Page 71 - Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice

Employment issues make up an important part of legal aid representation of the poor, and have become more important to poor women as the public assistance system has moved single mothers into low wage work and their children into childcare . Not only do women make less money on average than men, but many also face “wage theft” issues, i .e . the failure of employers to pay wages earned and legally owed to their workers .12
Interestingly, wage theft by women’s employers was the reason for the establishment of some of the earliest legal aid offices . Professor Felice Batlan has described how the New York Legal Aid Society grew out of the Working Women’s Protective Union, an organization founded in the 1860s and dedicated to providing employment and legal assistance to women . The organization was not operated as a union but instead as a benevolence agency, run by a board of male members of the bench and bar who wanted to help women entering the work world .13 Its work consisted largely of cases against employers who refused to pay working women . The legal aid world has not embraced this history of its initial role: legal aid was the provider of assistance to women when they encountered exploitation moving into an industrializing world controlled by men .
Unfortunately, wage theft is not just a historical problem of the 19th century, but continues today, particularly for immigrant workers . Work to prevent and address it, along with advocacy for increased wages for the lowest paid workers, are part of the current legal aid agenda of particular importance to women .
Legal aid work to provide medical coverage to the poor has particular impact on women, who are more likely to use health care when young for reproductive health and maternity issues, and who are usually the caretakers of sick children and older family members . Similarly, representation and advocacy for legal aid clients facing housing issues has particular importance for women . Low income women are more likely to face the devastating effects of eviction from rental housing than are men . A recent study of 300 renters facing eviction actions found that 79 percent of them were women and 65 percent housed minor children with them .14 Matthew Desmond of the Institute for Research on Poverty writes, “If incarceration has become typical in the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction has become typical in the lives of women from these neighborhoods .”15 Women are at high risk for mortgage foreclosure as well . While women are less likely to own their own homes, single women who did buy homes experienced higher rates of subprime lending than their male peers, and thus were more likely to obtain mortgages that have a high risk of default and foreclosure .16
Recent studies on scarcity and its impact on individuals suggest that the demands of living with poverty reduce cognitive functioning and hurt decision making ability . Economic insecurity
12 At Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, the Employment unit reports that about half the clients who sought assistance with wage theft cases in the past three years were women.
13 Felice J. Batlan, The Birth of Legal Aid: Gender Ideologies, Women, and the Bar in New York City, 1863-1910, 28 law & hisT. reV. 931 (2010).
14 Public JusTice cenTer, JusTice diVerTed: how renTers are Processed in The balTimore ciTy renT courT 12 (2015), available at http://www.publicjustice.org/uploads/file/pdf/JuSTICE_DIVERTED_PJC_DEC15.pdf. Most respondents were Black women; 94 percent of the respondents identified as “African American/Black.” Id. at 12-13.
15 Matthew Desmond, Unaffordable America: Poverty, Housing, and Eviction, fasT focus No.22-2015 (Institute for Research on Poverty March 2015). See also Matthew Desmond, Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty, am. J. sociology Vol. 118 No. 1, 88–133 (July 2012).
16 See Amy Castro Baker, Eroding the Wealth of Women: Gender and the Subprime Foreclosure Crisis, social serV. reV., Vol. 88, No. 1, 59-51 (March 2014).
Specific Areas for Reform: Women’s Rights
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