This question asks whether workers with the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS) — which offers legal representation to criminal defendants who cannot afford a lawyer — should be able to collectively bargain.
What your vote means
If this passes
CPCS employees would have the statutory ability to create a public-sector union and negotiate with the agency over pay, benefits, leave policies, and workplace conditions.
If this fails
It keeps CPCS employees as they are: not among the public employees in Massachusetts allowed to collectively bargain.
The breakdown
Staff attorneys and other workers at Massachusetts’s public defender agency — CPCS — do not have the right to unionize under the state’s public employee collective bargaining law. That stands in contrast to employees at about 180 other state agencies, covering groups like public educators, Department of Transportation workers, and state Lottery employees, who have the right to collectively bargain their employment terms.
The staffing challenges of CPCS employees were thrust onto the public stage in 2025 when the agency scrambled to cover the workload of bar advocates who engaged in a work stoppage to protest their pay rates. CPCS staff does not have the capacity to handle the bulk of indigent defense cases. More than 1,500 criminal charges were dropped during the work stoppage.
The Legislature responded to the bar advocate work stoppage by increasing District Court rates for private lawyers to $75 an hour this spring, which was followed by another bump to $85 in August.
The budget for CPCS as an agency has increased incrementally over the years, until this year when lawmakers appropriated $40 million for CPCS to hire 320 additional public defenders over two years. The fiscal year 2027 budget included a $12 million boost over the previous year’s budget.
But those increases still fall short of the need and do not address work conditions, ballot measure proponents argue. At a special legislative hearing on ballot initiatives in March, they noted that the staff is still overwhelmed by the caseload. During the same hearing, CPCS’s chief counsel said the agency will stay neutral on the question.
Effective date
CPCS employees would become eligible to collectively bargain roughly a month after the election.
What this does NOT change
The bargaining status of the private attorneys known as bar advocates, who handle the bulk of cases in which defendants cannot afford representation and are managed by CPCS, would not change.
How did we get here?
Employees of the public defender organization have tried to unionize on at least three separate occasions since 1979, but in each instance, state labor officials found they did not have collective bargaining rights under state law.
For eight consecutive legislative sessions starting in 2015, bills that would allow CPCS workers to unionize died on Beacon Hill. Several advanced through committees but did not receive a House or Senate vote.
In January 2025, state Sens. Jason Lewis and James Eldridge filed the latest in the series of bills to add CPCS employees to the state’s public-sector collective-bargaining law. It has not received a vote, and the special committee reviewing ballot initiatives recommended taking no action on the unionization ballot measure.
This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
