New Article: Elizabeth Ford, Alt-Legal Services: Re-Visioning Lawyers’ Role in the Fight for Worker Power, Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, Vol. 46, No. 1, 2024. Abstract below:
Can litigation build worker power? This question is the subject of a long-running debate about lawyers’ roles in the labor movement as a whole, and particularly within the community-based worker advocacy and service organizations known as worker centers. On one side, scholars argue that legal services undermine worker power, “atomizing” workers by encouraging them to focus on individual solutions. But others respond that legal services – especially recovering workers’ unpaid wages through wage-and-hour litigation – is essential to improving workers’ material conditions and demonstrating status quo vulnerability. While many organizations have worked hard to harmonize these two perspectives, the argument has served as stumbling block, stoking internal conflict between organizers and lawyers and in the worst case undermining the organization itself.
In this article, I argue that the two sides of this debate are talking past each other because they are assuming different understandings of worker power. Thus, the article first develops a taxonomy of worker power, focusing on countervailing power (power over) and community organizing power (power with). Building on this more precise understanding of worker power, I argue that it is possible to construct a worker-center affiliated law office that both exerts power over employers to force them to stop stealing workers’ wages and builds individual and collective power within communities of workers. Far from rejecting individual representation, I argue that worker centers and other community-based organization can strategically embrace this work through a function I call “Alt-Legal Services.” An Alt-Legal Services office is a law office dedicated to ending wage theft by using legal tools to impose countervailing power on employers and by supporting community campaigns that elevate workers’ collective agency. Finally, I provide some concrete approaches to representation and funding that an Alt Legal Services operation can take.
Poverty Law 