Miscellaneous

Simple Injustice

By Anne Skove, Esq.

Thanks to Simple Justice for elaborating on our recent post about New York court employees.

Having spent over a decade working with court administrators (as well as judges, none of whom were escorted on the gilded divans of which Simple Justice speaks, at least not to our knowledge), we have to remind ourselves that this is a forgotten demographic.

So we suppose it is not obvious that many state court employees are not unionized. In some places only certain positions (say, security guards or court reporters) are union members. Others may have no unions at all. Right to work!

You'd probably think that in a nice place like Santa Barbara (never been there but we guess it's nice -- it was the location of a glamorous soap opera!) the employees have a union.

Wrong!

They just recently voted to join one. We put our money on a union comeback as court employee benefits wither like daffodils in May.

Don't think the nonprofits that help courts have it any better. In fact, they sometimes have it worse. During the court budget problems of the late 90s, at least one organization felt it could not give its own employees a raise until the courts themselves were up to par. The gilded divans, too, were nixed in favor of used furniture (for some). (So, what's this "private sector" we've heard so much about?)

Not sure about the state of the unions in Maine, but we do know this: the budget woes have state court administrator Ted Glessner calling for automatons to replace the court reporters. See Machines to Replace Maine Court Reporters, Betty Adams, Kennebec Journal (May 9, 2008). Watch this happen around the country as budgets fall like petals in a storm.

We hope the new replacements are able to capture the record of trials like the acquitted activists in Bangor. See Jury Acquits Six in Protest, Judy Harrison, Bangor Daily News (May 1, 2008). It's not every day that war protesters, several of them proceeding pro se, are acquitted by a jury.

Full post as published by court-o-rama.org on May 10, 2008 (boomark / email).