Philly public defenders voted against getting $6,000 raises if it meant weakening job protections

Last spring, during budget hearings, Chief Defender Keisha Hudson told City Council that her staffers deserved to be paid just as well as their counterparts at the District Attorney’s Office.

Starting salary for public defenders is $64,000 — at least $6,000 less than that of prosecutors and the attorneys at the city Law Department, she argued.

Hudson’s office ultimately got a $2 million increase, far short of the $15 million she asked for.

But late last month, staffers learned that Hudson had proposed to give them all raises — $6,000 for lawyers and $9,000 for law clerks — only if they agreed to give up some protections their union had successfully bargained for. The protections, focused on workload and firing for cause, were for defenders in their first three years on the job.

On Monday, results of a two-day vote were tallied: A majority of the roughly 200 workers refused raises if it meant rolling back protections. The vote was 120-42.

Union president Mary Henin said the vote was a message that “job protections … are just as valuable as any desired salary increase.”

“We are disappointed that things had to play out this way when our managers have been saying publicly for months how much we deserve pay parity with our counterparts at the [District Attorney’s Office] and other city agencies,” she said in a statement.

Management said it had to make “tough choices and prioritize initiatives that would best serve our clients” after only receiving a fraction of the budget increase it asked for.

“We could not simultaneously reduce pay disparities and hire new staff,” spokesperson George Jackson said. The proposed changes to the collective bargaining agreement “would have let managers staff courtrooms effectively to ensure high-quality client representation and increase salaries for all union members.”

Last month, defenders got $2,000 annual raises, under the collective bargaining agreement.

The current collective bargaining agreement protects defenders from working on weekends, or going to court the first day back from vacation or sick leave. Changing that practice was among the rollbacks that management sought.

Henin said that public defenders understand that their job is not necessarily 9 to 5.

“However, there needs to be reasonable limits on that,” she said. “… If someone is forced to represent clients the day after a two-week vacation, they’re not [prepared to] do a very good job.”

Public defenders voted to unionize with the United Auto Workers in early 2020.