Elizabeth Ford’s Alt-Legal Services offers a bold and refreshing take on the role of lawyers in worker movements. Can lawyers empower workers—or do they undermine organizing efforts? Ford tackles this long-standing debate head-on, arguing that the tension stems from competing ideas about what worker power really means. Her perceptive solution: a new model of “alt-legal services” that fuses legal advocacy with grassroots organizing to build worker power.
Ford argues that when people disagree about the role of legal services for worker power, they tend to misunderstand what it entails. Some believe that lawyers undermine worker power by taking control of campaigns and fragmenting workers through individual litigation. Others see litigation as essential for improving workers’ material conditions and securing remedies for workplace harms, such as wage theft. Ford argues that this conflict arises because both sides differ in what they assume worker power is. To resolve this conflict, she introduces an analytical framework that she develops from Galvin that distinguishes between “power over” and “power with.”1
“Power over,” recognized as “countervailing power” by the traditional labor movement, refers to the capacity of some individuals to exert their will on others. Unions obtain power over employers via membership organizations that have both economic and legal power (via labor law) to compel employers to bargain collectively with workers and reach legally binding agreements. Worker centers, not being unions, cannot develop “power over” in the same manner, but have other options. Ford identifies three key sources of “power over” for worker centers:
- Authority through enforcement—Collaborating with government agencies to enforce labor and employment laws. Here, Ford highlights the importance of the so-called “co-enforcement” literature.2
- Normative power through storytelling—Using workers’ stories to spotlight their moral and dignitary rights, build public pressure, and challenge the status quo. Here, Ford highlights scholarship on the normative dimension of power.3
- Resource aggregation—Leveraging fee-shifting provisions that hit scofflaw employers’ bottom lines, while also funding the work of their lawyers.
“Power with” refers to the power rooted in solidarity and relationships—what I have called elsewhere the “social capital” of worker centers.4 “Power with” is the typical way community-based groups build power.
Armed with these conceptions of power, Ford shows what they imply for alt-legal services. For example, Ford argues that alt-legal services should not be used for base building—that is, attracting new members to worker centers. Using legal services to recruit not only conflicts with what clients expect but also may be unethical. Besides, traditional organizers are simply better at base building. Legal work is slow. It often requires confidentiality, which can strain relationships between organizers seeking access to workers and lawyers bound by attorney-client privilege.
At the same, alt-legal services lawyers do not live by a stylized attorney-client relationship. Alt-legal services lawyers understand their client relationships through a flatter, Freirean popular education model that transforms client intakes into learning processes. The model empowers workers as teachers.
For example, consider wage theft. Ford argues that alt-legal services lawyers must learn the workers’ stories behind wage theft. Workers teach lawyers and become part of their own solution. These stories also become powerful resources for the low-wage worker movement. As both workers and lawyers get to understand the structural causes of wage theft, alt-legal services lawyers can shape more effective legal reforms and litigation strategies to address those root causes.
Ford outlines four core strategies for alt-legal services: supporting and holding government enforcement accountable, engaging with large numbers of workers, litigating individual wage theft cases, and building a bank of worker stories. These activities, she argues, are essential for building both “power over” and “power with” within the worker center framework. Ford also emphasizes sustainable funding by way of fee-shifting provisions, partnerships with government agencies, and limited charitable support. Reliable funding is critical, given the persistent financial challenges facing the alt-labor movement.
Ford’s article speaks directly to alt-labor organizing and its campaigns, but we can extend its lessons to labor unions. Union lawyers could think more about how to contribute to “power with.” By limiting secondary boycotts and related activity, the Taft-Hartley Act severely undercut union capacities to build “power with.” Yet, by protecting employees’ “concerted activities for … mutual aid or protection,” section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (as interpreted in Eastex, Inc. v. NLRB, 437 U.S. 556 (1978)) helps employees mobilize for legislation that impacts all employees and can thus support worker coalitions beyond a single union in one workplace. Union lawyers might find similar ways to build “power with” via other federal and public sector labor law.
Ford’s article is valuable for those who view lawyers as integral parts of social movements. Like Cummings,5 Ford shows how legal advocacy and organizing are not inherently at odds. Legal strategies can strengthen community ties and give meaning to campaign messages. Building those bonds and spreading workers’ moral fights doesn’t have to be the job of traditional organizers alone. Alt-legal services lawyers can help too.
Ford’s article also aligns with my research on alt-labor, which shows that social capital, symbolic capital, and framing strategies are central to the success of alt-labor organizations.6 The “power with” idea underscores how alt-labor uses social and symbolic capital to mobilize workers and shape policy. But Ford goes further. She explains how story banks—a collection of client stories that lawyers gather with workers’ permission—could help worker centers frame their campaigns more effectively. This is a new idea. Worker stories don’t have to stay buried in law office files or the occasional newspaper article. Instead, these stories could drive public education and policy campaigns to fix the deeper problems low-wage workers face.
In short, Ford delivers a creative blueprint for lawyers, law students, other legal workers, and organizers urgently trying to find ways to work together to build worker power in perilous times. By showing us the distinct value of “power over” and “power with” for alt-legal services, Ford fuses legal strategy with grassroots organizing, popular education, and strategic storytelling. In a time when oligarchs dominate, democracy rots, and the rule of law decays, Ford’s article is simply essential reading.
- Daniel J. Galvin, Alt-labor and the New Politics of Workers’ Rights (2024); Daniel J. Galvin, Alt-Labor’s Turn Toward Politics and Public Policy to Combat the Exploitation of Low-Wage Workers: Building Power and ‘Punching Above their Weight’, Econ. Pol’y Inst. (2021).
- E.g. Jance Fine, Enforcing Labor Standards in Partnership with Civil Society: Can Co-enforcement Succeed Where the State Alone Has Failed?, 45 Politics & Society 359-88 (2017).
- E.g. Diana S. Reddy, After the Law of Apolitical Economy: Reclaiming the Normative Stakes of Labor Unions, 132 Yale L.J. 1391-461 (2023).
- César F. Rosado Marzán, Worker Centers and the Moral Economy: Disrupting through Brokerage, Prestige, and Moral Framing, 2017 U. Chi. Legal F. 409, 420.
- Scott L. Cummings, An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles (2021).
- Marzán, supra n.4.
