The Bronx Defenders’ Statement on Organization’s ALAA-UAW 2325 Union Chapter Decision to Strike 


Bronx, NYJuval O. Scott, Executive Director of The Bronx Defenders, issued the following statement following the organization’s local union chapter’s decision to strike: 

“As public defenders in the Bronx, we defend nearly 20,000 people every year from incarceration, eviction, family separation, and deportation in one of the most policed, surveilled, and under-resourced counties in New York State – and one with the highest rates of poverty, housing instability, and economic precarity in the nation. 

“And our staff do this work with more zealousness, compassion, and integrity than I have seen anywhere in my over two decades of service as a public defender. 

“That is why from the moment I took the helm at The Bronx Defenders last fall, I have been advocating non-stop, alongside with union leadership, for increased funding at the city and state level, and for real fixes to the City’s broken contracting system, to pay our staff properly for their work. 

“I am proud of our success in securing more funding this year for legal services – including in the City budget passed last month – and we have met with our local union chapter multiple times and offered good faith proposals to meet their demands as much as is possible within the conditions and constraints of our funding. 

“Our latest offer to the union was to significantly increase the overall salary scales for staff across the board. For administrators, investigators, and advocates, we proposed to lift the lowest salary by 11.4% while meeting the union’s salary demands for workers with 9 years of experience and higher. For attorneys and social workers, we increased the lowest salary by approximately 5.5% year over year. To encourage retention, we also offered a new annual longevity increase of $3,000 for all union members after 8 years of service. And we agreed to pay attorneys a daily rate for arraignment shifts.

“I’m proud of what we were able to offer. We worked hard to get there, applying all available City funding and making difficult decisions around staffing to bring our salaries closer to our staff’s worth in a way that would not jeopardize the quality of legal representation we provide. 

“But the union’s latest counterproposal requires an additional $600,000 that we just don’t have without additional City funding. With valid concerns around workload and maintaining the highest quality services for the people we represent, we cannot responsibly offer more.

“We are deeply concerned about the impact a strike will have on the thousands of people we represent and the hundreds of people we will need to turn away during the strike’s pendency. We must also respect our local chapter’s decision to strike. The people of the Bronx deserve high-quality legal representation, and my staff deserve to be paid their worth. We implore the union and the City, both, to support us in seeking a swift resolution.” 

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