Scarce, Underpaid, and Prone to Burnout
Learning What Solidarity Can Accomplish for Legal Aid Lawyers
Over the last year and change, I have had the good fortune of participating in a labor awakening within Philadelphia’s legal services community. White-collar unionization is nothing new, but given persistent stereotypes about organized labor, lawyers are perhaps nobody’s idea of union rank and file. I am a proud civil legal aid attorney, and I am aware of many problems in the field, but before deciding whether lawyers and other legal services workers should unionize, I had to overcome certain prejudices I scarcely knew I had.
Specifically, I had to embrace the fact that I am a worker. I have no choice but to sell my labor to an employer to earn a living. This is a long way of saying, I’m not independently wealthy, so it should have been obvious.
Before I explain further, a bit of context is in order. When I refer to civil legal aid attorneys, I’m thinking of people who are paid to provide free advice or representation to individuals who cannot afford to pay an attorney. It’s important to understand, that, in America, you do not get a free lawyer just because you need one. In civil matters, people experiencing poverty must rely on a patchwork of nonprofit agencies that provide legal aid based on income guidelines and individual organizations’ various missions. The involvement of state and local governments varies. Philadelphia, for instance, is rolling out the right to counsel in eviction cases a few zip codes at a time. The system, therefore, literally changes according to your zip code.
Reasons abound for civil legal aid lawyers to seek improvements for ourselves and our clients. We are underpaid, too scarce, and commonly subject to debilitating burnout Nationally, the median entry-level salary at legal aid organizations in 2022 was only $57,500. Even legal aid lawyers with 11–15 years of experience had a median salary of just $78,500, while the average salary of lawyers in general was $163,770. True, most of us came to this work understanding we were passing up shiny law firm salaries. But what we don’t necessarily realize in advance is the harm this does. There are only 2.8 paid civil legal aid attorneys in the U.S. for every 10,000 people experiencing poverty. In 2022 the Legal Services Corporations’ Justice Report, revealed that 92% of civil legal needs go unmet for people with low incomes. So, yes, we sign up for lower salaries, but there has to be some limit to this idea. When society fails so spectacularly to invest in civil legal aid, we can’t just accept a salary scale that has no bottom because we believe in the mission. Our low salaries make it possible for government, funders, and the employer class to perpetuate a system that only meets 8% of the need for civil legal aid.
Moreover, legal aid attorneys are often subject to vicarious trauma and burnout. We listen to horrible stories. Horrible events unfold as we try to help clients through them legally. I have lost sleep wondering what would happen to my client’s several children if I couldn’t prevent an eviction. I’ve worked with anguished parents who haven’t seen their children for months because of a spiteful parent on the other side. I’ve looked at children’s hospital records that are hard to forget. Burnout has been described as physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion from long-term involvement in emotionally demanding situations. While I, luckily, haven’t gone through burnout, I know it has driven several colleagues away from legal aid. Burnout has been linked to poor job performance, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation and can cause negative attitudes toward clients.
Unionization offers an opportunity to stop complaining about such problems in individual isolation and to take collective action, but there are mental hurdles to overcome. There’s a lot to like about working in legal aid. Clients have told me that I was there for them when nobody else would listen, and that before I came along, they couldn’t find a way to make themselves heard by a judge. My colleagues are almost universally fantastic. Some might feel they are betraying all of this by unionizing. But what once held me back from going all in on the idea of unionization was something less noble. I didn’t want to think of myself as the kind of person who needs collective action. I wanted to think that my education placed me above pedestrian class struggle — a “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” as Steinbeck might have mocked. I’m supposed to be the helper, not the helped. I am, in fact, very privileged in many contexts. Still, in talking to colleagues at various workplaces and learning about their specific frustrations, I came to understand the selfishness and self-importance of my reluctance. Organization and solidarity are the only way to improve the system for clients with low incomes as well as all my fellow attorneys. Individuals might negotiate a raise here and there, but alone we are powerless to engineer improvements to the whole system.
Solidarity, however, can indeed accomplish astounding change. With respect to attorney burnout, collective bargaining can create a culture that enforces work-life balance in contrast to merely talking about it. Generous paid vacation and sick time can be demanded in collective bargaining. Contracts can create firm restrictions on after-hours demands and caseloads. These solutions address flawed working conditions rather than presumptively flawed workers. Here’s one other big weapon you might only get through the miracle of collective bargaining: health insurance. That is comprehensive, employer-paid health insurance that fully covers mental health. Unions enable us to demand these changes rather than beg for them.
As for salaries, certain unionized legal aid attorneys in Philadelphia who are a year from bar passage currently start at $68,500. A similarly situated nonunion lawyer has recently started with a salary as low as $62,000. The union attorney has comprehensive, fully employer-paid, health insurance. Unionized workers, in general, are less likely to express an intention to quit and employee tenure increases with unionization. Further, Legal aid lawyers empowered by solidarity can be powerful partners with employers in advocating for increased funding. If our work were not happening governments and other funders would find the crisis hard to ignore.
Ultimately, my excitement for, and understanding of the power of organized labor, was only possible with a measure of humility. To see the power that comes with worker solidarity, you first have to own a degree of individual powerlessness. Once you embrace that reality, though, the change you can help make is limited only by the imagination, energy, and commitment you can build with other workers.
