Queens Defenders staff unionizes following controversial director’s ouster

Support staffers at the Queens Defenders have begun an effort to unionize, around a month after the organization's longtime, controversial leader was forced out by the group’s board of directors. Photo via ALAA

By Jacob Kaye

Paralegals, legal assistants, program facilitators and other support staffers at Queens Defenders have begun to unionize, an effort that began almost immediately after the organization’s longtime, controversial leader was booted from her post earlier this year.

Support staff at the local public defender group are in the process of joining the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys UAW 2325, which currently represents Queens Defenders’ lawyers and social workers, who themselves went through a bruising – but ultimately successful – unionization effort in 2021.

The support staff’s unionization effort does not appear as though it will be as contentious as the previous one, primarily because the organization’s former executive director and CEO Lori Zeno, who fiercely fought the attorneys’ efforts to unionize, was abruptly forced out by the public defense group’s board of directors in January.

Multiple staffers at Queens Defenders this week told the Eagle that they shied away from unionizing in the past out of fear of reprisal from Zeno, who remains on leave a month after she was barred from entering any property owned by Queens Defenders and from making contact with those employed by the organization. And while it was Zeno’s leadership that discouraged the staffers from unionizing, they said it also was what propelled them toward solidifying workplace protections.

Zeno, who declined to comment for this story, was known to run Queens Defenders based on loyalty, not on merit. She was sued multiple times for wrongfully terminating both lawyers and support staff alike who allegedly refused to fulfill her demands. Zeno was also accused of firing a number of attorneys who led the initial unionization effort at Queens Defenders, an organization that itself was born out of opposition to the unionization of the city’s public defenders.

With Zeno out and an interim executive director and CEO sympathetic to the calls for a unionized workplace leading the indigent defense organization, support staff said they’ve been “presented the perfect opportunity” to organize.

“This was the one and only opportunity that support staff thought that we could unionize,” Marie Roldan, an administrative assistant and homicide paralegal, told the Eagle. “Everybody wants to see a more positive change going forward.”

“We're looking for a brighter future for the support staff,” Roldan added. “It’s about fairness, transparency and equality.”

The staffers have first called on the organization to recognize their union and begin contract negotiations, avoiding a lengthy legal process like the one experienced by Queens Defenders’ attorneys. The Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys has asked that the staffers be brought into Queens Defenders’ current bargaining unit.

Antony Martone, the organization’s former deputy director of trials who was chosen to lead the organization on an interim basis in the wake of Zeno’s ouster, has told the group that he intends to voluntarily recognize the bargaining unit, according to the union.

In a statement, Martone highlighted the effort to reform the workplace culture that had existed under Zeno, who had been in a leadership role at the firm since its founding.

“Always with any staff there is a resistance against filing complaints and that needs to change,” Martone said. “I personally support a union that creates many benefits for their members including, but not limited to, fairness to all members, procedures to ensure all members are heard, and to grieve any wrongdoings without fear of retribution.”

‘Weird standards’ and ‘unpleasantness’

If anyone understands the culture at Queens Defenders under Zeno, it's Roldan, who was one of the group’s first hires in 1996.

“I’ve seen a lot of things go down here that weren't fair to other employees,” Roldan said. “I don't want the next generations coming up behind us to experience a lot of that unnecessary unpleasantness.”

Queens Defenders began when then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani was looking for firms to represent indigent clients as attorneys with the Legal Aid Society, which was contracted with the city to represent low-income New Yorkers, went on strike.

Out of the strike, Queens Law Associates was born.

Originally, Queens Law Associates was a private law firm and employed Zeno, who previously worked at the Legal Aid Society, as one of its deputy directors. In 2009, the group reincorporated as a nonprofit. A little less than a decade later, Zeno was made its executive director.

Zeno’s leadership of the organization has long been characterized as controversial.

With Lori Zeno no longer leading Queens Defenders, support staff at the organization said they now felt safe to unionize. Photo via Queens Defenders/X

Current and former Queens Defenders employees said Zeno had a temper and, according to one lawsuit, fostered an “abusive work environment.”

A 2021 lawsuit brought by a former Queens Defenders employee claimed that the former executive director retaliated against her after she requested workplace accommodations for multiple physical ailments she was suffering from.

Last year, the former executive director was sued by three support staffers who claimed that Zeno “tolerated, permitted, encouraged, and participated in creating a hostile work environment permeated by discrimination and retaliation.”

The staffers alleged that Zeno forced them and others working at the organization's Far Rockaway location, which was primarily staffed by Black employees, to do manual labor at an offsite warehouse in Long Island that was without heat, air conditioning or lights.

The lawsuit claimed that the staffers went unpaid for their work “on many occasions.”

“During multiple conference calls and meetings, [Zeno] belittled, berated and bullied Rockaway attorneys and staff members,” the lawsuit reads. “She often cursed and yelled at staff when they refused to volunteer to take on more unpaid work on top of their already overburdened workloads, and accused them of being undedicated, uncommitted and lazy.”

Zeno, who employed both her son and her daughter when she was leading the organization, has also been accused of offering promotions to those most loyal to her, and firing those who aren’t.

And while staffers are hopeful that the loyalty-based system of management is behind the organization, it’s in part what has inspired the effort to unionize.

“We just want opportunities to be based on merit versus some kind of interpersonal relationship that other people may or may not be aware of,” said Yamilet Castrejon, a legal assistant at Queens Defenders. “Ultimately, the goal is to just eliminate these weird standards that have been implemented over the years.”

Anthony Occhino, a paralegal who was hired at Queens Defenders alongside Castrejon around a year ago, said that Zeno’s management of the organization was particularly harmful given Queens Defenders’ mission – to provide legal and social services to indigent defendants and families in the World’s Borough.

“The idea of loyalty should be to the company and the cause, not to a specific person in charge,” Occhino said. “At the end of the day, nobody works here unless you are fully committed to what we do, and so loyalty should be to our clients and those that we interact with on a day-to day-basis, as opposed to how hard we work for an individual person on the management team, no matter who it is.”