For the First Time in 20 Years, NYC Legal Services Attorneys Set to Go on Strike

05/4/13

Things moved nearer to the first strike in 20 years at the Legal Services NYC on Wednesday, when their workers union found the management’s recent offer for a new labor contract as unacceptable. The not-for-profit group provides free civil legal services to low-income residents of New York. There would be a vote on the new two-year agreement across all five boroughs of the city on May 15. However, for now, things seem bleak. If the majority votes against the new agreement, NYC Legal Services employees can go on strike.


Gibb Surette, a staff attorney and the union president said in an email after negotiations, “LSNYC had given us an offer that they said was their last … Every member of the bargaining team thought that it was something that we could not possibly recommend, and we told them so.”

On Thursday, in an interview, Surette observed that given the situation and the terms of the latest offer from LSNYC management, a strike was “highly likely.”

However, the executive director of LSNYC, Raun Rasmussen, said the management would wait for the outcome of the vote before commenting, and that they had put the “last, best offer on the table.”

Currently, employees are working without a contract since July 2012, and the union had given the management the deadline of May 1 for providing a proper contract to employees.

However, the union alleges that like many other unrealistic organizations, the reaction of LSNYC to tight budgets was to retain a top-heavy management and get rid of the workers making the existence of the organization self-defeating except to perpetuate vested interests of a few.

Surette said, “They want our members to go deeper into their pockets than they’ve ever gone before … When we have a real problem with management being top-heavy to begin with, they will not offer us any assurance that the jobs we save by these sacrifices will at least in part be our own.”

However, on behalf of the management, Rasmussen said that federal budgets have been reduced drastically, and with anticipated revenue losses, layoffs and reduced services was inevitable – unless the employees signed the new contract.
On the other hand, the union holds the belief that the projections of future revenue made by the management are improbably low. Given the prospects of layoffs, the union has already represented that they are willing to trade concessions in exchange of limits on the number of union members who could be subject to layoffs.

Though about two-thirds of the union members are attorneys, the management is preparing supervisors to take over cases from staff attorneys in anticipation of a strike.