Protecting Our Telecom Work, Strengthening Our Strike and Bargaining Power, Protecting Press Freedom, Ending Grad Worker Fees: Big Wins in the NYS Legislature This Year

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We made some big progress in Albany this year on legislation that will have a huge impact on New York’s working families—and it’s thanks to months of hard work by our Legislative & Political Action Team and hundreds of others who took action!

Protecting our work from anti-union “One Touch Make Ready”: Make-ready pole attachment work is complex, and best done by company employees who’ve been trained to properly do this work. This bill protects our work and our contracts by:

• Requiring other companies to identify their make-ready work and equipment.
• Requiring the Public Service Commission to create a complaint form for violations of the law.
• Creating a penalty structure to hold companies who violate the law accountable and prevent those companies from getting public funding in the future.

Shortening the waiting time for striking workers to collect Unemployment: After successfully shortening the waiting time from seven weeks to two in 2019, we won another reduction to just one week.

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Safety standards and transparency in the Tower Climbing Industry: Requires contracts between tower companies and NYS to include certified safety trainings for tower climbers, and for companies to share details about the contractors and subcontractors employing tower climbers, including any previous labor law violations.

Phase-Out of SUNY Graduate Worker Fees: In 2022, we won a commitment to phase out mandatory fees for SUNY graduate workers (members of CWA Local 1104). This year we won language ensuring that this victory is codified and graduate workers are protected in perpetuity.

Protecting press freedom and emergency services transparency: Members of the news media rely on police radio transmissions to respond quickly to emergencies in order to provide vital information to the public. This bill ensures emergency services organizations and journalists have real-time access to encrypted radio communications—it’s vital in order for our NewsGuild-CWA members to do their jobs.

Our work made the difference on these victories. More than 100 CWA members—from telecom field techs, to nurses, call-center reps, reporters, graduate and county social workers—held over 160 meetings with lawmakers in Albany, while hundreds of other CWAers made phonecalls and sent emails to legislators to advocate for these bills.