On a blazing hot morning in Lower Manhattan last Friday, dozens of employees of Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem—one of the city's nonprofit legal services organizations—were slapping on sunscreen and scarfing down coffee and bagels outside their downtown office in preparation for their sixth day of picketing.
The strike, which as of Monday is in its 11th day, is the longest public defender strike in the city since 1982, when attorneys from the Legal Aid Society went on strike for 10 weeks. Unionized employees from both Neighborhood Defender Service and the Bronx Defenders are currently on strike, with the Bronx union just a day behind. (Both are represented by the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys-UAW Local 2325, and met up for drinks at Harlem Tavern last Thursday night after another day of picketing in the rain.) Brooklyn Defender Services, a fellow public defender nonprofit, also recently ended its four-day strike, after coming to a deal with management on July 21, allaying fears of a simultaneous strike across three of the six public defender organizations that contract with the City, which could have slowed criminal, immigration, family and housing court cases citywide.
The circumstances of each organization's strike is different, but the bigger picture is the same: Unionized employees at Neighborhood Defender Service and the Bronx Defenders, both of which provide free legal representation to low-income defendants, say management is trying to stiff them on their new contracts, belt-tightening at a time of increasing unaffordability in the city.
At the same time, they say worker power has gotten a boost from the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor, despite an increasingly intense workload under the Trump administration—particularly for attorneys and social workers working primarily with immigrant New Yorkers. Jessica Coffrin-St. Julien, an attorney with the Bronx Defenders immigration unit, said the mass public defender strikes this summer spoke to two key themes.
"One is a reinvigoration of the labor movement, and particularly among legal workers. And on the flip side, it speaks to just how poor some of our working conditions are, and how our compensation has just failed to keep pace with the costs of living in New York City."
Jahnavi Bhaskar, a senior staff attorney and union member at Neighborhood Defender Service, also pointed to the shifting political climate, and the fact that each of the striking public defender groups unionized in the past decade. "I think it's really, in a bigger sense, connected to the same politics and message that have led to Zohran being elected, and the wave of congressional elections where many Democratic Socialists of America-aligned politicians won their elections this past June," she said.