(Special to BINJ.News) – Massachusetts residents will vote next month on whether employees at the Committee for Public Counsel Services—the state agency for public defenders and the social workers who support them—can collectively bargain.
Public defenders, who provide free legal representation to criminal defendants who cannot afford an attorney, have been struggling to get the right to collectively bargain in Massachusetts for decades, with efforts dating back to the 1970s. Much of the organizing has focused on amending language in the state’s constitution that bars Committee for Public Council Services employees from unionizing. Other neighboring states, like Connecticut and New York, already have unions for their attorneys.
Voting yes on Question 2 this year will not automatically create or recognize a union for public defenders—it only gives them the legal ability to form one. In Massachusetts, employees at the Committee for Public Counsel Services are some of the few government employees without that right.
Many public defenders view their job as integral in holding up the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—the right to legal counsel—and that their ability to give their clients good representation is strained by their working conditions.
CPCS declined to comment for this story.
Tanvi Verma has been working as an attorney for the CPCS for nearly three years.
“You have the right to the same kind of defense that a rich person has,” Verma told The Shoestring. “All of the people that are criminal defendants in our system are presumed innocent and they all deserve the same rigorous defense, no matter how much money you can put towards a lawyer.”
But employee caseloads have doubled in the past year, in part because the state Legislature wanted public defenders to take on more clients, Verma said. That has meant that attorneys are now taking cases that are outside of their areas of expertise. At the time of Verma’s interview with The Shoestring, she said that she had spent nearly every day in court, often having to visit multiple courts in a day.
“When you’re stretched that thin and you have so much responsibility and you have so many clients, you begin to think: ‘Am I able to do the best job that I know I can? Like, is this the right way for me to be able to give this work my all?’” Verma said. “Because at this point, I feel like if I am giving the job everything I have, I’m saving so little for myself.”
Verma said that there’s little consistency or clarity on the cases they’ll be covering, and that those decisions are made by management. When employees have raised issues to management, she said that they’re ignored because they have no bargaining power.
According to Verma, legislators have historically told CPCS employees that it wasn’t a priority to amend the statute that designates what public employees are allowed to collectively bargain, and that they instead focused on what they saw as more pressing issues, like housing.
Verma said that organizers looked at what worked for Uber and Lyft drivers when they posed a similar question to Massachusetts voters in 2024. Public defenders decided to do the same.
Other unions and organizations, like Local 888 of the Service Employees International Union and Progressive Mass have come out in support of voting yes on Question 2. There is no public opposition against the proposal.
On top of struggling to unionize and get recognition, public defenders in Massachusetts have been paid less for their work compared to other states—and have been fighting for wage increases for decades. Higher pay for public defenders, at minimum, would cost millions of dollars—something the state has been hesitant to invest in. CPCS’ budget is about $87 million and it spends nearly 80% of it on wages. The organization also has $250 million in its safety net reserve.
Last year, the caseload burden at CPCS and a lack of workers resulted in over 100 cases being thrown out without fines or fees. The state cannot hold a case if someone is without representation for over 45 days, and can’t hold somebody in police custody if they’re without representation for seven days.
According to WGBH, attorneys at CPCS represent about 20% of public defenders across the state, while bar advocates—private attorneys who contract with the state—represent the remaining 80%.
The Office of the Inspector General has taken CPCS to court as part of the office’s scrutiny of the agency, which was the subject last year of a scathing report the inspector general published. In the report, the independent oversight agency said that CPCS attorneys take less caseloads compared to attorneys in other states, that representation is more expensive per case in Massachusetts, and that the justice system itself is “broken” in how it defines need for representation. The inspector general also criticized CPCS because it does not “effectively notify the Legislature that CPCS staff attorneys do not handle 20% of indigent cases.”
The report also recommended that bar advocates receive more cases and an increase in the cap for the amount of hours a bar advocate can work on a case.
“The Commonwealth’s expensive indigent defense system is inefficient and operates with
Impunity,” the report said. “The failings of the status quo came to a head in May of 2025, when many bar advocates stopped accepting new case assignments and sought an increase in the hourly rates set by law.”
The inspector general’s office told The Shoestring it has no opinion on Question 2. CPCS entered into a legal dispute with the Office of the Inspector General in response to the report, and said that the office’s claims are “not supported by the full record.”
Last summer, bar advocates organized a work stoppage and negotiated with Gov. Maura Healey to increase their wages and better their working conditions. The stoppage didn’t come without its criticisms. The inspector general’s office said in its report that the stoppage was a sign of the failure of the justice system, and some prosecutors felt that it put public safety at risk.
Healey later approved an increase of $20 an hour to bar advocates’ hourly wages over two years, which would put the minimum wage at $85 an hour. This is still less than other states, like Rhode Island and Maine, which offer starting rates at $112 and $158 an hour, respectively.
But CPCS public defenders still start out earning less than $40 an hour, even after a rapid expansion and funding that hired an additional 22 attorneys.
Courts in Springfield and Holyoke are in particular dire straits. In an interview with The Shoestring last year, Judge Judd Carhart had said that the conditions of the courts were “a threat to Hampden County defendants’ constitutional rights that warrants immediate intervention.”
Eilish Thompson, born and raised in Springfield, now represents the city’s residents—some of whom are people she knows, or are loved ones of people she grew up with.
Thompson has been working with CPCS for a little over a year and said she’s overwhelmed, often pulling 80-hour work weeks and representing upwards of 50 clients at a time. She said it’s not the kind of work attorneys can keep up with if they don’t care about the people they’re representing, and that the risk of burning out is high.
“It’s not sustainable,” she said.
Eilish found it strange that CPCS employees had to go to the ballot to try and gain the right to collectively bargain. To her, this emphasized “the second class status that public defenders have in the government system.” Thompson said that Massachusetts seems to value the Sixth Amendment less than its neighboring states and that she’s considering becoming a public defender in Connecticut because the rate of pay is higher.
For Thompson, the ability to unionize would mean more work-life balance and opportunity to provide “above and beyond” representation to her clients. It would also assist the unique position that she thinks public defenders are in to provide more resources for clients that have needs outside of what the legal system is able to meet. This includes connecting people with rehabilitation services and support with mental health.
For this reason, Eilish said that while she thinks accountability is important, she doesn’t feel like the inspector general’s characterization of CPCS represented the holistic aspect of their work, which she said can be hard to capture in a report.
Better working conditions for public defenders would allow for better performance as attorneys, Thompson argued, which would “help with trying to really interrupt cycles of poverty,” she said. “To qualify for public defense, you have to be making under a certain amount of money—so that is truly the connecting thread between all of the people that we work with.”
Many employees at the CPCS view their jobs as an important and holistic intervention in the legal system and view their social workers as an integral part of that approach. The right to collectively bargain isn’t just for public defenders, but would also include social workers like Jeff Whiteside.
Whiteside is a senior social service advocate who has been working for CPCS for over a decade. Much of his work consists of going to jails and prisons, and writing memos to the court that explains a client’s background and contextualizes their interaction with the legal system.
“If we’re not able to tell our client’s story, that’s a detriment to them throughout the legal process,” Whiteside said.
According to him, if social workers aren’t able to provide that information, judges are only going to hear the prosecutor’s perspective, which Whiteside said wouldn’t capture “the fullness of who a person is and what they’ve gone through.”
Though they aren’t sure what a union contract would look like for them, they know they want more of a voice in decision-making and their working conditions.
“It really feels for the first time like this could happen,” Verma said. “We need to give the people that worked on this for so long the credit that they deserve because a lot of them didn’t get to see this issue cross the finish line. A lot of them left for other states because they had to—a few of them have passed away. There is no vision of what our union can look like in the future without all of the thankless and rewardless work of the people from the past.”
This article was original published in The Shoestring (western Massachusetts). It is part of a joint series on the 2026 Mass ballot questions by BINJ.News and The Shoestring.
