2009.00.00 — Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History — ML Article on ALAA — OCR
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF STRIKES
IN AMERICAN HISTORY
AARON BRENNER
BENJAMIN DAY
IMMANUEL NESS
EDITORS
c:Jv.f.E.Sharpe
Armonk, New York
London, England
Copyright© 2009 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without written permission from the publisher, M.E. Sharpe, Inc.,
80 Business Park Drive, Armonk, New York 10504.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The encylopedia of strikes in American history I Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, Immanuel Ness [editors].
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7656-1330-1 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Strikes and lockouts-United States-Encyclopedias. I. Brenner, Aaron. H. Day, Benjamin, 1979-
III. Ness, Immanuel.
HD5324.E39 2008 ,
331.892’97303-dc22
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z 39.48-1984.
MV (c) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Publisher: Myron E. Sharpe
Vice President and Editorial Director: Patricia A. Kolb
Executive Editor: Lynn Taylor
Production Director: Carmen Chetti
Production Editor: Angela Piliouras
Editorial Assistants: Kathryn Corasaniti and Nicole Cirino
Typesetter: Nancy Connick
Cover Design: Jesse Sanchez
2007036072
I
ATTORNEY STRIKES AT THE LEGAL AID SOCIETY
OF NEW YORK CITY
Michael Z. Letwin
In 1970, Legal Aid attorneys in New York City
becan1e the first lawyers in the United States to go
on strike, and they did so again in 1973,1974,1982,
and 1994. Despite expectations to the contrary (and
for reasons that cannot be fully explored here) few
lawyers elsewhere have followed their example.
It is clear, however, that Legal Aid strikes in
New York City took place in the wake of Gideon v.
Wainwright (372 U.S. 335, 1963), in which the U.S.
Supreme Court dramatically expanded the right of
counsel for indigent criminal defendants. Instead
of establishing a public defender office to meet the
obligations imposed by Gideon, New York City’s
municipal government contracted with the Legal
Aid Society, a privately funded charity established
in 1876, as its primary public defense provider. 1b
fulfill its city contract, the Society hired hundreds
of public defenders.
Despite Gideon, however, New York City’s
criminal justice system dealt contemptuously with
poor defendants. Grossly inadequate city funding
for indigent defense meant low salaries and impossible
caseloads, turning the attorneys into glorified
production workers who could offer only perfunctory
representation for an overwhelming number
of clients, nearly all of them African American
and Latino. This assembly line was epitomizeCl by
fragmented representation in which clients were
seen by a different attorney on each of many court
appearances in the same case.
By the late 1960s, the civil rights movement
had condemned such poor-quality indigent defense
as just another reflection–alongside police
brutality and discriminatory sentencing-of institutional
racism throughout the criminal justice
system. But despite a series of official reports and
mass inmate protests that sharply criticized such
665
representation in New York City, conditions did
not change; politicians, judges, Wall Street lawyers,
and Legal Aid management simply did not feel
compelled to change them.
ln 1968-69, these public defenders took matters
into their own hands by founding the Association
of Legal Aid Attorneys (ALM), which
conducted five major strikes between 1970 and
1994. Although widely decried as” unprofessional”
by the city’s political, judicial, and corporate elites,
these strikes were catalysts for systemic improvement
of indigent criminal representation in New
York City, including continuity of representation
(assignment of the same triallpwyer throughout
a given case), retention of experienced attorneys
through higher compensation, workload limits,
affirmative action, and health and safety.
Thus, for more than three decades, labor relations
in New York City’s criminal justice system
have been characterized by a recurring cycle of
accumulated grievances, strikes, and their aftermath.
Industry Background (1876-
1966)
In 1876, Der Deutsche-Rechtsschutz-Verein was
established to provide free legal assistance to
German immigrants, primarily in civil matters.
In 1896, under the auspices of leading members
of the private bar, it was renamed the Legal Aid
Society. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, criminal defense representation was
typically provided by private solo practitioners,
often members of immigrant communities,· for a
fee. During the Progressive Era, however, the legal
elite came to regard such attorneys as an impedi666
STRIKES IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR, SECTION 3
ment to swift and sure deterrence of immigrant
crime. Lawyers for the rich were also concerned
that poor immigrants felt “that they were being
denied redress, protection and equality before the
law,” particularly in regard to ineffective criminal
defense representation. The resulting political
radicalization, warned Legal Aid Society president
Charles Evans Hughes in a 1920 speech before the
American Bar Association, threatened to “open
a broad road to Bolshevism” in the United States.
Although initially concerned that the “public
defender movement” was a socialist plot designed
to undermine private profit, the legal elite ultimately
agreed with other reformers “to accept
the replacement of private lawyers in indigent
[criminal] cases, because they feared that assigned
counsel gave the poor legitimate grievances that
contributed to social unrest and presented an on-·
going impediment to the efficient administration
of criminal justice.” In 1914, the first such indigent
public defender office was established in Los Angeles.
Subsequent years witnessed a national shift
to such agencies, the public or private character of
which depended on the influence of the organized
bar in a particular jurisdiction.
These early reformers, the legal elite, and
institutional defenders all agreed that public defense
institutions should adopt a nonadversarial
approach. In the words of one leading public defender
advocate, the prosecution and defense
worked together to ensure that “no innocent man .
may suffer or a guilty man escape.” WithotJ.t the
financial incentive to prolong a case, it was argued,·
public defenders would encourage most defendants
to plead guilty, if necessary by seeking to
withdraw from cases in which” guilty” clients were
intransigent. Rather than seeking “technical” defenses
or go to trial, public defenders encouraged
their clients to testify, thereby ensuring that only
an innocent person was acquitted, and appeals
were brought only on merit.
Pursuant to this model, the New York Legal
Aid Society gradually took on a growing but still
limited number of criminal defense assignments.
This qualitatively changed only as a result of the
U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 decision in Gideon,
which greatly broadened the right of counsel to
criminal defendants, regardless of their ability to
hire a lawyer.
Most major cities responded to Gideon by
establishing or expanding a governmental public
defender office. Instead, New York City government
contracted with the already-existing Legal
Aid Society to serve as its primary public defender
organization. To fulfill this contract, the Society
hired hundreds of young public defenders, many
of them heavily influenced by the civil rights, stude-
nt, and anti-war movements.
These new defenders were appalled by the
contrast between Gideon’s lofty promise and the
grim reality of daily Legal Aid practice. As Gerald
Lefcourt recounted in a 1994 interview with the
author, when he joined the Society in 1968:
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 … no real
offices, no telephones. We couldn’t call witnesses.
There was 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
investigatorsoperating out of Manhattan for the
whole [Legal Aid] Society.
Moreover, clients (mostly African American or
Latino) saw different Legal Aid lawyers (mostly
white males) at each court appearance.
Lefcourt and others responded by organizing
the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, an independent
union that was certified as the lawyers’ exclusive
bargaining representative in December 1969.
(The Association of Legal Aid Attorneys affiliated
with District 65, an independent general union in
1978, and the union became a local of the United
Auto Workers [UAW] in 1996.) Several months
later, city jail inmates rebelled, in part to protest
the poor quality of Legal Aid representation. The
Society responded by threatening to terminate
its contract with the city to defend criminals 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.
Regarding this as merely a token gesture, on May
3-6, 1970, amid international protest against the
ATTORNEY STRIKES AT THE LEGAL AID SOCIETY OF NEW YORK CITY 667
U.S. invasion of Cambodia, Legal Aid attorneys
in Manhattan conducted the first lawyers’ strike
in the United States.
The legal establishment reacted with hostility.
The New York Law Journal cited “authoritative
sources” who “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.”
This brief strike yielded mixed results. To
counteract favoritism and promote attorney job
retention, the union’s first contract included a
twelve-step salary scale; direct client representation,
however, was not significantly improved.
Tile 1973 Strike
Three years later, Legal Aid attorneys hoped that
such conditions would be remedied by the unprecedented
federal court decision in Wallace v. Kern
(392 R Supp. 834), which ordered a limit on Legal
Aid’s criminal caseload. On June 27, 1973, however,
these hopes were dashed when the federal appellate
court overturned the decision on jurisdictional
grounds. On July 2, therefore, Legal Aid attorneys
voted 178 to 79 to strike for lower caseloads, private
client interview facilities, stenographic help, more
time for research, better salaries, and, above all,
continuity of representation.
The strikers were immediately attacked by
the presiding appellate court justices. As reported
in the July 6, 1973, New York Law journal, these
justices denounced the strikers for “abandoning
the responsibility to the indigent which union
members assumed upon their employment,”
recruited private attorney strikebreakers, and
threatened that if the strike did not end, “we will
be compelled to take such action as is warranted
by the circumstances.”
Union president Karen Faraguna answered
this attack by arguing, as reported in the July 17
New York Times, that the inadequate quality of Society
representation had been” abandoning [clients]
for years,” and that, as reported in the July 9 New
York Law Journal, “we are on strike to implement
the very [continuity] recommendations made by
the Appellate Divisions’ own committee.” She also
pointed out, reported the July 3 New York Daily
News, that “in 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 …. This 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?'”
Perhaps the most effective answer came from
forty-one inmates who refused to leave their cells
for court appearances.
The broader legal community was split. As for
the mainstream bar, the New York Times reported
that “from the Wall Street firms and the Associa··
tion of the Bar of the City of New York-publicly
at least-came not a word of support for their
ov’erburdened brethren.” 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 “your acceptance of [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.” An advertisement
in the July 19 New York Law ,Journal, signed by
professors at New York and Hofstra law schools,
“urge[d] members of the private Bar to support
this important [strike].” Similar statements of support
were issued by the New York Civil Liberties
Union and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and
Education Fund.
When the strike ended just six days later on
July 9, the ALAA had won continuity of representation
within the same court, to “the maximum
extent feasible,” and an experimental program
for continuity between misdemeanor and felony
courts. New York 1Ymes columnist Tom Wicker, who
had covered the Gideon case, wrote approvingly
that “the 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.”
The 1973 contract also established workload
grievance mechanisms, salary increases, eventual
“substantial parity” with assistant district
attorneys, shorter probationary periods, greater
Spanish-language training, confidential interview
conditions, greater office space, and the provision
668 STRIKES IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR, SECTION 3
of office equipment, such as desks, chairs, and
telephones.
In practice, however, the 1973 strike yielded
few representational improvements. Although
the number of Legal Aid public defenders had
tripled since 1970, the agency remained starved
for adequate city funding and attorneys still lacked
adequate offices, interview space, or workload
limits. Moreover, judges undermined the contractually
mandated continuity experiment and
were increasingly hostile to Legal Aid attorneys’
vigorous advocacy.
The 1974 Strike
In response to these conditions, union members
set a strike deadline for September 11, 1974. When
management nonetheless equivocated on continuity
of representation and blamed the city for
the Society’s refusal to offer meaningful raises,
attorneys voted 193 to 144 to walk out.
Echoing their ‘1973 attack on the union, the
presiding appellate justices declared, according
to the New York Daily News, that Legal Aid strikers
were “attorneys, professionals, not day laborers,
and should act accordingly,” and threatened to
bring disciplinary charges, recommendations of
dismissal, and replacement by private attorneys.
The same newspaper also reported the
union’s reply that “we 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.” 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. Speaking to a strike rally, then-House
member Edward I. Koch responded to the presiding
justices by declaring, as recounted years later
in a 1982 News World article, that “to threaten a
man-any man-be he lawyer or laborer, with
Joss 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.”
But by the end of the nineteen-day strike,
about one-third of the attorneys had crossed
the picket line because, Faraguna recalled in an
interview years later, “many people did not want
another strike when improvements were in progress.”
Thus, the remaining strikers returned to
work, even though management remained free to
modify, or even to abandon, continuity in order to
handle more cases. As the New York State Bar journal
late:J; explained,
When 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.
In June 1975, the union sustained another
blow, when a committee of the New York County
Lawyers Association issued an opinion that the
strike had violated professional ethics. Attorneys
nonetheless conducted a one-day strike on October
26, 1976, to reinstate a colleague deemed to have
been fired for her union activity.
The 1982 Stdke
In negotiations over a 1982 contract wage reopener,
the union, which by now had affiliated with District
65, UAW, again sought salary comparability
with assistant district attorneys. At the same time,
Rockefeller drug laws enacted in the mid-1970s
had further exacerbated attorney workload, in
response to which management increased the
pressure on individual attorneys. One of these
was Weldon Brewer, an attorney fired in 1982 for
having told a judge that he was unable to file a
motion due to his high caseload.
Brewer’s firing quickly became a symbol for
everything that was wrong with Legal Aid representation.
Legal ethics specialist Monroe H. Freedman,
of Hofstra Law School, writing in an op-ed
piece in the November 7, 1982, New York Times,
declared that Brewer “has taken up the fight where
Mr. Gideon left off,” and former U.S. Attorney GenATTORNEY
STRIKES AT THE LEGAL AID SOCIETY OF NEW YORK CITY 669
eral Ramsey Clark agreed to represent Brewer. On
October 22, enraged by the firing, ALM members
rejected management’s salary offer and voted by
a two-to-one margin to strike.
Staff attorney support for the strike was strong;
by the fifth week, only 5 percent had crossed the
picked line, compared with 30 percent by the third
week of the 1974 strike. Scabs were dealt with
harshly, union spokesperson Gary Sloman told the
New York Law Journal, “because … people who are
working are stabbing us in the back.”
Support staff represented by Local1199 continued
to work, but supported the strike in a wide
variety of ways. The strike was endorsed by local
criminal bar associations, including the New York
Criminal Bar Association, which in a letter appearing
in the New York Law Journal, “urge[d] our
members, and other private lawyers, not to accept
court assignments to indigent defendants now
represented by a striking Legal Aid attorney.”
In the strike’s fifth week, nearly a thousand
strikers and supporters rallied at City Hall Park. On
November 22, UPI reported a speech by Ramsey
Clark, who told a rally of 300 strikers and supporters
that the strike represented “a struggle for
equal justice” in a system that permitted millions
of dollars for defense of the rich, but provided only
“pennies for [defense of] the poor.” On November
26, eighty-one 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 picket lines at courthouses and
Legal Aid offices. In a message of support reported
in the union’s November 24, 1982, strike bulletin,
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 private 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 same issue of the
union strike bulletin made clear that:
None 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.
The December 21,1982, strike bulletin reported
that 416 Rikers Island inmates signed a petition
stating that “the striking attorneys are balking at
the very idea of ‘Assembly Line justice.’ 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!” Similarly, theN ovember
23, 1982, bulletin reported the comments
of one criminal defendant’s mother, who declared
that “[the strikers] are definitely underpaid, and
overworked …. I know what’s right and what’s
wrong-and they’re right.”
Soon, however, the strikers came under fire
from the alliance of Legal Aid management, city
government, court administration, and the press.
Before the strike was even a day old, management
threatened to cut off strikers’ health benefits and to
discipline attorneys, particularly probationers, for
“abandoning” clients. In a November 5 statement,
the Society’s board called the strike “indefensible
economically and incompatible with the Society’s
670 STRIKES IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR, SECTION 3
mission of providing legal representation to the
poor of New York City.” Management counsel
Robert Batterman threatened to seek legislation
prohibiting strikes by Legal Aid attorneys and
sought a court order restraining union disciplinary
proceedings against scabs-who were given free
representation by the Wall Street firm of board
member Robert Patterson. In late Octobe1~ 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.
The November 10 New York Daily News reported
that Mayor Koch, who as congressman
had supported the Legal Aid attorneys in their·
1974 strike, had now raised the ante by denouncing
the strikers as” unethical” and instructing City
Criminal Justice Coordinator John Keenan (who,
according to the New York Law Journal, had already
stated publicly that “I don’t think they [Legal Aid
attorneys] should have the right to strike”) to study
“replacing” the Society with a governmental public
defender agency. New York Times editorials labeled
the strike “foolish” and urged Koch to “maintain
the pressure by getting standby legislation that
permits him ‘to replace the society with a public
defender system at any time.” The union’s December
8 strike bulletin 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 dosing
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.” On December 21, according to the New York
Law Journal, Koch’s “Keenan Commission” conceded
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 private
(18-B) representation. The commission, however,
called for replacement of the ALAA’ s right to strike
with arbitration binding on the Society and the
union, but not on the city-which funded the
Society’s criminal defense work.
Finally, on January 3, 1983-ten weeks into a
strike that had paralyzed the criminal courts-the
parties reached a settlement. It included an 11.2
percent salary increase over two years (compared
with management’s 4.31 percent prestrike 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 upheld his dismissal).
These improvements were the result of a long
strike that had been characterized by a high degree
of democratic rank-and-file control, in which only
46 (or 8.5 percent) of the union’s 540 members
had crossed the line. As a result, no striker was
disciplined by management, the city, the courts, or
the bar. And although the strike cost each striker
thousands of dollars in salary, they had emerged
proude1~ more active, and more confident.
Shortly after the strike, however, a committee
of the Association of the Bar of the City of
New York issued an opinion-at Koch’s urgingsuggesting
that striking Legal Aid attorneys were
ethically obliged to continue to represent their
criminal clients.
The 1994 Strike
The 1982 strike won eight years of relative labor
peace. From 1990 to 1992, however, conflict erupted
when, after years of rising attorney workload, due
largely to a dramatic increase in prosecution for
crack cocaine, management sought to reduce attorney
health benefits and other compensation. The
ALMand 1199 support staff, working in unprecedented
alliance, conducted a series of escalating
protests, one-day strikes, and other actions.
By 1994, however, a strike seemed unlikely. In
June, the Society had convinced the city to deal
with the costly and poor-quality criminal representation
provided by private (18-B) lawyers by
increasing Legal Aid’s role. As a result of relentATTORNEY
STRIKES AT THE LEGAL AID SOCIETY OF NEW YORK CITY 671
less labor strife, the Society’s board of directors
came under the control of a more union-friendly
leadership, which agreed to raise senior attorney
salaries, implement more aggressive affirmative
action, improve health and safety, and otherwise
lift the quality of representation. A settlement
was anticipated by October 1, when the union’s
contract would expire.
In the middle of September, however, the expected
agreement was effectively vetoed by Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani, who declared it inconsistent
with his hardline position in upcoming municipal
labor negotiations. Although the Society emphasized
that it would self-fund the agreement, the
mayor issued an ultimatum: even modest salary
increases would provoke his severe displeasure.
Fearing retribution from its primary source of
funds, the Society agreed.
When the union contract expired on October
1, the mayor personally vowed to cancel Legal
Aid’s contracts if the attorneys struck; his criminal
justice coordinator privately reminded the union
that when Giuliani worked for Ronald Reagan
he had helped break the 1981 air traffic controller
(PATCO) strike.
At a mass meeting on the morning of Monday,
October 3, union members weighed their
options. Despite the mayor’s threats, most would
neither accept a net cut in compensation nor surrender
their National Labor Relations Act rights,
as private sector employees, to strike. Moreover,
many believed that Society management would
capitulate before Giuliani could actually carry out
his threat, or simply felt that they had no choice but
to fight back. Thus, attorneys voted overwhelmingly
to strike, before marching down the middle
of Broadway to join picket lines already erected by
striking 1199 support staff.
Within minutes, as reported by the New York
Times, Giuliani went on live television to declare
that “The canon of ethics says that you can’t
abandon cases, so I don’t know where lawyers
come off striking. And here they are abandoning
cases for an entire city. I’m not going to let
them do that.” Although Legal Aid supervisors
were prepared to fully staff the courts, Giuliani
unilaterally terminated all of the Society’s city
contracts, which, he said, would be replaced by
new agreements with other contractors. As a
result, he was quoted in the New York Daily News
saying, “This will be the last time lawyers strike
against the public interest.”
Although some press reports portrayed the
strikers sympathetically, the city elite enthusiastically
supported the mayor’s hardline position.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Arthur Liman,
a former Legal Aid Society president and onetime
Iran-Contra prosecutor, said that Giuliani “had a
responsibility” to end the walkout. The Daily News
editorialized that ‘/while [strikers] have every right
to bargain and demand higher wages, their ability
to shut down something as vital as the courts gives
them too much power … they must be held to the
same no-strike law as other key city employees.
. . ‘. They must never again be permitted to hold
the city hostage.”
The next day, Tuesday, October 4, the ALM
sought countermomentum with a mass press
conference on the City Hall steps. Foreshadowing
Giuliani’s later restrictions on First Amendment
expression, hundreds of police prevented the media
from contact with the strikers, who defiantly
chanted //Rudy, Rudy is his name, union-busting
is his game.”
Notably absent, however, were Governor Mario
Cuomo or City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, both
of whom were leading Democrats. Also missing
were leaders of the major municipal unions. On
October 5, the New York Times reported that Stanley
Hill, executive director of the American Federation
of State, County and Municipal Employees DC 37,
had publicly advised both sides to return to the
bargaining table. Six days later the New York Post
reported that Sonny Hall, president of Transport
Workers Union Local100 (subway and bus workers),
said, /The Legal Aid lawyers’ strike was indeed
a careless act, although they had an excellent case
for their demands …. Our concern is not why the
mayor said no, but how he said it.” Privately, the
leadership of both DC 37 and the United Federation
of Teachers (UFT) assured Giuliani that they were
1/neutral” about the attorneys’ strike, presumably
in hopes of softening the mayor’s demands for
$200 million in cuts in their members’ health care
benefits. As the New York Times explained:
Whether the Legal Aid workers realized it, they
had walked off their jobs at a critical point in
672 STRIKES IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR, SECTION 3
the city’s relationship with its work force. Mr.
Giuliani, having just completed a round of
budget cuts and staff reductions, has now gone
back to the workers, seeking more job cuts and
asking them to start contributing toward their
health-care benefits …. The Giuliani administration
seemed to fear that by striking, the lawyers
threatened the spirit of collective sacrifice.
Or, as City University of New York professor
Stanley Aronowitz pointed out, “Labor’s strategy
has become Giuliani’s strategy. The big fry make
their deals.”
Similarly, many private lawyers regarded the
1994 strike as an opportunity for enrichment rather
than solidarity, as they told Newsday. “I’ve got to
make a living,” explained attorney William Blasi,
who was anxious to pick up struck cases. Mitchell
Salloway, another private attorney, rejoiced that,
for him, the strike meant: “More cases. More
money. More food on the table.”
Further emb’oldened by such support, Giuliani
announced that any striking attorney who
did not return to work by the following morning
would be permanently blacklisted from all
future city-fvnded representation. Under these
overwhelming threats, the strikers returned to
work on Wednesday morning, and that evening,
they voted 544 to 150 to ratify a slightly improved·
agreement.
This brief but intense battle left attorneys feeling
a mixture of bitterness, defiance, and pride.· One
junior attorney, Young Ran Ra, told the New York
Times that “when I took this job I knew I wouldn’t
be paid well, but. .. [a] lot of people are contemplating
leaving because of what has happened.” Luis
Roman said, “if I’m back here tomorrow, the sign
on my door will read ‘Dump Rudy Headquarters.”‘
Mary Beth Mullaney spoke for many when she said,
in a letter printed in the New York Times,
Seven months ago I left my family and friends in
Irmo, S.C. … to work as a staff attorney for the
Legal Aid Society in New York It is the job I had
most wanted. On Oct. 1, I went on strike with
about 800 of my colleagues …. I was asking Legal
Aid Society management to redistribute funds
already within the society …. There was nothing
unethical about the strike …. I am ridiculed
by my family and friends for the work I do. But
I am proud of it because I am fighting to uphold
individual rights for everyone, not just those
who can afford it.
However, the New York Times praised Giuliani’s
“firm foundation in fiscal reality” and declared that
the strike had been” a foolish challenge.” Writing in
th<; New York Post, former Mayor Ed Koch praised
Giuliani’s” courage in taking on the striking Legal
Aid attorneys.” Newsday quoted Lawrence Kudlow,
economics editor of the right-wing National Review
and a chief budget economist in the Reagan administration,
who predicted that “Giuliani’s action
on the Legal Aid lawyers was a very significant
development; to some extent it’s a New York City
version of Reagan’s PATCO confrontation ….
I’m sure it has sent a lot of public union officials
scurrying.”
Opposition to the mayor’s conduct fell to
commentators such as writer and former public
defender James S. Kunen, who wrote in the New
York Times that “the strike was fated to fail because
these advocates for the indigent were demanding
the one form of compensation their fellow citizens
are unwilling to give them: respect.” In Newsday,
radical labor analyst Robert Fitch predicted that
municipal unions would suffer from their abandonment
of the Legal Aid strikers:
What’s surprising is not that Giuliani broke the
[ALM] strike by threatening to fire everybody
and is now picking his teeth today with the attorneys’
bones. It’s that the rest of the city’s municipal
labor movement-once regarded as the
most militant and powerful in America-mostly
looked on while the mayor gnawed away on the
carcasses of their fellow trade unionists.
The mayor, however, seemed determined to
inflict further punishment for the brief strike. According
to Newsday, he declared that the attorneys
“have a hope, not a reality of keeping their jobs,”
and he vowed that any “new [contract] between
the Society and the city … [must] prohibits trikes in
the future.” When blocked by an NLRB investigation
from pursuing a permanent ban on Legal Aid
strikes, he demanded an immediate $13 million cut
in the Society’s $79 million city criminal defense
ATTORNEY STRIKES AT THE LEGAL AID SOCIETY OF NEW YORK CITY 673
funding. This cut led Legal Aid criminal-defense
attorneys to surrender a week’s compensation in
order to prevent the layoff of 1199 support staff and
junior attorneys. The New York Times applauded
these cuts for yielding II cheaper, more efficient
defense services.”
Mayor Giuliani also announced plans to transfer
an additional 25 percent of the Society’s city
criminal funding to nonunion contractors, thereby
ensuring, reported the New York Times, that the city
would “no longer be at the mercy of one group that
could decide in the future to go out on strike, and
then all of a sudden you have a massive backup
in the criminal justice system.”
But strikebreaking was not the mayor’s only
purpose. The autumn 1995 City journal, a publication
of the Manhattan Institute, a Giuliani administration
think tank allied with the right-wing
I-Ieritage Foundation, charged that the Society
was dominated by the union and “leftist” poverty
lawyers whose successful representation of public
housing tenants, the homeless, and juvenile offenders
had interfered with the Giuliani administration’s
efforts II to improve the city’s quality
of life.” But “with Legal Aid cut down to a more
appropriate size,” the mayor could ;’undertake a
broad legal and political counterattack against the
pernicious consent decrees and court mandates …
[and] campaign more effectively in the Legislature
for needed reforms in such areas as juvenile justice
and homeless policy.”
Recognizing such motives, Council member
Adam Clayton Powell IV, representing East Harlem
and the Bronx, was quoted in the New York Times
as denouncing the transfer of Legal Aid funds to
nonunion contractors as “another vicious attack
in a long line of vicious attacks on the poor, the
African-Americans and Hispanics who get caught
up in this system. For [Giuliani] to be taking this
type of action simply as retribution for the strike
that they undertook last year is really appalling.”
Similar statements were issued by former mayor
David Dinldns and the Central Labor Council. The
Amsterdam News wrote:
Giuliani has been more cruel than human, on
the cutting edge of the kind of psychosis that
he regards poor whites, Blacks and Hispanics
as butterflies, whose wings he can tear off with
impunity while he has the temporary power of
the bully …. The Legal Aid Society has taken a
bold step [of opposing new Giuliani indigent
defense contractors]. It is imperative that they
be supported.
The bluntest statement, jointly issued by the
Center for Constitutional Rights, the National
Conference of Black Lawyers, National Emergency
Civil Liberties Comrnittee, and the National Lawyers
Guild stated that they “reaffirm our support
for The Legal Aid Society and its unions in reversing
Mayor Giuliani’s attacks, in particular, call for
attorneys to withhold any and all aid and comfort
to new strikebreaker indigent defense agencies.”
‘ By July 1998, the Giuliani administration used
such contracts to slash Legal Aid criminal funding
by an additional $13 million, without any significant
decrease in the Society’s overall workload,
leading one judicial oversight body to report, according
to Newsday, that the Socie.ty ‘/is obligated
to represent almost the same number of clients for
substantially fewer dollars,” thereby overwhelming
Legal Aid attorneys with impossible caseloads,
arraignments, and other work. In the process, this
posts trike de-funding seriously; weakened continuity
of representation and other gains long fought
for by the ALM.
Ironically, howeve1~ this same period led to
dramatic improvement in the Society’s internal
labor-management relations, including the Legal
Aid board’s deliberate rejection of the mayor’s
demand to break the ALM, and its appointment
of new management whose primary mission was
to ensure labor peace.
As a result of such changes, ALM contracts
in 1998 and 2000 yielded an average 6 percent
compensation increase-by far the greatest in the
ALAA’ s history, and far higher than that negotiated
by municipal unions for the same period.
Moreover, both the ALM and 1199 won a unique
level of influence over the Society’s hiring, promotion,
legal practice, budget, and other critical
issues. Not until after Giuliani left office in 2001,
however, were the Society and its unions able to
recoup some of the millions in lost city funds. And
Giuliani’s nonunion contractors have outlived his
administration, thereby posing an ongoing threat
to the unionized Society.
674 STRIKES IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR, SECTION 3
Since it was founded in 1876, the Legal Aid
Society in New York City-the oldest and largest
legal aid agency in the United States-became
the national model for small, private nonprofit
charities representing indigent clients in civil
(and later juvenile) cases. In the 1960s, however,
it was largely transformed into the world’s largest
indigent-criminal defense (or public defender)
agency. Within just a few years, this nearly unique
transformation led to the first attorney strikes in
the United States. Therefore, New York City’s
Legal Aid strikes, which took place between 1970
and 1994, have been a response to the often-dismal
state of indigent criminal defense representation.
See also: Three Strikes Against the New York City Transit
System, 277.
Bibliography
Letwin, Michael. “History of The Association of Legal
Aid Attorneys UAW Local 2325.” Available at www.
alaa.orypages/History.pdf. Revised August 1999.
Lindenauer, Susan E. “Equal Justice: The History of the
New York Legal Aid Society.” Update on Law-Related
Education 18, no. 3 (Fall1994).
“Legal Aid Society.” In The Encyclopedia of New York City,
ec;l. Kenneth T. Jackson, 661-62. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995.
Legal Aid Society. Encyclopedia of Company Histories (n.d. ).
Available at http://www.answers.com/topic/the-legal-aidsociety.
Mirsky, Chester L. “The Political Economy and Indigent
Defense: New York City, 1917-1998.” In 1997 Annual
Survey of American Law, 891-1017.
ALAA Roots -- An Unofficial Site 