New York Legislative Agenda 2024
2024 Legislative Priorities: Our Worker Power Platform
FY2025 BUDGET AGENDA
1. Full Medicaid Funding - FY24 Budget Item
Hospitals desperately need increased funding in order to protect our healthcare workers, keep hospitals open, and ensure the best quality of care for all New Yorkers. We must protect workers and prioritize patient care by improving job conditions for frontline healthcare workers and focusing on worker recruitment and retention. The FY25 budget must include 100% reimbursement for all Medicaid costs.
2. Raise Revenue by Taxing the Wealthy & Making Corporations Pay their Fair Share - FY25 Budget Item
New York State must protect and expand our existing public goods and services by ensuring that the wealthiest New Yorkers and the most profitable corporations in our state pay their fair share. CWA supports a number of proposals to:
- A more progressive personal income tax structure
- An investment income tax
- An increase in the corporate tax rate
- Creating an inheritance tax
- Creating a tax on billionaire wealth
3. CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies - FY25 Budget Item
SLU is specifically dedicated to public service and social justice, providing undergraduate and graduate degree programs that prepare the next generation of labor and community leaders. In order to cover the increase in enrollment, additional funding is needed.
4. Save Local Journalism - FY25 Budget Item
New York can stem the tide of newspaper closures and offer newspapers a bridge to a self-sustaining new business model. Saving newspaper jobs and preserving news coverage of NYS communities is vital to a healthy democracy and local economies. This bill creates a payroll tax credit allowing news organizations to receive a 50% job creation tax credit on the first $50,000 of a local journalist’s salary.
LEGISLATIVE AGENDA 2024
1. Worker Retention in State Contracted Call Centers (S.6328 Ramos/A.8939 Bronson) (Assembly Only - Passed the Senate in 2023)
State and local governments often contract with private sector companies for call center services. But when a contract changes hands, an entire workforce can be laid, despite years of training and expertise. The State should act as an exemplary employer by ensuring the retention of existing workforces in these situations.
- What we’re fighting for: protecting workers for state-contracted call centers from losing their jobs if the contract changes hands.
2. One Week Unemployment Insurance Striking Workers (S.4402 Kennedy/ A.1443 Wallace) (Assembly Only - Passed the Senate in 2023)
In NYS, most workers eligible for unemployment insurance only have to wait one week before being eligible for benefits. Striking workers must wait two weeks. This creates an unfair financial burden on striking workers for exercising their legal rights to organize, bargain collectively, and strike.
- What we’re fighting for: reducing the waiting period for striking workers to receive unemployment to one week.
TO BE FILED: Protecting All Healthcare Workers from Mandatory Overtime
Frontline healthcare workers like nursing assistants, patient care technicians, respiratory therapists and MRI technicians are critical to patient care. Yet, unlike RNs, these workers do not have any protections against mandatory overtime. Too many workers are forced to work beyond scheduled hours, leading to fatigue and burnout—and increasing the likelihood of medical errors.
- What we’re fighting for: preventing healthcare employers from mandating that direct patient care workers work beyond their regularly scheduled hours.