Legal Services Workers, Including Tenant Lawyers, Could Strike Over Pay & Other Conditions

At NYLAG, where the largest unit is the tenants’ rights division, a strike could hinder low-income people’s access to free representation when facing eviction, a service unique to the city’s Right to Counsel program which nonprofits are contracted to deliver.

Editor’s Note: After this story was published, the NYLAG bargaining committee announced that it had set a strike deadline of Tuesday, July 15.

Housing, immigration, and labor attorneys, as well as the staff who support them, picketed in front of the Manhattan office of the New York Legal Assistance Group (NYLAG) Monday after voting to authorize a strike if they don’t receive certain demands ahead of Tuesday’s contract expiration.

In parallel with other legal service providers also unionized with the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys (ALAA), UAW Local 2325, NYLAG workers have bargained for months to demand pay increases, workload reductions, and free speech protections. But progress has been slow, and all are gearing up for a coordinated action.

“NYLAG, NYLAG it’s been ages. Pay your workers living wages,” the group chanted Monday.  

The threat of a strike looms that could significantly disrupt New York City’s courts. At NYLAG, where the largest unit is their tenants’ rights division, a strike could hinder low-income people’s access to free representation when facing eviction, a service unique to the city’s Right to Counsel program which nonprofits are contracted to deliver.

“If people can’t pursue the type of zealous representation that would get our clients meaningful outcomes in court because of strenuous workloads, for example, then we’re not doing right by our clients,” said Shelly Pires, paralegal at NYLAG and vice president of membership at her union shop.

“It’s hard to stay in this line of work with this degree of pay with rising costs of living in New York,” Pires added. “We’re doing what we’re doing to try to ensure that people like us who care about this work, who enjoy doing this work, can do it for a long time.”

According to NYLAG workers, rejecting their demands would lead to continued high turnover at the organization and inadequate representation for their clients, an issue that a recent report from Comptroller Brad Lander found is surging.

“Rigid contract requirements, inadequate funding, and insurmountable caseloads have made it extremely difficult for providers to meet increasing demand,” the comptroller’s report found, noting that only around 30 percent of tenants facing eviction in March of this year had an attorney.   

Their demands

Central to NYLAG and the other ALAA chapters’ demands are salaries, which they say need to be increased to a minimum of $70,000 per year. NYLAG most recently offered to have all current employees up to that by Fiscal Year 2029, though new hires could still be offered starting wages of $67,515.*

NYLAG workers also want a 5.5 percent annual salary increase, a 10 percent retirement contribution, and a decrease in health insurance premiums. Additionally, as an organization that also serves immigrant communities, recently taking on the high-profile case of a Venezuelan public school student detained by ICE, staff from immigrant backgrounds often employ their language skills and cultural knowledge in their work. The union says that these workers deserve a pay differential.

Outside of pay, workers want NYLAG to codify free speech rights that they say were always standard at the organization, but were rolled back after staff began opposing Israel’s siege of Gaza. While displaying political posters and expressing personal views was permitted, the organization implemented a specific ban on displaying materials related to the conflict, and some have faced disciplinary action for it, which the union wants reversed.

NYLAG board member and former chair, Jill L. Rosenberg, is a major donor to UJA-Federation of New York, a local pro-Israel nonprofit. Pressure has also come from within, as the bargaining unit was recently hit by a discrimination lawsuit from the Brandeis Center that argues workers displaying pro-Palestine posters creates a hostile workplace for Jewish union members. 

“There’s a coordinated effort in this country to suppress speech in support of Palestine, and it’s really disappointing to see NYLAG management falling on the same side of that debate as the Trump administration,” said Diana Rosen, a staff attorney in the immigration protection unit who received a written warning for taking a photo with a keffiyeh alongside her coworkers. “My job on its own is stressful enough. I don’t need to also be surveilled and intimidated and harassed by the general counsel.”

A NYLAG spokesperson disputed this characterization, saying the organization’s goal is to “create a safe and supportive atmosphere.”

“We prohibit displays unrelated to our core mission and work that cause division or distress—regardless of the viewpoint—and while we address violations of that policy through dialogue, it may also include disciplinary processes,” the spokesperson said.*

NYLAG workers’ other major demand is to reduce their caseloads, which they say are so high that they are constantly stressed, exhausted, and dealing with high turnover, leading to worse outcomes for clients.

Attorneys are often assigned more than four new cases a month, an amount NYLAG considers appropriate based on a 2023 New York State report. The union says that this number assumes attorneys spend all their time on casework, excluding the administrative work that often occupies up to a third of their time. Lawyers argue that the caseload should be dropped to 30 per year, or roughly two and half per month. 

“All of this just really limits a worker’s capacity to really immerse themselves in their cases and find those hidden gems that make or break a case,” said Jon Bash, senior staff attorney in NYLAG’s tenants’ rights division and vice president of communications at the union chapter.

Citywide impacts

When it passed its Right to Counsel laws in 2017, New York City became the first place in the United States to grant low-income tenants facing eviction free representation. The Department of Social Services (DSS), which is responsible for providing attorneys, does so by contracting with legal aid nonprofits like NYLAG. 

At a time when evictions are soaring, fewer than 50 percent of people facing eviction have representation in housing court, according to Lander’s report. Tenants are eligible for RTC if they earn less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or up to $53,300 a year for a family of three. 

“[Right to Counsel] needs to be fully funded, but the demand that we have been putting out there, is that the courts and the city can be doing more to ensure that every tenant who’s entitled to Right to Counsel gets an attorney by matching the pace of cases in the courts to lawyer capacity,” said Malika Conner, coalition coordinator at the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition, who helped pass the laws.

Elected officials, workers, and legal aid nonprofits have been calling for increased funding to Right to Counsel for years. While the budget has more than doubled since 2020, when the program expanded citywide, advocates say it’s still less than half of the $350 million per year needed to ensure NYLAG and other ALAA workers receive the wage increases and reduced caseloads they’re demanding.

The 2026 budget passed this week increased funding for Right to Counsel by $15.6 million, in line with what the City Council requested.

Neha Sharma, a spokesperson for DSS, said the city does not have direct oversight of things like staffing levels and pay equity at the nonprofits it contracts with, and that funding for RTC providers is based on amounts those organizations propose themselves. She pointed to the fact that the city will pay an unprecedented amount to nonprofits in advance of services in the 2026 fiscal year, an effort to ensure providers like NYLAG with having adequate funds to be properly staffed.

Strategy

Coinciding the dozen legal service providers’ contracts to expire on the same day took years of preparation, and was done to maximize the influence they would have if workers don’t receive their bargaining demands.

If all of the ALAA organizations with now-expired contracts—which include the Legal Aid Society, the Urban Justice Center, and the Center for Appellate Litigation—go on strike, it would severely impact housing courts, likely forcing cases to be adjourned and putting pressure on public officials to intervene and encourage the nonprofits to make concessions, as happened during a strike last year of attorneys at Mobilization for Justice.

This strategy of unifying different contracts to expire simultaneously is growing in the United Auto Workers, and was implemented on a large scale in 2023. At that time, workers at Ford, Stellantis, and GM coordinated a strike where they unpredictably walked out of different factories at different times, collectively disrupting the United States’ auto industry and garnering support from people as high up as former President Joe Biden. In the end, the union won historic demands, such as pay raises of over 25 percent per year.

While the particularities of the nonprofit legal industry create unique challenges that will prevent them from replicating this campaign, the UAW learned that unpredictability can give them an edge, and that they will receive more public support by expanding campaigns beyond one shop.

“Our goal has never been necessarily to strike. What we want out of these contract campaigns are strong and fair contracts, and management is able to avoid a strike at any point by giving proposals and counters that provide that baseline,” said Estefania Rodriguez, organizer at the ALAA. “Part of the strategy of sectoral bargaining is not just about putting pressure on our management, but also putting pressure on the city.”

*This story was updated to include new comment from NYLAG, and to clarify details of the organization’s most recent salary offer in contract negotiations.

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