UAWD 2325 Roots and Purpose. Over the past decade, new openings for militancy have emerged in Local 2325 as our union transformed from a narrow craft model into an industrial union with members across New York City’s entire legal services sector, and as the City’s neoliberal politics have been increasingly discredited. A new layer of shop-floor leadership has been forged by our historic 2025 sectoral contract campaign, in which twelve shops bargained simultaneously and seven went on strike, and by broader political struggles, from opposition to the genocide in Gaza to increased ICE presence in our communities. This layer has pushed for more militant action, deeper organizing, and more democratic unionism, while exposing the limits of labor law and service unionism in addressing the crises we face. This trend has met internal resistance from more timid and collaborationist tendencies. UAWD 2325 aims to reclaim and reaffirm our union’s long history of rank and file power by consolidating left forces, raising the political consciousness of ourselves and our coworkers, and militantly organizing in our shops and our sector to advance class-struggle unionism with the following principles.
Legal services workers must stand with the working class. Capitalism exploits legal services workers, like all workers, with low wages, high workloads, and high rents. We can only end this exploitation with an organized movement of the entire working class to abolish capitalism and take control of our society and economy. Therefore, we must stand with workers across the UAW, across the country, and across the world in our common struggle for liberation.
Class struggle is rooted in vehemently opposing racism, xenophobia, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, nationalism, ableism, and all types of divisions used to pit workers against one another. The ruling class maintains its power not only through economic control, but by shaping societal norms, values, and beliefs through its institutions. Legal services institutions are not exempt. We view class struggle, not only as a contest over material resources, but as an ideological contest about the long-term interests of the working class with all its intersectionality.
We must fight for legal services that serve the working class. Our work, like all work under capitalism, is used to benefit capital and perpetuate the exploitation of the working class. Maintaining capitalism requires immense violence—surveillance, prosecution, incarceration, eviction, deportation, and family separation. Capitalists have constructed a piecemeal legal services system to channel resistance into the courts and create a veneer of justice.
Capitalists disagree among themselves on the optimal amount of due process and legal services funding required to maintain social stability. The more reactionary factions prefer no legal services at all. But they all agree that the cost and political power of legal services workers should be minimized, which they enforce with low wages, high caseloads, political repression, and union-busting.
To avoid the moderating role capitalists intend for us, we must fight their austerity and repression at every turn, and we must highlight the inherent injustice of the “justice” system, private property, and tiered citizenship systems we’re tasked with helping to administer. A truly just society would have no need for indigent legal services. As legal services workers, we are of and in solidarity with the working class, including those we defend every day – “our clients”.
Class struggle unionism requires class struggle tactics. Labor law was created to fragment worker struggle across individual workplaces and shift it away from the shop floor to bargaining tables and arbitration rooms. This regime is designed to provide controlled pressure-release valves while minimizing disruption to production and preserving the capitalist status quo.
Class struggle unionism requires that we break out of this mold by escalating and broadening our fights. We must be unafraid of tactics that shut down our workplaces and court systems, including strikes. We must end disparities across shops and job titles, raising the floor for every worker so our bosses can’t divide us. We must stand in solidarity with other unions and workers to shut down our cities in moments of crisis, such as ICE deployment into our communities. And we must consider all sources of leverage, even if they involve tactics banned under current labor laws. As legal services workers committed to class struggle unionism, we understand our tactics to be in furtherance of liberating and defending the entire working class.
Workers must lead our own struggles. We labor every day in our shops and live under material conditions in large part defined by our collective bargaining agreements. Armed with this first-hand knowledge of our working and living conditions, we must lead our struggles politically and strategically. At times, we may seek information from specialists such as union counsel. We may also rely on staff organizers to help administer our union. However, we cannot outsource the leadership of our struggles on the shop floor.
Currently in our Local, workers often do not lead bargaining or grievances. In order to eliminate these elements of service unionism, workers must be the principal bargainers at the table, facilitate bargaining committee meetings, and lead grievance hearings to cultivate rank-and-file leadership that strengthens the union at large. In shops where workers do not yet have the experience, resources, or confidence to lead these tasks, staff and rank-and-file must collaborate to organize towards this goal. Only the working class can liberate itself from the oppression inherent in and necessary for the proliferation of capitalism.
Our Local must stop begging and start bargaining with politicians. Our fight is both with our immediate bosses in our shops and the politicians who control the framework in which they operate. When we bargain with management, sympathetic arguments and offers of partnership do not move them. They only respond to leverage—our ability to shut down their operations. Individual managers may be pleasant people, but they operate within constraints set by boards and funders to maximize output and minimize costs. Treating politicians as our friends is similarly ineffective. Individual politicians may also be perfectly pleasant, but any politician committed to “governing” within the capitalist state operates under parallel constraints: pressure from business interests and the NYPD, limits imposed by other sections of government, balanced-budget requirements, and legal protections for capital.
Fortunately, we already know how to deal with actors who present themselves as sympathetic while administering systems of capital. When management refuses to improve our conditions, we shut down their operations by withholding our labor. Politicians are similarly vulnerable. When they act against the working class, we have the ability to shut down the courts, and we can raise the political cost by organizing alongside tenant unions and other working-class organizations. Armed with this leverage we can bargain, not beg, with politicians.