More good news this week for NY's workers

This has been a hugely successful week for workers in New York State! After our victory on healthcare center safe staffing legislation on Tuesday, we got more good news late Wednesday evening as Governor Cuomo signed the NY HERO Act into law.

This is a bill that we have been fighting tooth and nail for since last spring. For over a year, we’ve joined other labor and community groups to demand stronger safety standards and protections for workers during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

CWA members spoke out at rallies - both in-person and virtually over Zoom - wrote hundreds of emails to New York legislators, and shared gut-wrenching stories of being an essential worker through the worst of the pandemic surges with lawmakers in order to advocate for stronger protections.

And that work finally paid off this week.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of our members and thousands of other New York workers have risked their lives every day to keep our communities running. We have members in many different types of jobs, from healthcare to telecommunications to city government, who have literally put their lives on the line to help New York get through this crisis, and we’ve lost dozens of our sisters and brothers to the coronavirus in the past year.

“We lost John, an X-ray tech, at this time last year to COVID,” said CWA Local 1168’s Sarah Buckley during a recent press conference following the bill’s passage by the NYS Assembly. “He had a dry sense of humor - always took the stairs, hardly ever took time off and loved to take his grandsons to lacrosse matches. Here in Western New York we are experiencing the worst surge in the state. We need this bill still today.”

There have been no uniform standards for basic worker protections - until now.

The NY HERO Act will strengthen worker protections during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond by:

• Creating new health & safety standards during airborne infectious disease outbreaks

• Giving workers a stronger voice on the job

• Holding employers accountable for dangerous workplacesWe know that workers are best positioned to keep ourselves safe, and this bill creates joint employee-employer worker committees that will give us the voice we need to raise serious health and safety concerns with management. This legislation is a model for other states to follow, and I’m very proud of our members who helped lead the way, successfully advocating for the State to act on the lessons we learned during the pandemic about how to keep people safe on the job.

Congrats to all of us, and thank you to our legislative advocate members who worked hard to make this legislation a reality!

In solidarity,
Dennis G. Trainor
Vice President, CWA District 1