Revoking legal services: Republicans want to keep lawyers from the poor

Progressive, The, April, 1996 by Steven Stycos

For years federal legislation has prohibited legal-services agencies from using federal money to represent illegal immigrants, lobby state legislatures, or handle abortion-rights cases. But many local agencies still did that work, and paid for it with other funds.

This year Republicans in Congress tightened the leash with a provision that would prohibit any agency that receives federal funds from handling restricted cases. And they added new restrictions, most notably a prohibition on filing class-action lawsuits.

The proposed law, says Rhode Island Legal Services executive director Robert Barge, "is simply a denial of equal justice in America."

When Freddie James reported for work at Bulk Lift International on Monday morning, June 20, 1994, he had a big surprise waiting for him. The Wilmington, North Carolina, factory where he worked--making industrial-strength bags for fertilizer, salt, and dry chemicals--was closed.

James and seventy-five other employees received no notice of Bulk Lift's shutdown, in apparent violation of the federal law requiring a sixty-day notice of plant closing. Having no union, James went for help to Legal Services of Lower Cape Fear for help, and it filed a class-action suit on behalf of the plant's seventy-six employees.

The company argued that the sixty-day-notice requirement did not apply to them. The plant was closed due to quality problems, Bulk Lift said, so all its employees were fired for cause.

But after a preliminary court ruling in the workers' favor, the company agreed to settle, paying James and his co-workers a total of $72,000.

Under the Congressionally approved restrictions, Legal Services of Lower Cape Fear could file a lawsuit for James individually, but not his co-workers, unless it tracked down and received authorization from each one.

That change, says William Beardall, litigation director of Texas Rural Legal Services, would drastically increase the cost of legal actions on workers' behalf and clog the courts with identical lawsuits. And more importantly, he says, it would encourage employers to break the law.

Take the Texas A&M lawsuit. In that case, the huge university was paying 400 farmworkers at its agricultural-experimentation stations as independent contractors, not employees. From 1990 to 1993, that enabled Texas A&M to avoid paying unemployment and social-security taxes totaling fifty-one cents an hour per worker.

After Texas Rural Legal Services filed a class-action lawsuit charging the workers were Texas A&M employees, the university admitted it had violated the law and agreed to pay $86,000 in back payroll taxes, giving some workers the credits to collect social security for the first time.

Not paying farmworkers' social-security taxes is a common practice, says Beardall. "The class action is the only way you can ensure that the employer doesn't rip off people year after year and profit from it," he says.

Under the new restriction prohibiting class-action suits, if ten or twenty members of a crew of 200 farmworkers seek the help of legal services to recover unpaid wages, says Beardall, "the employer can pay off the ten or twenty people and still end up ahead."