Friday, July 18, 2025
Workers Strike Back and I stand in solidarity with New York City legal aid workers, unionized with Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys (ALAA), UAW local 2325, who are on strike. These workers are demanding higher wages across the board with the lowest-paid jobs getting at least $68,500 a year, the bare minimum necessary to keep pace with the overall cost-of-living crisis with rapid inflation and skyrocketing rents.
ALAA represents over 3,000 public interest attorneys and advocates in the New York City Metro Area. They fight for justice for poor and low-income New Yorkers in housing court, welfare centers, unemployment offices, administrative hearings for food stamps, federal disability benefits, and Medicaid, eviction court, criminal defense, foreclosure, immigration, and employment law.
Some union members have been on strike for days, and today the strike grew with walkouts taking place at three more workplaces to add to the three already on strike. Union members who work for Legal Aid society, another shop organized by the union, are also scheduled to join the strike next Friday, which will bring over a thousand more workers onto the picket lines.
This method of striking all at once across one sector is a powerful tool in the hands of workers and can be used to shut down the city’s court functions and create a serious disruption to the city’s Democratic-Party-controlled pro-corporate administration.
The Democratic Party, which controls the Mayor’s Office with Eric Adams and has 45 out of 51 seats on the New York City Council, has catastrophically and chronically underfunded legal aid, including for immigration and housing defense cases. This is absolutely shameful in general, but especially now. More and more vulnerable working people are in need of these legal services, as the Trump Administration carries out its brutal crackdown on immigrants. Rent has been skyrocketing in NYC. In 2023, average wages in NYC increased by 1.2 percent, while the median rent soared by 8.6 percent. Many working-class and poor renters find themselves in eviction court due to obscenely high rents in NYC. Having an attorney dramatically reduces the chance that a working-class or poor renter gets evicted, and yet, nationally, 90 percent of renters don’t have access to legal representation in eviction court.
The leadership of the NGO non-profit organizations that these union members work for have failed to stand up and fight the city and state governments to win higher taxes on the rich to fully fund the necessary legal aid for working-class and oppressed New Yorkers and dramatic improvements in the living standards of the legal aid workers. The top administrators of the NGOs are paying themselves around $300,000/year salaries while the legal aid attorneys on the front lines are barely scraping by on the pitiful wages offered to them.
NYC is home to Wall Street and some of the wealthiest corporations and billionaires on earth. To win this strike and these demands, working people and union members need to organize mass rallies and protests, to build momentum for the strikers’ demands and to tax the rich in New York City to pay for all services needed by working and poor people. We should also not only just fight to fund defensive services like legal aid but we should also go on the offensive to fight for rent control and an end to deportations. NYC Councilmembers Tiffany Cabán, Alexa Avilés, Shahana Hanif, and Democratic Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, from the Democratic Socialists of America should be building these fighting movements.
Alongside union members and working people here in Seattle, Washington, I used my City Council office to build mass movements and win working-class victories. In 2020, we fought the Democratic Party and the city’s elite, and organized mass rallies and democratically-organized Action Conferences to win the Amazon Tax, a tax on Amazon and other big businesses. The Amazon Tax raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year to fund affordable housing, including dedicated funds of millions of dollars annually in historically Black neighborhoods. In 2021, my office also won public funds for the right to a free lawyer for anyone facing eviction in Seattle.
I am now running for the U.S. Congress against warmongering corporate Democrat Adam Smith, who voted to create ICE, and to fund the genocide in Gaza to the hilt, and who also voted in 2022 to break the strike of the railroad workers’ unions.
Our campaign for Congress is taking the fighting strategy that was needed to win the Seattle Amazon Tax to the national stage to fight for free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich and national rent control. Whether we are up against Jeff Bezos, corporate landlords, and the Democrats in Seattle, or big businesses and the Democrat-dominated city and state government of New York, the strategy remains the same – working people need to get organized to fight back because when we fight, we can win!