The legal aid organization's employees went on strike Monday, one year after the union last walked off the job.
While the organization's leadership remains unwilling to link the pay scales, Executive Director Juval O. Scott said in a statement that the revised proposal would raise a social worker's starting salary to $90,000 and provide an average increase of approximately 6% across the scale. She said this "far exceeds the starting pay advertised for many recent New York City government social work positions, including specialized roles requiring advanced licensure and experience."
"It is also substantially above the approximately $71,300 annualized mean wage for community and social service occupations in the New York metropolitan area reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics," Scott added. "Our proposal thus sustains competitive pay for social workers while allowing us to address a different and urgent problem: Attorney compensation has fallen too far behind comparable legal work, making it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain the lawyers our clients and defense teams need. Equal increases across both roles would not allow us to meaningfully address the attorney recruitment and retention gap."
Jessica Coffrin-St. Julien, an immigration attorney with Bronx Defenders, or BxD, and a member of the union's contract action team, told Law360 Pulse on Thursday that the union has offered counterproposals on salary, retirement, reprieve leave and hybrid work.
Several union members emphasized their focus on keeping attorney and social worker salaries tethered in interviews with Law360 Pulse during their first day on the picket line Monday. Coffrin-St. Julien said, however, that while the union still wants a single scale, it has since offered to agree to a differential for attorneys.
"We agree that attorneys deserve to be compensated competitively," she said. "We also think that BxD's outward commitment to a holistic defense model merits compensating social workers fairly as well.
"Management is sort of painting this as a zero-sum game, and we reject the premise," she continued. "The work that we do demands a lot of all of us. Management has never said they can't afford to meet the union's salary proposals. I'm honestly not sure why they continue to claim that our proposals are holding attorneys back. Our proposals are competitive for attorneys."
The Bronx Defenders union remains on strike alongside the Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem union, which walked off the job July 24. The Brooklyn Defender Services union ended its strike with a tentative deal last week.
All three unions are represented by the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys, a United Auto Workers affiliate that represents more than 3,500 legal services workers in the New York City metro area.
--Additional reporting by Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Editing by Robert Rudinger.
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