Law and Disorder Radio, July 11, 2022

Maurice Sugar was a workers’ lawyer and a socialist, one of the founding members of the National Lawyers Guild, the first General Counsel to the United Auto Workers and a staunch defender of working people’s rights. He was also a talented poet and songwriter of political songs and poems. In the 1950’s, during the height of the Cold War, Walter Reuther was elected President of the UAW. His first official action was to fire Sugar. Maurice and his wife Jane Sugar, who was an activist and union organizer of teachers, homesteaded over 100 acres of property in the Black Lake area of Michigan. At their deaths – he in the 1970s and she in the 1980s – a trust was created which formed the financial seed money for the founding of the Maurice and Jane Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice in Detroit, Michigan.

Guest – Executive Director of the Sugar Law Center, John Philo. John has litigated cases in dozens of states representing low-wage workers, communities, and injured persons on matters of employment, constitutional, and tort law. John is also a former president of the Detroit Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and a contributing author to the National Lawyers Guild’s Employee and Union Member Guide to Labor Law and the Institute of Continuing Legal Education’s Torts: Michigan Law and Practice. … see podcast interview at Law and Disorder

Brown, Murray Introduce Legislation to Improve Warn Act by Providing More Notice for Workers, Holding Employers Accountable

 “The WARN Act intends to provide employees and their communities with fair notice of job loss so that they can take steps to avoid the potentially devasting effects of sudden wage loss and economic uncertainty. The Fair Warning Act recognizes that large employers today have thousands of employees working at smaller sites spread across many communities. The Act would close the loopholes that allow companies to avoid providing notice when hundreds or even thousands of persons lose employment and would provide more meaningful accountability to ensure that working people and their communities receive the fair notice that they deserve,” said John Philo, Sugar Law Center for Economic & Social Justice. … see full story at Sen Sherrod Brown’s Newsroom

FEMA flood program could violate civil rights law

The Stafford Act clause also casts a wide net of protection by barring discrimination on the basis of economic status and English proficiency in addition to the protected classes of race, nationality, religion, disability and sex.

“They can’t discriminate against you because you’re poor. That’s unusual in most of the antidiscrimination clauses you see,” said John Philo, executive director of the Sugar Law Center for Economic & Social Justice in Detroit, a nonprofit organization focused on low-income workers. “Usually it’s race, gender, age, military status and other things.”

Congress enacted the nondiscrimination provision in 1970 “to address rampant discrimination in federal, state, and private assistance programs after Hurricane Camille,” Perls wrote in her paper, referring to a devastating Category 5 hurricane in 1969 that made landfall in Mississippi. … see ful story at Politico

A new proposal would offer legal representation for Detroiters facing eviction

Tonya Myers Phillips, project leader for the Detroit Right to Counsel — a group seeking to guarantee legal representation for low-income renters facing eviction — argued Thursday during committee that the ordinance was legally sound.

“We need to bring our residents and our city one step closer to having housing security,” Phillips said.

Last week, Phillips told the Free Press that the ordinance, if passed, would be a “game changer.”

“A right to counsel is, simply put, just the right to have legal representation in a legal proceeding,” Phillips said, using the example of how those accused of a crime are guaranteed a lawyer if they can’t afford one. There isn’t an equivalent on the civil side and that needs to change for those facing eviction in Detroit, she said. … see full story at Bridge Detroit

Detroit City Council approves 'Right to Counsel' for renters facing eviction

The ordinance comes a long way after more than three years of drafting, said Tonya Myers Phillips, project leader for the Detroit Right To Counsel Coalition.

"Today is the day we can start a new chapter in our Detroit history and put forth systemic change to ensure that we are protecting our most vulnerable residents," Myers Phillips said. "This ordinance guarantees tenants the rug won't be pulled out from under them." … see full story at Detroit News

A new Detroit ordinance will pay for lawyers for low-income people facing housing issues in court

In Detroit an individual is 18 times more likely to remain in their home when they have a lawyer to help them during an eviction, says Tonya Myers Phillips, a leader of the Right to Counsel Coalition and one of the attorneys who helped draft the new rule. Myers Phillips says the ordinance is not only expected to keep Detroiters in place — it’s expected to preserve money in the city.

“Detroit receives an estimated $3,751 annually per resident in non-reimbursable federal funding,” says Myers Phillips. “So, when an individual is evicted and moves out of the city of Detroit, which is a trend that we noticed that’s happening as well, that federal funding is lost.” … see full story at WDET NPR

Why Michigan's pandemic unemployment aid problems seem like déjà vu

For unemployment advocates, Mauricio’s story reflects a sense of déjà vu inspired by the most recent round of pandemic-era problems at the Michigan jobless agency — as a wave of new errors and overpayment demands by the state unemployment agency follow the ebbing tide of false fraud cases from 2015.

“That’s what makes me think I’m losing my mind: The exact same thing happened all over again,” said Tony Paris, an unemployment lawyer at Detroit's Sugar Law Center for Social and Economic Justice. “The amount of calls, the desperation, the onslaught, the news coverage — it’s all the same.” … see full story at Detroit News

Attorney: Detroiters facing eviction deserve right to counsel in courtrooms

NOTE: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ted Phillips: What is a right to counsel?

Tonya Myers Phillips: Simply put, it’s the right to have legal representation in a legal proceeding. If you’re charged with a crime in this country and you can’t afford your own attorney, you’re provided with a lawyer — that’s a constitutional right. But unfortunately, we don’t have that equivalent on the civil side of the law. So we’re advocating that individuals in Detroit who are facing eviction be provided with an attorney … see ful story at Outlier Media

House committee hears testimony on unemployment issues on first day back from summer break

Tony Paris is the lead attorney at the Detroit-based Maurice and Jane Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice. The nonprofit law office works with people on unemployment who are experiencing issues with the system.

Paris testified about what he and his clients had experienced as they worked with Michigan's unemployment system, with Paris saying the issues drawing attention now long pre-date COVID-19.

“Of course then when a pandemic happens, you take this broken system and you add an unprecedented amount of filers with an unprecedented amount of folks that were normally not eligible - you heard some of the testimony in there regarding pandemic unemployment for self-employed people - that is unprecedented," said Paris. "So, you have all those folks flooding a broken system. It was a recipe for disaster. And that disaster continues every day.”

Paris claimed the computer system for the Unemployment Insurance Agency filers was programmed to make things more difficult for Michiganders who needed benefits and to make it easier for those who didn't deserve them. Paris said one of the most important changes the UIA could make immediately would be to make its site more easy for filers to understand and navigate. … see full story and CBS News Channel 3

Michigan attorney overwhelmed with calls over unemployment mixups

In 2015, attorney Tony Paris was working 12-hour days attending hearings with his clients who were wrongly accused by Michigan's Unemployment Insurance Agency of getting payments they weren't eligible for.

He had so many clients caught up in the false fraud scandal — that was later attributed to a computer system that operated without human oversight — that he got vocal fold nodules from talking so much, leading to voice loss. Now, about a year and a half into the pandemic, he's getting close to losing his voice again.

That's because, over the last few weeks, Paris has spent every day working with clients both new and old to help them figure out how to "requalify" for jobless benefits after the state's UIA notified nearly 650,000 claimants in late June that some of the questions that qualified them for benefits were not approved by the U.S. Department of Labor. … see full story at Detroit Free Press