadequate . . . . There
isn't any such thing as love between
the men here at the Tombs and the
Legal Aid Society as you may
already know; but we would like to
go on record as being in support of
your actions and ask if there is
anything at all that we can do to help
matters along in any way.
The broader legal community was
split. The New York Times reported
that quot;from the Wall Street firms and
the Association of the Bar of the City
of New York--publicly at least--
came not a word of support for their
overburdened brethren.quot; However, in
a July 2 New York Law Journal
advertisement, the National Lawyers
Guild and National Conference of
Black Lawyers asked private lawyers
to refuse reassignment of the
Society's struck work, pointing out
that quot;[y]our acceptance of [the
strikers'] assignments will decrease
the effectiveness of the strike. We
ask you to consider seriously the
implications of the present crisis and
to join us in supporting the

Association's action.quot; An ad run by
professors at Hofstra Law School
and New York Law School quot;urge[d]
members of the private Bar to
support this important [strike] . . .quot;
The New York Civil Liberties Union
(NYCLU) and the Puerto Rican
Legal Defense and Education Fund
(PRLDEF) issued similar statements
of support.
The strike ended just six days
later, on July 9. ALAA won
quot;horizontalquot; continuity within the
same court, to quot;the maximum extent
feasible.quot; If a 60-lawyer
experimental program for vertical
continuity between Criminal and
Supreme courts was deemed
successful, the Society would be
required either to obtain funding for
its full implementation or to
terminate its criminal defense
contract with the city.
Faraguna observes that by
agreeing to initiate even this limited
continuity of representation, the
1973 contract represented quot;a total
reversal of the Society's initial
position.quot; New York Times columnist
Tom Wicker agreed, writing that
quot;[t]he net effect . . . should be to treat
a client's case more nearly as his or
her case rather than as a file folder.
That is what the constitutional right
to legal counsel is all about.quot;
The 1973 contract also established
workload grievance mechanisms,
badly-needed salary increases,
eventual quot;substantial parityquot; with
ADAs' salaries, shorter probationary
periods, the right to be relieved when
in disagreement with a supervisor
about how to handle a particular
case, Spanish language training,
confidential interview conditions,
greater office space, and such basic

equipment as desks, chairs and
telephones.
In September, another federal
court shed light on problems with
Legal Aid representation in
overturning the conviction and ten-
year sentence of Louis Testamark.
Testamark had been represented in
nineteen calendar calls by ten
different Legal Aid attorneys.
Moreover, the Society had
reassigned his case to a lawyer who
had not met him before trial, who
had failed to interview witnesses,
who had not consulted him about
possible defenses, who had not
sought a bill of particulars, who had
not addressed the jury, and who had
not questioned or presented
witnesses. As Testamark had
explained to the state trial court
judge when he asked for a new
attorney:
I haven't seen this legal aid in here
ever-since the case has been. . . .
Every time I appeared in court, there
has always been someone else here.
And when I come to court, all they
do is adjourn it. . . . And I have been
here for ten months now, and things
are getting worse, and nobody seems
to understand anything, nobody
wants to understand anything.
Incredibly, the state court had
denied Testamark's request on the
grounds that
[i]f he [the attorney] spoke to you
once, he's familiar with [your case]. .
. . He doesn't have to speak to you
every day. That doesn't make him
any more familiar with it. He speaks
to the district attorney. That's what
makes him familiar with it, with
what's going to be the testimony
here.
Direct Response To Judicial

Abuse
As it turned out, few
representational improvements
followed the 1973 contract and the
Testamark decision. Although CDD
had tripled in size since 1970, it
remained starved for adequate city
funding. The Society had not
provided staff with offices, interview
space or workload relief. Brooklyn
judges undermined the contractually-
mandated experiment in continuity,
and judges generally displayed
greater hostility toward CDD
attorneys than they had before the
strike.
In the fall of 1973, for example,
Judge Bernard Moldow held
Manhattan CDD Staff Attorney
Elliott Wilk in contempt for being
too aggressive in making an
application for bail. In response,
every Legal Aid lawyer in the
Criminal Court building at 100
Centre Street stopped work, thereby
initiating a tradition of direct,
immediate union response to judicial
abuse of a colleague that has
continued to this day. When
Administrative Judge Irving Lang
visited the holding pen to ask that
Wilk quot;allowquot; the other attorneys to
return to work, the lawyer
responded, quot;What can I do? I'm in
jail.quot;
In early June 1974, Staff
Attorneys Donald Zuckerman and
James Block were held in contempt
and jailed by a night court judge for
insisting that they had not finished
interviewing defendants' relatives in
preparation for a bail application.
Colleague Mark Weinstein was cited
for refusing to process cases while
Zuckerman and Block remained
under threat of contempt. The two

were released only when Court
officers took up a bail collection.
On July 9, 1974, Staff Attorney
Douglas Colbert was cited for
contempt and jailed by Manhattan
Criminal Court Judge Milton
Samorodin for arguing that the judge
should stay issuance of a client's
bench warrant. Staff Attorneys
immediately boycotted the 100
Centre Street courthouse, and
refused to return until Colbert--who
was held in a cell adjacent to the
courtroom for two and a half hours--
was released. Thereafter, no Legal
Aid lawyers entered the judge's
courtroom until the contempt
hearing, eight days later. At that
time, Guild attorney Marty Stolar,
appearing for Colbert, easily
overwhelmed the beleaguered
Criminal Court judge, who was not
renowned for his scholarship and
was, in any event, mainly concerned
with trying to preserve his dignity
before a courtroom audience packed
with Legal Aid lawyers. At the end
of the hearing, the judge hurriedly
imposed a $100 fine and, gathering
his robes about him, fled the bench.
Judge Samorodin had not, of course,
ever actually held Staff Attorney
Colbert in contempt; and the fine, as
his Honor surely anticipated, was
never paid.
On August 13, 1974, Brooklyn
CDD attorneys refused to appear in
Criminal Court after Staff Attorney
Joe Kaplan was inexplicably held in
contempt and sentenced to a fine of
$50 or five days in jail, even though
he had already acquiesced to the
judge's denial of a motion to
introduce preliminary hearing
minutes at trial.
1974 Strike

Angered by these judicial attacks
and encouraged by their rising
militancy, ALAA members set a
1974 strike deadline for September
11. When Management equivocated
on continuity and blamed the City
for the Society's refusal to offer
meaningful raises, attorneys voted
193-144 to walk out. Union
president Joel Gorham emphasized
that the strike was related to both
issues.
As for continuity, said Gorham,
quot;management is perfectly willing to
let things go another 100 years. It's
one thing this year, another next
year. We work in the courts every
day, and we're impatient.quot; With
respect to salaries, he argued that
increases won in the 1973 contract
meant that quot;[f]or the first time, the
average length of experience of a
Legal Aid Society staff attorney is
over two years. This trend must not
be reversed.quot;
Echoing their 1973 attack on the
union, the Presiding Justices
harumphed that the strikers quot;are
attorneys, professionals, not day
laborers, and should act
accordingly,quot; and threatened
disciplinary charges,
recommendations of dismissal and
replacement by attorneys appointed
from the 18-B panel, private
practitioners who, under the city's
indigent defense plan, were supposed
to handle homicides, co-defendant
cases, or defendants whose
representation by the Society would
otherwise present a conflict.
Again, the union replied that quot;[w]e
are striking today because the
judiciary and the management of The
Legal Aid Society have continued to
ignore their responsibility to indigent

defendants in this state. . . . The
Presiding Justices' statement
amounts to the ancient practice of
strikebreaking.quot; Or, as one striking
attorney put it, quot;[w]e're not out just
for money, but we are out for the
right to be out for money.quot; The
union filed charges at the National
Labor Relations Board (NLRB)
against the Presiding Justices and
repeatedly offered to end the strike
in exchange for binding arbitration, a
proposal rejected by the Society.
So obviously just was the strikers'
cause that it even found favor with
United States Representative Edward
I. Koch, who told a strike rally that
quot;[t]o threaten a man--any man--be he
lawyer or laborer, with loss of
employment, loss of the right to earn
his living at his chosen occupation
for speaking his mind, for striking to
improve his lot, is not only uncalled
for but repugnant to our law.quot;
Unlike 1973, however, Staff
Attorney support was uneven; by the
end of the 19-day strike, about one-
third had crossed the picket line.
Faraguna concludes that this was
because quot;many people did not want
another strike when improvements
were in progress.quot; In any case, the
remaining strikers had little choice
but to accept terms under which
Management remained free to
modify, or even to abandon,
continuity in order to handle more
cases. As the New York State Bar
Journal later explained,
[w]hen it was over, the strikers
returned to work with a lot less than
they had at the beginning. They were
out 20 days' pay. The future of their
five-year-old union--called with
proper professional dignity The
Association of Legal Aid Attorneys

of the City of New York--was in
jeopardy. And the two issues over
which they walked out in the first
place--cost-of-living increases and
the right to represent their clients
from the start to finish of each case--
were still unresolved. . .
There was more negative fallout in
June 1975, when the New York
County Lawyers Association
Committee on Professional Ethics
issued an opinion--without
identifying by whom it had been
requested--that the strike had
violated professional ethics. ALAA
counsel noted that the opinion
conflicted with NLRB rulings, and
union president Lee Ginsburg
criticized it as a quot;poorly reasoned . . .
example of legal double talk,quot;
vowing that union members quot;will not
be inhibited from pursuing their
obligations and rights as employees
and as lawyers.quot;
Impact Of Mid-'70s Fiscal
Crisis
Still more bad news loomed.
Negotiations in 1975 convened
amidst tremendous pressure from
finance, insurance and real estate
interests to slash services in response
to New York City's first major
municipal fiscal crisis. On July 1, the
Society threatened to layoff 60-65
Staff Attorneys. ALAA offered to
surrender $1 million in scheduled
salary step increases; to substitute
compensatory time for night and
weekend pay; and to defer the
Society's pension fund contribution.
In early August, however, the
Society laid-off 25 attorneys and 46
support staff. Although all affected
staff were recalled before year's end,
by February 1976, these layoffs
created a wave of fear that convinced

union members to ratify a contract
that waived the Society's 1975
pension contribution, froze the salary
scale, and deferred the issue of step
increases.
Thus did ALAA approach 1976
negotiations. Membership
confidence had been weakened by
the 1974 strike and by the 1975
layoffs; for two years there had been
no wage or step increases, and no
pension contributions. Members,
therefore, rejected the Bargaining
Committee's recommendation to
strike, and accepted a poor salary
offer. Salary at the newly-established
Step 13 was barely higher than the
old Step 12. The union's first serious
attempt to win greater affirmative
action was referred to a powerless
joint committee. The one significant
victory was management's final
agreement to full vertical continuity
of representation.

1976 Caroline Kearney Firing
Revives Attorney Militancy
Staff Attorneys were again
galvanized, however, when, on
October 26, 1976, Management fired
Caroline Kearney, a young
Manhattan CDD attorney and
alternate Union delegate, on the
ground that she had arrived late to
arraignments. In a November 17,
1976 New York Law Journal
advertisement, ALAA charged that
Kearney was actually fired for
having joined other junior attorneys
in charging that quot;Staff attorneys are
not receiving adequate supervision
or help from our supervisors . . .
While this problem affects every one
of us, unfortunately the greatest
burden falls on the newer attorneys,
particularly those hired within the

last year.quot;
Many union members saw
Kearney's firing as an example of a
broader conservative retrenchment at
the Society. Staff Attorney (and
future NLG/New York City chapter
president) Hal Mayerson, writing at
the time, argued that
[t]his increased repression [reflected
in the Kearney firing] . . . flows
directly from management's view
that the staff attorneys when
confronted with the choice between
retaining their job or giving their
clients quality representation, will
always choose their own needs over
their clients . . . While the rights of
all the citizens of this city are being
attacked in an unprecedented manner
by the bankers and financiers who
now run the city government, the
primary attacks are taking place
against poor people, black and
hispanic poor people. The criminal
justice system is a primary center for
these attacks . . . the state makes
certain that institutions like The
Legal Aid Society are underfunded .
. . Management's response to the so-
called fiscal crisis has been speed-
up, harassment and intimidation.
As a result of a one-day protest
strike, Kearney was reinstated.

Economic Recovery,
Stability In Late '70s
Kearney's victory and municipal
economic recovery helped ALAA to
rebound in the late 1970s. During
this period, the union made
important economic improvements,
won confidential client interview
conditions, conducted its first
coordinated negotiations with
support staff members of 1199,
began to seriously raise the issue of

more aggressive affirmative action,
affiliated with parent union District
65 and became increasingly engaged
in political activity.

Late '70s Contracts And Early
Battles For Racial Diversity
In a May 1977 New York Law
Journal ad, ALAA criticized
management for being an
quot;increasingly . . . top-heavy
bureaucracy that stands as an
impediment to the real needs of our
clients,quot; and for rejecting the union's
demands for greater affirmative
action, higher salaries, better
training, office and interview space.
On June 22, three hundred Staff
Attorneys rallied for these demands
at Legal Aid's 15 Park Row
headquarters.
Speaking to the attorneys, Bruce
Wright, one of the City's few
African-American judges--and a
favorite target of Mayor Koch and
the tabloid press for his evenhanded
treatment of criminal defendants--
accused the Society of institutional
racism for maintaining an
overwhelmingly white attorney staff-
-scarcely seven percent of Legal
Aid's lawyers were people of color.
ALAA president Mike Russek
attributed the Society's position on
this issue to the quot;class point of viewquot;
of the Legal Aid Board of Directors,
noting that 35 of its 39 members
were corporate Wall Street lawyers.
As Russek put it, quot;[t]hey don't even
like the fact that we are organized.quot;
The 1977 contract increased
health benefit contributions by the
Society, raised salaries by an average
11 percent, and restored annual step
increases. The Society, however,
refused to discuss the union's

principal non-economic demands: a
joint hiring committee to implement
affirmative action; higher attorney-
to-support-staff ratios; and regular
evaluation of supervisors, and, where
warranted, their dismissal.
In January 1978, ALAA members
overwhelmingly adopted a resolution
that accused management of
quot;institutional racismquot; for dismissing
five attorneys of color who had
failed the bar, even though it had
retained four white attorneys in the
same position. Overall, attorneys of
color made up only 8.73 percent of
Staff Attorneys and were even more
poorly represented within
management. The union, supported
by PRLDEF, minority bar
associations, and Deputy Mayor
Basil Paterson, forced management
to rescind the terminations; all five
passed the next bar exam. This battle
led to establishment of a short-lived
Minority Caucus and an interracial
ALAA Affirmative Action
Committee.
The 1978 contract included an
average 10.6 percent salary increase
and a new pension plan that reduced
the vesting period from twenty years
to the current five. In the same year,
the union helped to organize Nassau
County Legal Aid Attorneys,
reestablished an ALAA legislative
committee; pressed for improved
CDD training, and successfully
campaigned for confidential client
interviews in Manhattan Criminal
Court.

District 65 Affiliation
Of particular importance was the
March 1978 vote to affiliate ALAA
with District 65, Distributive
Workers of America (later a local the

United Auto Workers). Arguing for
affiliation, outgoing ALAA president
Michael Russek appealed to the
members' social conscience by
observing that quot;District 65 . . . has
been in the forefront of the civil
rights movement and was the first
significant opponent of the Vietnam
War within the American labor
movement.quot;
He also emphasized District 65's
political strength; its ability to
provide financial assistance; its
proven record of support for the
Union's campaign on behalf of the
fired attorneys of color; its
commitment to quot;organizing . . . legal
and defender services attorneys and
legal workers nationallyquot;; and its
agreement to grant ALAA broad
autonomy, including the right to
secede.

1979 And 1980 Contracts
In 1979, ALAA conducted its
contract negotiations in coordination
with 1199 support staff at Legal Aid
and with the Legal Services Staff
Association (LSSA)--both of whom
shared ALAA's October 1 contract
expiration. The resulting ALAA
contract established health and
pension plans jointly administered
by union and management, and
required the Society to hire an
affirmative action officer. Less,
however, was achieved in regard to
salaries, where inflation had eaten
into earlier wage gains.
In the same year, the union
prosecuted a partially-successful
workload grievance in the Brooklyn
office of JRD; campaigned for the
reelection of Civil Court Judge
Bruce Wright; and criticized the
Society's Executive Director,

Archibald Murray, who, in his
capacity as a member of the Health
and Hospitals Corporation Board,
voted to cut indigent patient services.
When bargaining resumed in
1980, the union-management
relationship was badly frayed.
Management refused to offer more
than a 6.6 percent salary increase and
demanded cuts in attorney health
benefits. As in previous years, the
Society announced that it would
offer no more than that expressly
provided for increased compensation
by the City. Management also stated
that it was quot;philosophically opposedquot;
to flex-time, job sharing, and part-
time work--all of which ALAA had
demanded on behalf of an increasing
number of members with childcare
responsibilities.
Attorneys sought to generate
pressure for their demands with a
rally at Society headquarters, a mass
sickout, and a picket line at the
October 28 annual meeting of the
Legal Aid Board of Directors. In the
end, however, members accepted the
Bargaining Committee's
recommendation to accept the offer
of improved health benefits and a 7
percent raise, while preparing for a
strike in the following year.

1981 Contract And 1199
Support Staff Strike
During contract negotiations in the
spring of 1981, management made a
4.3 percent salary offer, which
Archibald Murray defended on the
ground that the city had demanded
wage restraints for municipal
employees and contractors. On July
20, ALAA members responded with
a strike authorization vote,
establishment of strike committees

and publication of a weekly
bargaining newsletter. For the first
time, ALAA and 1199--both of
which were without a contract--
exchanged mutual pledges to support
each other's contract objectives.
In addition to seeking higher
salaries, ALAA charged that quot;[t]he
conditions under which we work at
LAS have deteriorated over the years
to a point where many staff attorneys
question the ability of the Society to
provide adequate representation in
all cases,quot; examples of which
included a major quot;shortage of
attorneys. . . [and] support staff, the
lack of decent office conditions and
equipment and the inadequate initial
and continuing training of
attorneys.quot;
In response, the union proposed
guaranteed minimal staffing levels
for CDD, CAB and JRD, where
attrition saddled staff with higher
caseloads and with more institutional
responsibilities, such as arraignments
and quot;catchquot; assignments (day-long
staffing of one all-purpose
courtroom by the same lawyer
handling Legal Aid cases on which
the assigned attorney is unable to
appear.)
Management remained
unresponsive. On October 1,
however, ALAA members--many
expressing the fear that a strike
would end The Legal Aid Society--
again accepted the offer despite the
negative recommendation of both
Bargaining and Executive
Committees.(3) On October 7, 1199
support staff rejected management's
offer of a $20 weekly raise and an 8
percent annual increase in each of
two years.
ALAA asked its members to quot;lend

any and all support they can,quot; but
treated observance of the 1199
picketlines as a matter of individual
conscience. Civil Division Staff
Attorneys who honored the picket
lines were docked. Other ALAA
members expressed their support by
going to their offices only when
picket lines were down, and by fund-
raising. After six weeks, 1199
members ratified a contract
providing for a wage increase of the
higher of $24 a week or 8 percent in
the first year, and $22 a week or 8
percent in the second.

1982 Strike
The 1982 strike, during ten cold
winter weeks, served to fully
reestablish the strength that ALAA
had lost in the unsuccessful 1974
strike and the 1975 fiscal crisis--all
in the face of great resistance and
retaliation from management, the
city elite, Edward I. Koch (by then
the mayor), and the courts. Over the
long-term, however, the Society
responded by seeking permanent
strike-breaking capacity through
bloating the number of Legal Aid
supervisors, while the city pursued
the same objective through a
dramatic increase in 18-B
representation.

Initial Negotiations
Negotiations over a contract wage
reopener began during the summer
of 1982, when the union sought
salary increases to make Staff
Attorneys more comparable to the
ADAs. At the same time, harsher
mandatory sentencing laws enacted
in the 1970s had exerted growing
pressure on Legal Aid workload and
continuity. Between 1980 and 1982,

the number of criminal trials had
grown by 41 percent. Institutional
assignments had multiplied. In
September 1982, this trend was
compounded by the Society's
surrender to the Manhattan District
Attorney's demand for a lobster shift
(overnight arraignments)--without
even consulting the union. Under
these rising pressures, illness and
emotional stress pushed annual staff
turnover to 15 percent.
In contract negotiations, therefore,
ALAA proposed that the Society
address the severe attorney shortage;
reduce the number of CDD attorneys
on extended probation, which had
risen to about one-third, and quot;act
affirmatively to affect legislation and
procedures which impact on our
clients and our ability to do our job.quot;
But instead of taking measures to
ease the crisis, management
increasingly penalized individual
Staff Attorneys. Manhattan CDD
Staff Attorney Steven Leventhal was
suspended for two weeks for asking
a judge to relieve him from several
cases due to an excessive workload.
In October, LAS labor counsel
Robert Batterman(4) alleged that the
Society's 4.3 percent salary offer was
fair because Staff Attorneys were
allegedly quot;comparablequot; to
prosecutors.

Brewer Firing Lights Fire
The next day, the Society fired
Brooklyn CDD attorney Weldon
Brewer for telling a judge that he had
been unable to file a motion because
his workload was too high: 65 cases,
including 36 felonies--a 50 percent
increase since 1978. As Brewer
explained,
[o]n September 10, I had 10 cases in

four different courtrooms. Now how
can I instill confidence in those
clients when some aren't going to see
me at all? Or when some will get
only a hurried conversation, where I
won't have any time to answer
questions? And let's suppose one of
those 10 clients has to decide
whether to plead guilty that day. It's
a serious undermining of the
relationship between attorney and
client.
Brewer was not atypical; all 18
members of his complex (the CDD
office sub-unit) had declared
themselves unable to take additional
cases and that their caseloads made a
mockery of continuity.
Brewer's firing quickly became a
symbol for everything that was
wrong with Legal Aid
representation. Hofstra Law School
ethics specialist Monroe H.
Freedman said that Brewer quot;has
taken up the fight where Mr. Gideon
left off,quot; and former U.S. Attorney
General Ramsey Clark agreed to
represent Brewer. On October 22,
enraged by the firing, ALAA
members rejected management's
salary offer and voted by a 2-1
margin to strike.
In regard to salary, the union
criticized management's refusal to
apply comparability with ADAs past
the first five Legal Aid steps. As
striker Charles S. Bobis put it, quot;[i]f
they can come up with an assistant
district attorney who after 10 years
earns only $37,000, I will go back to
work posthaste. There is no such
animal.quot; The union also made clear
that ADA salaries were a floor for
Legal Aid compensation, rather than
a ceiling, especially since Society
funding had dramatically increased,

while salary offers since 1978 had
dropped by 50 percent.
Solidarity--Within And
Without
Staff Attorney support for the
strike was strong; by the fifth week,
only five percent of the members had
crossed the line, compared with 30
percent by the third week of the 1974
strike. Scabs were dealt with harshly,
according to union spokesperson
Gary Sloman, quot;because the basic
view is that people who are working
are stabbing us in the back.quot; This
support for the strike was evident in
membership rejection of four
successive management offers.
Chelsea Civil attorney Candice
Carpenter, who had originally voted
against the strike, later explained:
The more I see of what they
[management] are trying to do, in
what are obviously attempts to break
the union, the more angry I get at
them. I'm totally flabbergasted by the
strength of the union, of staying
together. It's amazing power. It's
opened my eyes to so many things.
Who would have thought in law
school that I'd be in a union and have
these big teamsters come up to little
ol' me on the picket line and say,
quot;Okay, I'm not crossing.quot;
In a subsequent analysis, two of
the strike leaders, Steve Banks and
(future ALAA president) Jean
Schneider, explained how the Union
quickly harnessed this momentum
into organized activity:
[The strike] began with little or no
prior preparation . . . almost
overnight city-wide picket lines were
organized . . . a daily
communications network was
established [and] [f]rom scratch an

impressive fund-raising apparatus
was developed and a program of
outreach to and solicitation of
support from members of Legal
Aid's Board of Directors, bar groups,
political organizations and
politicians, judges, labor
organizations, client organization
and other constituency groups, was
initiated and forcefully carried out.
Support staff members of 1199
continued to work, but supported the
strike in a wide variety of ways. The
strike was endorsed by the county
criminal courts bar associations,
including the New York Criminal
Bar Association, which quot;urge[d] our
members, and other private lawyers,
not to accept court assignments to
indigent defendants now represented
by a striking Legal Aid attorney.quot;
In the strike's fifth week, nearly a
thousand strikers and supporters
rallied at City Hall Park. Ramsey
Clark told a November 22 rally of
300 strikers and supporters in City
Hall Park that the strike represented
quot;a struggle for equal justicequot; in a
system which permitted millions of
dollars for defense of the rich, but
provided only quot;pennies for [defense
of] the poor.quot; On November 26, 81
city judges issued a statement citing
the crucial role of Society attorneys
in both civil and criminal cases and
called for the quickest possible
resolution of the strike.
Visitors to the picket line included
Lt. Governor Mario Cuomo, City
Clerk David Dinkins, City Council
member Ruth Messinger, Judge
Bruce Wright, contingents of court
officers and other unionized court
employees, and delegations of labor
and community leaders. Teamsters
employed by United Parcel Service

and by heating oil companies refused
to cross ALAA's picket lines at
Society offices and at courthouses.
In a message to the strikers, Coretta
Scott King wrote:
Martin Luther King, Jr. [who was
assassinated in 1968 while visiting
Memphis to support striking
sanitation workers] gave his life in a
trade union struggle, and if he were
with us today, I believe he would
also be among your strongest
supporters. . . . Together we shall
overcome.
Society supervisors, meanwhile,
appeared on pending criminal cases
without files, and were soon unable
to accept new criminal cases at
arraignments. The refusal of 18-B
attorneys to cross the lines to take
struck Legal Aid cases--and the
inexperience of many of those who
did--caused numerous criminal
defendants to be arraigned without
counsel. As long trial and sentencing
delays piled up, the jails became
overcrowded. Commenting on this
logjam, the union made clear that
[n]one of us gloats over the impact
of our strike on our clients--we all
work at Legal Aid because we
believe in our clients' rights to
quality representation . . . Yet we
must recognize that our strongest
leverage with management is our
ability to close down the courts and
this necessarily means putting aside
the short term needs of our clients
for their long term need for
experienced, conscientious lawyers.
It is management's refusal to agree to
our demand for a decent wage
increase, and indeed its refusal to
bargain at all, which has prolonged
the strike, not any action by the
union.

Many Legal Aid criminal clients
agreed. A petition from 416 Rikers
Island inmates stated that
[t]he striking attorneys are balking at
the very idea of quot;Assembly Line
justicequot;. Underlying the demand for
salary increase is the less publicized
demand for lighter caseloads and a
less hectic pace. . . . We, as
detainee/defendants, should all
support this strike! It is imperative
that they win, because in the long
run, we win!
One criminal defendant's mother
said that quot;[t]hey [the strikers] are
definitely underpaid, and
overworked . . . I know what's right
and what's wrong--and they're right.quot;
Antiunion Counterattack,
ALAA Resistance
However, a sinister alliance of
management, city government, court
administration and the press soon
launched a counter-attack designed
to break the strike and the union
itself. Before the strike was even a
day old, management threatened to
cut off Staff Attorney health benefits
and to discipline attorneys,
particularly probationers, for
quot;abandoningquot; clients.
The Society's Board called the
strike quot;indefensible economically
and incompatible with the Society's
mission of providing legal
representation to the poor of New
York City.quot; Management counsel
Robert Batterman threatened to seek
legislation prohibiting strikes by
Legal Aid attorneys and sought an
order restraining union disciplinary
proceedings against scabs--who were
given free representation by the Wall
Street firm of Board member Robert
Patterson. In late October, the union
responded by filing an unfair labor

practice charge against management,
and in early November filed a
federal lawsuit to enjoin
administrative judges from coercing
strikers into returning to work.
Mayor Koch, however, raised the
ante by denouncing the strikers as
quot;unethicalquot; and instructing City
Criminal Justice Coordinator John
Keenan (who had already stated
publicly that quot;I don't think they
[Legal Aid attorneys] should have
the right to strikequot;) to study
quot;replacingquot; the Society with a
governmental public defender
agency. New York Times editorials
labeled the strike quot;foolishquot; and urged
Koch to quot;maintain the pressure by
getting standby legislation that
permits him to replace the society
with a public defender system at any
time.quot; ALAA publicly challenged
this plan to replace the unionized
Legal Aid Society, asking:
What, then, distinguishes any City
attempt to replace Legal Aid with,
for example, the closing of a factory
and moving of it to another state
solely to avoid unionization? This is
the classic runaway shop situation
and is illegal under current labor law.
Striker Kevin O'Connell attacked
the accusation that striking was
unethical: quot;Quite frankly, I get very
upset when I hear management
making the statements about clients
being hurt. They don't have clients.
They sit in their office and push
papers. Not one of them knows what
it's like to come into court and do the
work.quot;(5) Similarly, Hofstra Law
School ethics Professor Monroe
Freedman wrote that the Times
editorial quot;was erroneous in
suggesting that New York City's
Legal Aid attorneys are violating

their ethical obligations by striking. .
. . No contract can override the Legal
Aid lawyers' constitutional and
ethical obligations to assure that their
clients are receiving effective
assistance of counsel.quot;
On December 13, 1982, ALAA
proposed quot;open arbitration,quot; under
which, explained the union, quot;the
arbitrator [would be] free to reach a
decision which is fair and reasonable
under the totality of the
circumstances.quot; Management
countered with quot;baseball
arbitration,quot; in which the arbitrator
quot;would have been able to choose
only between the last offers made by
the management and the union.quot; The
Society also refused to include the
issue of Brewer's dismissal or other
non-compensation issues. On
December 16, the members voted
321-141 to reject management's
arbitration proposal.
On December 21, Koch's quot;Keenan
Commissionquot; released its report.
Although designed to help break the
strike, the report was forced to
concede that
creation of a public defender system
with simultaneous abandonment of
Legal Aid is not the course to take. It
involves numerous startup costs and
on-going expenses . . . There would
seem to be little point in jettisoning
an established organization, well
qualified to perform the desired
function, equipped as it is with able
personnel and fortified by long
experience. . . . [and] known for its
vigorous independent representation
of indigents.
The report also found the Society
to be of higher quality and more
cost-effective than 18-B
representation. The commission,

however, called for replacement of
ALAA's right to strike with
arbitration binding on the Society
and the union, but not on the city.
Victory And Backlash
On January 3, 1983--ten weeks
into a strike that had paralyzed the
criminal courts--a settlement was
finally reached. It included an 11.2
percent salary increase over two
years (compared with management's
4.31 percent pre-strike offer),
establishment of a joint union-
management working conditions
committee, and selection of caseload
arbitrators. Weldon Brewer would
remain suspended with pay pending
an arbitrator's decision (which
ultimately held that his
quot;insubordinationquot; merited dismissal).
These improved terms reflected
the indisputable fact that ALAA
members had stood together, despite
intense pressure, for ten long,
difficult weeks. Democratically
controlled by the rank-and-file, and
organized by a broad and dedicated
leadership, only 46 (or 8.5 percent)
of ALAA's 540 members had
crossed the line; the Civil Division,
Volunteer Division and Brooklyn
CDD could each boast of not having
had a single scab. Notwithstanding
concerted efforts at intimidation, no
striker was disciplined by
management, the city, the courts or
the bar.
Thus, despite the loss to each
striker of thousands of dollars in
salary, ALAA members emerged
from the strike prouder, more active
and more confident in their union.
As Jean Schneider wrote a year later,
quot;[o]ur most significant successes . . .
have come from a new awareness,
born during the strike, of what we

can achieve through collective
action.quot; Over the next year, for
example, union members won
withdrawal of management's threat
to fire a Queens CDD probationer;
compelled rejection of the city's
demand for Saturday criminal
hearings in Manhattan; and
quot;convinced management that it is
worth their while to communicate
with us about working conditions
issues that affect us and to try to
work with us to arrive at solutions.quot;
The settlement, however, did not
end attacks on the union. Shortly
after the strike, the Ethics Committee
of the Association of the Bar of the
City of New York issued an opinion-
-at Koch's instigation--suggesting
that striking Legal Aid attorneys
were ethically obliged to continue to
represent their current criminal
clients and might even have to pick
up new clients. In 1987, the
Association's Ethics Committee--
then chaired by a partner at
Batterman's firm--refused to
reconsider that opinion, despite a
three-year effort for its modification
by both union and management
lawyers on the Association's Labor
Committee.

Percolation In The '80s
The balance of the 1980s were
characterized by ALAA's renewed
political activism, by rising
caseloads generated by the quot;crack
crisis,quot; by relatively favorable
economic settlements and by a
growing union focus on non-
economic demands, particularly
affirmative action.

Immediate Aftermath Of 1982
Strike

In April 1984, realizing that the
Koch administration's threats to
cancel the Society's contract would
not guarantee ALAA's submission,
the Board, under its new president,
Arthur Liman, commissioned a
quot;Quality of Work Life Studyquot; which
ultimately recommended sweeping
changes in management style,
including a far greater role for
ALAA.
In the end, however, few of these
recommendations were
implemented. More promising was
the 1984 contract, which raised
salaries by five percent in each of
two years; sped up caseload
grievances; broadened union
involvement in affirmative action;
established a half-time work
experiment for attorneys rearing
children; lengthened parental leave
from three to ten months; created a
health and safety committee; and
established more reasonable criteria
for certifying lawyers to handle
felony cases.

quot;War on Drugsquot; Spawns
Speedup
In the summer of 1985, however,
this newfound calm was disrupted
when NYU Law School professors
Chester Mirsky and Michael
McConville issued a report on
indigent criminal defense in New
York City. Although focused
primarily on the poor quality of 18-B
representation, the quot;Mirsky-
McConville Reportquot; also asserted
that Legal Aid frequently avoided
(quot;shedquot;) difficult cases at
arraignment, failed to provide
consistently conscientious
representation, and had become quot;a
guilty-plea misdemeanor workshop.quot;

Both the Society and ALAA strongly
challenged the report as an unfair
portrayal of Legal Aid
representation.
Without question, however, Legal
Aid attorneys were being
overwhelmed by the escalating quot;drug
warquot; against crack cocaine. In the
spring of 1986, union workload
grievances compelled the Society to
pull CDD attorneys out of some
arraignment shifts in Manhattan and
Brooklyn, and to retract Board
President Maurice Nessen's
unilateral decision to extend the
Manhattan CDD lobster shift.

1986 Contract and Renewed
Militancy
Strain again returned to the
collective bargaining process.
Although the 1986 contract provided
across-the-board salary increases and
created greater half-time work
opportunities, Staff Attorneys were
angered by the Society's refusal to
offer more than a one-time bonus to
step 13 senior attorneys, a position
which was widely perceived to
reflect Nessen's contemporaneous
remark that working for Legal Aid
was a quot;young man's jobquot; to be gotten
quot;out of your systemquot; before moving
on. Similarly provocative was the
Society's claim that affirmative
action was solely a management
responsibility and that Legal Aid did
not have a quot;race-related retention
problemquot;; the Society, however,
ultimately agreed to a new--albeit
toothless--union-management
affirmative action task force.
Following the 1986 contract,
ALAA became increasingly
concerned with affirmative action. In
1987, the union elected its first

president of color, John Yong.(6) On
May 28, 1987, hundreds of ALAA
members attended a union
demonstration protesting the
dismissal of 17 law graduates--
including 15 attorneys of color--who
had failed the bar examination for
the second time. In response to the
union's charge that the Society had
breached its quot;commitment to
affirmative action,quot; management
ultimately agreed to provide greater
support for those attorneys who
failed their first bar exam.
On August 25, 1987, one hundred
Manhattan CDD Staff Attorneys left
their courtrooms to come to the aid
of colleague Tom Klein, who had
been held in contempt and jailed for
three hours --quot;by force if necessaryquot;-
-after having accused Acting
Supreme Court Justice Frank J.
Blangiardo, a notoriously anti-Legal
Aid judge, of unfairly favoring the
prosecutor during a robbery trial.
Led by ALAA member Jeremy
Schneider, the lawyers packed the
contempt hearing and refused to
handle night court arraignments until
Klein was released on the order of
Appellate Division Justice John
Carro.
In late November 1987, as a result
of similar direct action, Brooklyn
CDD attorneys won improved
conditions in the Criminal Court
holding pens after issuing a
collective threat to boycott
arraignments unless the court
administration rid the pens of rats,
roaches and filth.

Speedup And Growing
Reliance On Assigned (18-B)
Counsel
The highly-politicized quot;drug

warsquot; led the courts and city to use
the threat of greater 18-B
representation to speedup CDD
attorneys. By the end of 1987,
therefore, Legal Aid--the designated
quot;primary defenderquot;--represented
only 29 percent of felony defendants,
compared with the 18-B panel's 40
percent. In response to the city's
continuing pressure to have Staff
Attorneys sacrifice quality for speed,
management finally echoed ALAA's
position.
CDD division chief Caesar D.
Cirigliano stated that
quot;[u]nfortunately, the courts want
only one thing now--move the bodies
through the system. . . . We're not
making widgets. We're representing
people, and that takes time.quot;
Archibald Murray said that quot;[i]t's as
if they [the city and judges] believe
that the function of the lawyer is to
grease the way of his client into
prison.quot; Board Chair Alexander
Forger emphasized that quot;[i]t's the
lawyer's responsibility not to
acquiesce to that--not to obstruct, but
at least to try to get a couple minutes
of justice.quot;

1988 Contract
On May 19, 1988, meanwhile, 250
lawyers rallied in support of ALAA's
bargaining proposals. On August 15,
the bargaining climate was
dramatically inflamed when
Brooklyn CDD attorneys and
support staff held a joint wildcat
strike over the lack of office air
conditioning and ventilation on the
hottest day of the summer. On
August 25, 500 ALAA members
from around the City marched on
LAS Park Row headquarters to
protest the resulting dockings and

warning letters.
Just two weeks after the 1988
contract expired, and in the face of
rising membership militancy,
management agreed to an aggregate
13 percent two-year wage increase,
including an immediate 14.3 percent
raise for first-year lawyers and a
base-rate increase for those at Step
13. Outraged, the City refused to
reimburse $1 million of the cost, in
response to which the Board vowed
never again to make an offer for
which it did not have advance City
approval. Many ALAA members,
however, remained frustrated that
management had rebuffed the
union's demands for stronger
affirmative action and equal benefits
for lesbian and gay attorneys.

Racial Justice Battles Birth
New Leadership
Throughout the mid- and late-80s,
ALAA's Affirmative Action
Committee became increasingly
active. In the Civil Division it
initiated a long-term and ultimately
successful campaign over the failure
of Attorney-in-Charge Kalman
Finkel to recruit, retain and promote
attorneys of color. Committees in
Brooklyn and Manhattan CDD gave
support to attorneys of color. The
same period saw establishment of an
ALAA Lesbian and Gay Caucus.
In 1987, the Brooklyn CDD
Affirmative Action Committee
began to address broader issues by
publicly criticizing the acquittal of
Bernhard Goetz, who had repeatedly
shot several young black men in a
subway car. In 1988, Brooklyn CDD
delegate Michael Letwin testified
before the State Judicial Commission
on Minorities that quot;the entire

relationship between the criminal-
justice system and the minority
communities is based on
institutionalized racism of the most
profound sort,quot; and that quot;The Legal
Aid Society . . . must begin to
recognize and correct its institutional
racism, an effort that the Association
of Legal Aid Attorneys has all too
often found the Society's
management unwilling to do.quot;
Between 1987-1989, the Brooklyn
committee's members participated in
protests against racist murders in
Howard Beach, Staten Island, and
Bensonhurst. In September 1989, it
publicly contrasted the quot;preferential
treatmentquot; accorded white teenagers
charged with murdering Black
teenager Yusef Hawkins with the
demonization of African-American
teenagers accused of attacking a
white Central Park jogger. In
ALAA's first New York Times op-ed
piece, Letwin charged that, quot;[t]he
lenient treatment of the defendants
charged in the [Bensonhurst] killing .
. . is further proof that it pays to be
white when you go to court.quot; In
1989, ALAA also supported long
and difficult strikes at Eastern
Airlines and at the Pittson, West
Virginia mines, and became
increasingly involved in abortion
rights, and endorsed the first mayoral
candidacy of David Dinkins.
In the December 1989 union
elections, Brooklyn CDD and the
Civil Division served as a launch pad
for the quot;Action and Democracyquot;
slate, a cross-divisional coalition to
re-energize ALAA based on themes
generated in Legal Aid offices
throughout the city: direct, militant
grassroots decision-making and
action; collective, professional and

pro-active leadership; the centrality
of affirmative action; and
commitment to a deeper alliance
with 1199 support staff. Letwin
became union president on this
platform in January 1990.

Eruption In The Early
'90s
The 1990s immediately saw the
re-emergence of highly combative
relations within the Society as
management took advantage of
rising health insurance costs and a
sense of municipal fiscal crisis to
undermine attorney compensation,
while continuing to resist ALAA's
demands for more aggressive
affirmative action. Meanwhile, state
and city government sought to
further counter the union's influence
by funding small nonunion
organizations to represent indigent
clients without being subject to
ALAA's demands for quality
representation. During 1990-1992,
the new union leadership organized
to confront these challenges by
attempting to put into practice the
themes upon which it had been
elected. While economic gains were
limited, ALAA won major non-
economic improvements.

Speedup And The JRD Crisis
Pressure from governmental
funders to increase Staff Attorney
workloads and undermine ALAA
protections significantly increased in
early 1990. On March 9, Staff
Attorneys picketed in protest over
work quotas in CAB, where, said the
union, attorneys were quot;drowning in a
flood of cases generated by the crack
crisis.quot;
Beginning in February,

meanwhile, a three-way conflict had
emerged between ALAA, the
Society, and the state's Office of
Court Administration (OCA). The
year before, management had settled
a major JRD workload grievance by
reducing caseloads and demanding
that the state either pay for more
lawyers or face suspension of JRD's
intake. Now, the state not only
refused to provide the additional
funds, but threatened to replace
JRD's Manhattan office with a
nonunion contractor, Lawyers for
Children. Citing OCA's refusal to
provide the necessary funds,
management announced the layoff of
six JRD attorneys who had just been
hired as part of the grievance
settlement.
ALAA and 1199 promptly
responded with a joint public
campaign against these twin threats.
Characterizing OCA's request for
proposal (RFP) as union-busting,
ALAA argued that: quot;The union has
been the only organization in the city
with the power to challenge
unreasonable caseloads. They'll
[Lawyers for Children] handle
whatever caseload they're told. After
all, the only reason they're getting
the contract is so the OCA doesn't
have to deal with a union.quot;
On March 26, 1990, 300 Staff
Attorneys and support staff gathered
at Park Row to picket against the
layoffs. On May 30, the unions
picketed OCA offices, where they
held a press conference with leaders
of other unions. By the end of June,
ALAA later recounted, these
demonstrations, intensive lobbying
at the city and state levels, and its
public accusation that Lawyers for
Children lacked the affirmative

action plan required by state law,
quot;made it politically too costly for the
OCA to stick by its initial decision to
terminate the JRD contract.quot; The
campaign also forced management to
guarantee jobs for the six threatened
lawyers, if necessary by transfer to
other Society divisions.
Just as the JRD crisis was
resolved, ALAA was confronted
with the city's decision to fund a
nonunion quot;model program,quot;
Neighborhood Defender Services of
Harlem, to represent members of
CDD's client population. ALAA
responded by carefully
distinguishing itself from Legal Aid
management's smug dismissal of
NDS' innovative quot;early interventionquot;
approach. But it voiced concern
about the program's potential to
undermine the union:
We believe that [NDS] deserves
credit for pioneering ways to better
serve indigent defendants, and that
Legal Aid management should create
an atmosphere that encourages such
experimentation within the Society.
However . . . we are concerned that
this project has come about in the
context of an attack on the union
representation that exists at Legal
Aid. . . . because the union, often on
its own, has been the most ardent
advocate for quality representation
of indigent clients in New York
City.(7)
Fighting for Diversity And
Compensation In 1990
Negotiations
These threats from nonunion
contractors, however, soon paled
before the most contentious and
protracted contract negotiations since
1982. In early July 1990, amidst an
atmosphere of renewed municipal

fiscal crisis, ALAA sought wage
increases to match the ADA salaries,
explaining that quot;quality legal
representation to poor people can
only be maintained when those who
represent them are fairly
compensated.quot;
As in previous years, the union's
most prominent non-economic
demand was stronger affirmative
action, a proposal that was
strengthened by the creation of the
Attorneys of Color of Legal Aid
(ACLA), a caucus formed earlier in
the year with the union's strong
support and initially co-chaired by
Sallie Manzanet (Bronx CDD),
Millie Pinott (Volunteer Division)
and Magda Rosa-Ríos (Volunteer
Division).
Since people of color made up
more than 90 percent of the Society's
clients, but only 18 percent of Legal
Aid Staff Attorneys and 9 percent of
the managing attorneys, ACLA
representative Azalia Torres told the
press that, quot;[e]specially in this
climate of racial tension, Legal Aid
must begin to reflect the diversity of
our communities,quot; while Letwin
reiterated that quot;[t]he Legal Aid
Society simply cannot afford to send
the message to its clients that it is
part of a judicial system that is
widely perceived as being racially
unbalanced and unfair.quot;
Management, however, remained
intransigent on affirmative action,
and refused, even after the contract
expired on October 1, 1990, to make
any economic offer. ALAA
responded with public rallies on
October 1, informational pickets, an
invasion of the Society's October 23,
1990 annual meeting and disruption
of Management's Christmas party at

Park Row. In early October, the
union warned that quot;[i]f management
refuses . . . to consider our proposals,
they will force us to strike,quot; a
prospect that gained particular
prominence on October 4, when
Supreme Court Judge George
Roberts expelled Staff Attorneys
Troy Yancey and Robin Frankel
from his Manhattan courtroom for
displaying quot;Ready to Strikequot; buttons.
Across the city, Staff Attorneys
defiantly wore the buttons to their
own courtrooms.(8)
In December 1990, two months
after contract expiration, the Society
finally made its economic offer:
reduced attorney health benefits and
no wage increase--the equivalent of a
net three percent union give-back.
Management claimed poverty, but,
as in the past, refused to reveal how
the Society allocated its $120 million
annual budget. On January 29, 1991,
union members counterattacked with
a one-day strike, the date of which
was kept secret until the night
before. Striking Queens CDD
attorney Chandra Gomes told the
Daily News, quot;I love this job. I want
to do something to help people. All I
want is to be treated fairly, like
everyone else.quot; Sonja White, of
Manhattan CDD, told the Times,
quot;[i]n a nutshell, it's about respect.quot;
The Society answered by
threatening to terminate health
coverage for any attorney who
refused to authorize payroll
deductions toward the cost of
insurance premiums. When, in late-
February, attorneys voted 515-138 to
reject this ultimatum, the Society
unilaterally cut the benefits. ALAA
was now faced with a dilemma. Its
members regarded health give-backs

as unacceptable. Most attorneys,
however, were understandably
reluctant to strike. By early spring,
therefore, the union implemented an
alternative strategy of resistance
based on quot;insidequot;(9) and corporate
campaigns that included picketing
the law firms of Legal Aid Board
officers and bombarding Board
members' clients with a mass letter-
writing campaign.
Ironically, the city itself
unintentionally helped to break this
logjam. In early March, Deputy
Mayor Milton Mollen had offered to
fund salary increases if ALAA
would agree to an quot;arraignment
bureauquot; that would surrender the
continuity of representation won in
ALAA's 1973 and 1974 strikes. quot;It's
reprehensible,quot; answered ALAA,
quot;that anyone in the city
administration is trying to diminish
our clients' rights by trying to
blackmail us during a labor dispute.quot;
Having failed to buy off the union,
Mollen suggested then that the
Society compromise on ALAA's
economic demands, thus
undercutting management's
insistence that the city would not
permit it to exceed the pattern of
municipal labor contracts. When the
Society hemmed and hawed, the
union vowed to disrupt Legal Aid's
April 24 fund-raising dinner at the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Under this threat, the Society
offered to restore essential health
benefits, rescind unilateral employee
deductions and, for the first time
ever, guarantee existing benefit
levels for the life of the contract.
Except for a small increase at Step
13, however, salaries were frozen. In
other areas, the Society agreed to

landmark improvements in job
security, equal benefits for lesbian
and gay attorneys, and health and
safety.
When compelled by
management's terms to quot;recommendquot;
the offer as a condition of allowing
the membership to consider it, the
Bargaining Committeee achieved
ratification by 267-162--but only on
a basis that unilaterally repelled the
Society's last-minute attempt to
renege on its economic offer and to
coerce ALAA into dropping a Civil
Division affirmative action
grievance.
Although the union had
successfully endured, these difficult
contract negotiations served to
undermine members' morale. Deeply
concerned about health benefits,
salaries and other working
conditions, and without a prepared
strategy, ALAA had ended up
divided about how--or even whether-
-to resist Management, a schism
reflected within the Bargaining
Committee. On the other hand,
contract negotiations had generated
greater membership activism and
broad agreement on the need for
unified strategy in 1992.
Political Action
Throughout these early 1990s
crises, ALAA continued to address
larger social-justice issues. On
February 1, 1990, a union
demonstration focused media
attention on the police-instigated
beating in the Brooklyn court pens of
a defendant charged with child
sexual abuse. On August 15, 1990,
front-page press coverage reported
ALAA's charge that guards on
Rikers Island had inflicted a quot;secret
mass beatingquot; in which quot;[t]he walls

were covered with the inmates'
bloodquot; and one inmate was fatally
injured. quot;There was,quot; charged
ALAA, quot;no resistance, there was no
provocation. It was like declaring
open season on inmates.quot; These
revelations caused Mayor Dinkins to
order an investigation. ALAA also
took an increasingly public stance
against the quot;war on drugs,quot; which it
characterized as a reflection of
quot;institutional racism.quot;
In January 1991, a contingent of
ALAA and 1199 members joined in
activities against the Gulf War. In
1991, ALAA strongly supported a
successful 16-week strike by its
sister unionists at Legal Services for
New York, opposed Clarence
Thomas's Supreme Court
nomination, criticized the provision
of Glock automatic pistols to the
NYPD, and organized against the
epidemic of police abuse.

Defending Members Against
Management and Judiciary
Following the lengthy 1990
contract negotiations, ALAA again
turned to immediate issues. In early
June 1991, 75 Manhattan CDD
attorneys protested the termination
of Steven Hoffner, a well-regarded
probationary attorney, by picketing
Park Row and forcing Management
to explain its actions at two mass
meetings. On December 9, 1991, the
union called on the Society to protect
staff and clients against a rising
epidemic of drug-resistant TB, and
publicized the risk of exposure to
criminal defendants held in court
pens, telling the New York Times that
quot;[i]t was always inhumane to keep
people like that. But now [such
conditions] pose . . . a threat to the

entire city.quot;
On December 3, 1991, judicial
abuse of Staff Attorneys resurfaced
when Staff Attorney Michelle Myers
was handcuffed for alleged lateness
and for quot;smilingquot; at Criminal Court
Judge Bernadette Bayne; Myers had
asked that her client, charged with a
misdemeanor, be unshackled for a
pre-trial hearing. On December 12,
Brooklyn CDD union members
protested by walking off the job and
picketing Criminal Court. Several
days later, 100 Brooklyn CDD
attorneys voted to boycott Bayne's
courtroom to protest both Myers's
treatment and the contempt citations
issued by judges against four other
Staff Attorneys--all of whom were
either incarcerated or handcuffed for
periods ranging from a few minutes
to two hours for quot;being late.quot;
When, in February 1992, the State
Commission on Judicial Misconduct
dismissed the Society's complaint
against Bayne regarding this
incident, ALAA told the New York
Law Journal that quot;[u]ntil there exists
a genuine remedy 1,000 Legal Aid
attorneys facing judicial abuse in the
future will remain compelled to
defend our rights--and those of our
clients--with immediate, direct
action.(10)quot; A few days later, ALAA
mobilized more than one hundred
attorneys and support staff to picket
Legal Aid HQ over the firing of
Duane Williamson, an African-
American attorney whose
termination reflected a pattern of
discrimination against attorneys of
color in JRD.

Solidarity Yields 1992 Gains
Soon, however, ALAA became
bogged down in eight months of

fruitless mid-contract salary
negotiations regarding pay
comparability with ADAs, causing
150 ALAA and 1199 members to
picket Park Row on April 1, 1992.
Frustrated both by their experience
in 1990 contract negotiations and by
the illusory wage reopener, union
members told the 1992 Bargaining
Committee that--in sharp contrast to
the previous settlement--they wanted
a significant wage increase, to
continue existing health benefits
without employee premium
contributions or an HMO, and
settlement of the contract by its
October 1, 1992 expiration date.
These and other proposals were
reflected in ALAA's bargaining
demands.
To achieve these objectives, the
Bargaining Committee proposed a
two-part strategy designed to forge
broad Staff Attorney consensus. The
first was a quot;no contract, no workquot;
October 1 strike deadline--backed by
development of finances, strike
committees and creative strike
tactics--to give the union quot;some
muscle at the bargaining table from
the moment negotiations begin.quot; The
second was an quot;inside strategyquot; prior
to October 1, conducted in alliance
with Local 1199 support staff (which
had been working without a contract
since September 1991), that offered
various ways for members to build
momentum for either an acceptable
settlement or a strike.
The viability of this deepening
inter-union alliance was due largely
to the leadership of senior 1199
delegate Akil Al-Jundi (1940-1997),
a Manhattan CDD staff member and
Attica Brother; Brooklyn CDD 1199
delegate Bernette Carway-Spruiell;

1199 vice-president Angela Doyle
and 1199 organizer Cynthia Wolff.
On June 17, 1992, ALAA
members endorsed this approach by
a 266-180 vote and immediately
adjourned to form office-based strike
committees.
The strategy took immediate
effect. On June 22, 1992, several
hundred ALAA, 1199 support staff
and Criminal Justice Agency
workers (who were also without a
contract)(11) picketed the Society's
annual dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel, bearing buttons that decided
quot;1199 and ALAA--United in Spirit,
United in Action.quot;
On July 15, the three units held a
one-day strike. The strike flyer
refuted management's claim that
only the city could provide funds for
salary increases, pointing out that
quot;Legal Aid isn't broke; despite the
fiscal crisis, its revenues have risen
from $101 million to $130 million in
just four years and its managers have
received a 5-percent wage increase
since 1990.quot;
Chairing the rally, Al-Jundi noted
the historic nature of the joint strike:
Many of us waited and worked for
years to unite our unions and to
make a day where Legal Aid
attorneys and support staff would
come together . . . . [A]fter years of
allowing ourselves to be divided,
today we have broken a barrier and
proved them wrong. . . . [A]nd it
means a hell of a lot.
1199 President Dennis Rivera
pledged his union's full support for
both unions, promising that
[i]f you are prepared to build a new
relationship with [management],
based on being a fighting union. . . .
we will spend every dime, we will

put every resource behind you.
That's the commitment that we make
to you. And the only one thing we
ask in return is that you remain
united, that you make your decisions
in a democratic way, with your own
rank-and-file leadership.
Once again, the Society responded
by playing hardball. On August 26, it
announced that Staff Attorneys
might lose their health benefits
altogether unless the contract was
settled by October 1. quot;Is this a
threat?quot; mused management counsel
Bob Batterman. quot;I don't know. It's a
statement of alternatives in a very
unpleasant set of facts.quot; The Legal
Aid Board, meanwhile, sought to
avoid responsibility, claiming that
quot;[t]his is basically a negotiation
between management and the staff
and the city.quot;
ALAA answered that threatening
health benefits was tantamount to
quot;insidiously playing on people's
fears. The question is whether [the
Board] will have the will to stop this
union-bashing. They are in a
different world. They are partners in
these big firms . . . but they don't
know what it's like to represent
indigent clients. As far as they're
concerned, we're another species.quot;
The union defused this threat by
securing the UAW's agreement to
provide emergency health coverage
if management cut off attorney
benefits. In a final push, all 28
Manhattan CDD attorneys assigned
to weekend arraignments boycotted
work on September 12-13, 1992
during which Manhattan CDD Staff
Attorney Maquita Moody spoke
movingly at a union rally:
I just finished a trial--I want to
remind you what kind of work you

do. . . . My client was a predicate
[felony defendant]. . . . He hadn't had
an arrest for nine-and- half years.
And he was accused of telling an
undercover buy and bust to go across
the street and buy a vial of crack
from somebody else. He was out [on
bail], he got five years to life. He's
got kidney problems, he's on
dialysis. And a jury after 24 and a
half hours found him guilty. Now
how do you think I feel and how do
you feel when that happens to you?
We work so hard, and they don't pay
us any money, and the mental and
emotional strain we go through. . . .
They don't want us to be able to go
the doctor, they don't want us to be
able to see a psychiatrist, we can't
pay our rent . . .
On September 19, 200 union
members attended demonstrations
and 400 turned out on September 23.
On September 30, just before
contract expiration, reform-oriented
Legal Aid President Michael
Iovenko convinced the Board to
make a new offer, which ALAA
ratified by 536-268 on October 2.
For the first time, the Society
agreed to expand the concept of
quot;substantial comparabilityquot; with
ADA salaries through the tenth step,
thus generating 6.35 percent in new
money, far better than the 1990
contract's 2.5 percent and superior to
NYC municipal union settlements of
the same period. The agreement also
provided for protection from TB,
mandatory racial diversity training,
and health benefits for lesbian and
gay domestic partners. These
positive results, and the
membership's direct role in
achieving them, left union morale
and credibility far higher than in the

previous negotiations.
Incensed, the city's Office of
Management and Budget refused to
reimburse Legal Aid for about $2
million of the contract's cost. It also
barred Staff Attorneys from
participating in the municipal
workers' health plan, making it
necessary for individuals who chose
to retain full quot;indemnityquot; (non-
HMO) coverage to pay heavy health
insurance premium contributions.

1994 Strike
The momentum generated by
ALAA and 1199 during 1990-1992
carried forward toward the 1994
contract. What the unions could not
know, however, was that Rudolph
W. Giuliani's election as Mayor in
Fall 1993 foreshadowed the greatest
attack on poor people, people of
color, unions, and dissenters of any
stripe in New York City since 1950s
McCarthyism--and that one element
of this attack would be to provoke
ALAA into an unwanted and
unsuccessful strike in which it and
1199 support staff would stand
virtually alone.

Background
Between 1992 and 1994, ALAA
activism continued to grow, as did its
alliance with 1199. On March 8,
1993, 100 Brooklyn CDD attorneys
picketed Supreme Court and packed
the courtroom of Justice Carolyn
Demarest after she had imposed a
$50 fine on Staff Attorney Sonya
Zoghlin for appearing 15 minutes
late. ALAA told the press that quot;this
demonstration is about principle, not
about money,quot; pointing out that
quot;many judges show less respect for
Legal Aid lawyers than for private

attorneys, partially because of the
type of clients they represent [and
because] . . . Legal Aid attorneys are
very tenacious when it comes to
defending their clients, and this
sometimes tends to slow court
proceedings.quot;
On March 29, 1993, following the
murder of a woman by her parole
officer husband, 40 ALAA and 1199
members picketed Brooklyn Family
Court to demand that off-duty law
enforcement officers be prohibited
from bringing guns into the
courthouse. On December 3, 1993,
ALAA honored picket lines set up
by strikers at Legal Services of New
York (LSNY).
On May 6, 1994, 130 Brooklyn
CDD attorneys held a sickout after
colleague Monica Sheehan was
disciplined on the unsubstantiated
charge that she was quot;rude,
discourteous and inappropriate.quot;
On July 20, 1994, ALAA
members in the Civil Division's
Brooklyn Neighborhood Office
picketed over unmanageable housing
caseloads and brought a related
NLRB complaint. Union delegate
Michael Williams told the press that
quot;[w]hen clients have significant
violations--like lead paint, or heat or
hot-water problems--we simply
won't be able to go back to court two
or three times to force the landlord to
get repairs done.quot;
ALAA accompanied this activism
by strengthening and expanding its
leadership structure. For the first
time, each major office or division
would elect its own vice-president.
Collective leadership would be
bolstered by supplementing the
Executive Committee with a
standing Bargaining/Advisory

Committee made up of officers and
six issue and caucus representatives.
Management's longtime attempt to
block continuity within ALAA's
leadership was countered by making
explicit that the membership had the
right to elect officers
notwithstanding the Society's limits
on the duration of union leave.
Despite--or perhaps because of--
this ferment, a strike appeared
unlikely in 1994, particularly given
the clear determination displayed by
ALAA and 1199 in 1992.
In June, moreover, the city had
accepted the Society's proposal to
reduce costly and unreliable 18-B
assigned counsel representation. This
plan, which followed the scathing
exposÄ of 18-B fraud and its poor
quality representation that had
appeared in the New York Times,
gave Legal Aid control of quot;the
basketquot; of incoming cases in
Manhattan arraignments, thereby
increasing Legal Aid's share of
indigent criminal representation to
the 75 percent rate prevalent in the
Bronx and Queens. Taking its lead
from Manhattan CDD Staff
Attorneys, ALAA supported this
plan as a means of strengthening
such principles as vertical continuity.
At the same time, Board president
Michael Iovekno welcomed ALAA's
suggestions for more productive
negotiations, thereby generating
uncommonly good will early in 1994
contract bargaining. Substantively,
the Society agreed to remove the
artificial ten-step limit on senior
attorney salary comparability with
ADAs. For the first time, bilateral
subcommittees quickly reached
agreement on ALAA's proposals for
greater affirmative action, health and

safety, and quality of representation.
In this context, settlement of 1199's
contract was expected to follow soon
thereafter.
In mid-September, however, the
Giuliani administration began to
derail this process by declaring that
it would not fund even a modest
ALAA settlement.
On September 13, seeking to
generate counter-pressure on the
Society, hundreds of ALAA and
1199 members held a lunchtime
picket at courthouses and offices
around the city. That evening,
following extensive membership
discussion, the ALAA Executive
Committee reaffirmed the union's
1992 quot;no contract, no workquot; policy,
effective October 1. On September
27, ALAA warned the press that
quot;[t]he likelihood of a strike is very
real,quot; a point punctuated in a
September 29 rally of hundreds of
union members at Park Row
Behind the scenes, however,
ALAA urgently sought to avert a
strike. On September 30, the union
dropped its demand for the same 4.5
percent salary increase given
supervisors in July, and substituted a
two percent bonus in each of two
contract years--barely enough to
offset the rising cost of health
benefits. When the Society notified
the administration that Legal Aid
would be able to absorb this
insignificant cost without additional
city funds, the Mayor demanded that
the Society reject ALAA's proposed
compromise as inconsistent with its
no-increase policy for upcoming
municipal labor negotiations. He
further vowed dire retaliation were
the Society to disobey, or the union
to strike. Fearful of retribution, the

Society rejected ALAA's proposal.

Weekend Strike And
Giuliani's Threats
Since October 1 fell on a
Saturday, ALAA sought to use the
weekend as a final opportunity to
convince management that
settlement, even against Giuliani's
wishes, was far better than the
alternative. At midnight Friday,
September 30, 150 ALAA and 1199
members chanting quot;strikequot; marched
into Manhattan Criminal Court
arraignments and escorted their
working colleagues out to a
candlelight vigil that continued late
into the night.
On Saturday and Sunday, union
members from across the city joined
the Manhattan picket line. Like
earlier generations of Legal Aid
lawyers, the mood was grave but
defiant. ALAA told the press:
If you cannot attract and retain
experienced attorneys to represent
indigent clients, then the experienced
lawyers will be working only for
those who can pay--and that's not the
kind of equal justice we believe in.
Poor people deserve no less than the
Menendez brothers or O.J. Simpson
when it comes to quality legal
representation. Until Legal Aid
lawyers are treated fairly, the highest
quality legal representation is
reserved for the rich.
Susan Roche of Queens CDD said
she was on strike to quot;get the respect
for the work I'm doing and the
clients I'm representing.quot; Young Ran
Ra of Manhattan CDD said, quot;We
walked out so we would be able to
keep attorneys with experience who
could provide the best representation
to our clients.quot;

The administration replied by
threatening to wipe out both Legal
Aid and the union. City Criminal
Justice Coordinator Katie Lapp
privately warned that Giuliani would
cancel the Society's contracts if
ALAA members voted Monday for
an all-out strike. She stressed the
Mayor's determination by recounting
his prominent part in breaking the
1981 PATCO air traffic controller
strike. Giuliani uttered the same
threats publicly, vowing that quot;[w]hat
my administration will do . . . if they
refuse to go to work . . . is to cancel
the [Legal Aid] contract.quot;
May 3 Strike Vote
It was in these circumstances that
ALAA members convened at New
York University on the morning of
Monday, October 3. While the
subsequent strike vote may, in
retrospect, appear hard to fathom, the
decision facing ALAA members was
far from obvious. Indeed, for nearly
two hours, the members freely and
openly debated the choices.
After repeatedly conveying
Giuliani's threats, the Bargaining
Committee expressed the view that
quot;the offer before us is simply
unacceptable. . . . [A]lthough we are
quite aware of the risks involved--
and we must take the Giuliani threats
seriously--we simply are at a point
now that for us to accept an offer
like this is far worse a threat. . .quot;
Some members argued that a
strike would be catastrophic.
Manhattan JRD attorney Tom Curtis
said that quot;the strike is an obsolete
weapon and in the case of this strike
it would be stupid to be brought back
to this floor by the 18-Bs and the
other people who would walk in and
do the cases without us.quot;

David Lewis of the Federal
Defender Division said, quot;I do not
wish to see [Legal Aid] commit
suicide. I believe that is a genuine
possibility.quot; Many of those opposing
a strike advocated continuation of
the quot;insidequot; strategy.
Underscoring the concerns
expressed by Lewis, Letwin
cautioned that, when voting,
members should take into account
that quot;all the things he said might . . .
be true.quot; Most members, however,
agreed with the Bargaining
Committee that the union could
neither accept a net cut in
compensation nor buckle under the
same threats of replacement made
ever since the first ALAA strike in
1970. With lingering memories of
extended 1990-1991 contract
negotiations, few members
supported the middle road of a
prolonged guerilla warfare. Thus,
Bob Massi, the Brooklyn CDD vice-
president, argued that quot;[i]f you vote
to send us back to the table, even
with a [delayed] self-executing strike
date . . . your Bargaining Committee
will have absolutely no leverage at
all.quot;
Moreover, strike proponents
argued that management would
capitulate before Giuliani could
actually carry out his threat. As
Bronx CDD attorney Chuck Ippolito
predicted, quot;We take a strike vote,
you guys take a walk with me this
afternoon, and sometime tonight our
employers are going to call our
lawyer and they're going to say what
the best offer is.quot;
Similarly, Manhattan CDD
attorney Len Egert argued that
quot;[w]e're going to have an agreement,
if we vote to strike, way before

History Of The Association Of Legal Aid Attorneys Uaw Local 2325

History Of The Association Of Legal Aid Attorneys Uaw Local 2325

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History Of The Association Of Legal Aid Attorneys Uaw Local 2325