Our Purpose & Platform

  • WE are the Southwest Ohio Legal Aid Brigade. We are the staff of Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati and Southwest Ohio, serving our community day in and day out. We take the calls, work the cases, and make the difference. We are essential to the operation of our organization- the only legal services provider for a region of approximately 1.8 million people. And, in the spirit of mutual collaboration, we have asked management to recognize our union with the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 8.

    We love this work, and want to continue to serve our clients. But we are worried. We are worried about our ability to remain at Legal Aid and make ends meet, as our pay fails to keep pace with inflation. We are concerned about the effects of our stressful workloads on our lives. We are overworked and isolated within silos. We are confused by the lack of transparent standards around expectations. Our office culture and conditions are unsustainable.

    (1)

  • Above all, we are frustrated with our office’s culture of stagnation. Whether it is in strategic planning or team meetings, new ideas, methods of thinking, and non-management views are dismissed. This perpetuates a cycle with which we are too familiar: employees come to Legal Aid not just believing in the work, but with a desire to contribute to the institution’s legacy by providing new ideas for development and growth. However, these ideas are rebuffed in favor of more entrenched voices. Discouraged and burnt out, people leave to work elsewhere.

    This cycle hurts not just Legal Aid, but also our community. We lose crucial knowledge, expertise, and innovation. Our continually growing workloads reduce our ability to effectively serve our clients and community. Therefore, as strategic planning enters implementation, we gather as collective stakeholders within Legal Aid to address needs unmet within our organization.

    (2)

  • We unionize because it is consistent with the mission and purpose of Legal Aid. We cannot resolve the serious legal problems of low-income people if we refuse to resolve the serious problems gripping our workplace. We cannot be serious about promoting economic and family stability if we fail to pay wages that provide stability for all staff. And we cannot reduce poverty through effective legal assistance if we cannot retain those doing the effective legal work.

    We believe the systemic power of a union will better serve Legal Aid, its staff, and its clients. We know it will make us a more inclusive and forward-thinking organization. A union will empower our staff to make needed changes–big and small, internally and externally. We will be an organization that cares about its people. In sum, we will be a more sustainable place, for all of us, organized on the following goals.

    (3)

  • We will bargain for across the board pay increases for all staff, emphasizing increases for dramatically undervalued hourly staff. We strongly believe that the recent pay changes are inequitable, and do not adequately compensate legal assistants, paralegals, intake, and reception for the critical work they do.

    We will support compensation increases commensurate with staff taking on additional responsibility. Supervision takes a lot of work, and our pay should reflect that. Project management should be rewarded too. We will bargain for increased pay for those with language skills.

    At a time of record inflation, annual raises in the range of 5% for attorneys, and 3.5% for non-attorneys, are not true raises. We will collectively bargain for annual raises going forward actually tied to the cost of living, at a minimum. We are mindful that our annual raises have not kept pace with those for our executive director and other managers.

    We support an exploration of new fundraising strategies to pursue novel sources of funding for our work. We believe that growing the fundraising pie is critical to the financial health of our organization, and to ensuring that compensation is fair in the long term.

    We will not be divided by job title or experience level on this issue. We know that when we increase pay to properly compensate all of our colleagues, we are promoting retention and staff wellbeing - making us a better law firm. We are united together and cannot be divided up.

  • Our union is committed to making all that is left implicit at Legal Aid explicit. To that end, we will push for an updated and publicly accessible employee handbook that fully lays out the rules and expectations of the workplace.

    We will push for clear job descriptions for every position, especially for those in “hybrid positions”.

    We support tying our individual work plans to the work we actually do.

    We support a clear path to promotion and development for non-attorney staff.

    We support the inclusion of non-attorney staff in conversations about agency development, staff compensation, and organizational concerns.

    We support a more transparent process in how board members are selected, and how the board operates. We believe that the board should better reflect our clients and the community we serve, rather than the biggest corporations in Cincinnati.

  • We know that Legal Aid must look inward to address racial inequalities, as well as issues around gender identity, disability, and mental health in our own organization. We cannot rest on the basis of the clients that we serve. To fulfill our mission, we must confront racial inequalities and structural racism internally.

    We support mandatory training on implicit bias, cultural competence, and DEI issues in general, for both new and current status, with a recurring training schedule.

    We support a stand-alone DEI committee that is centered around BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disabled staff, and empowered to make real decisions. Legal Aid should be internally committed to racial justice and anti-racism, and to fully supporting and welcoming trans people in our workplace and respecting their identity.

    We will fight for a recruitment policy that emphasizes recruiting, hiring, and retaining people of color. We support questioning the assumption that a candidate must have a certain kind of public interest experience in order to fit the Legal Aid mold.

  • We know that Legal Aid employees of every job title feel unsupported and ill-equipped for what our work entails, with limited orientation and training provided in the spirit of “learn by doing.” While this principle is valuable, said value should not come at the expense of adding undo stress to newer staff, or to those whose responsibilities or roles within the organization have changed.

    We therefore support more uniform and substantive on-boarding, training, and shadowing of new staff, and staff who are changing their role within the organization.

    Our staff works closely with individuals in crisis, who are facing extremely difficult circumstances and often are struggling with trauma and other mental health challenges. We support uniform training on trauma-informed advocacy.

    Further, our organization pays little attention to the mental health and well-being of our staff. We need training on secondary trauma, support for staff in accessing counseling, and a uniform managerial attitude in favor of taking leave for mental health and well-being.

    We support improved feedback and staff development that is not simply being assigned additional responsibilities.

    We support an equitable, inclusive, office-wide work from home policy available to staff regardless of position.

    We support making the COVID paid leave policy permanent.

    Our current parental/family leave policy is inadequate. We will bargain for an expansion of the parental leave policy.

  • We will bargain for a more sustainable workload. While burnout and fatigue cannot be avoided, there are ways to remediate or mitigate these issues that are not being addressed.

    We will support realistic caseloads and work assignments with respect to the worker’s current capacity.

    We support an exploration of electronic files as official client files, to reduce the time-intensive and often duplicative task of maintaining a paper file.

    We advocate for supervisors to have reduced caseloads in order to provide time and attention for effective supervision. We also believe that managers need to communicate across practice groups to maintain internal consistency, and to more effectively manage advocates who are in multiple practice groups.

    We feel as though Legal Aid has a higher capacity for impact and litigation work that, while it may mean fewer individual cases, we cannot just be complicit in the systemic barriers our clients face.

    We support a deep and meaningful inquiry into PIKA as a timekeeping apparatus. PIKA’s current function and emphasis as a contemporaneous logging of time over-stresses minute to minute accountability on individual casework, and downplays time spent on project management, supervision, and staff support and collaboration. We support a more equitable conversation around the tracking of and accountability for advocate time.

“We believe the systemic power of a union will better serve Legal Aid, its staff, and its clients.”