I have BIG news: this afternoon, the New York State Assembly voted by a count of 93 to 19 to pass the NY Call Center Jobs Act! Since the bill already passed in the State Senate back in March by a vote of 58-3, this means that it just needs to go to Governor Cuomo to be signed into law.

This is a historic day for us, and one that’s been a long time coming. Since 2006, 40,000 call center jobs have disappeared from New York State thanks to greedy companies sending jobs to lower wage locations overseas and in other parts of the U.S. It’s long past time we stopped rewarding these companies. The 2017 Trump tax plan incentivized sending good jobs overseas, so this legislation is more critical than ever.

We’ve been fighting for years for legislation that would protect these workers and penalize companies that ship jobs out of New York, but we’ve been stopped again and again by anti-worker legislators who put corporations like Verizon and AT&T above their communities. Until now. In the 2018 Midterm Elections this past November, CWA members up and down the state came out in force to help elect a new pro-worker majority in the NYS Senate for the first time in decades, and now we’re reaping the benefits.

One of my biggest takeaways from seeing the NY Call Center Jobs Act finally pass today: elections have consequences, and our political action work is vitally important to keeping New York union strong.

I want to give special mention to our elected leaders who fought for this bill, Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, and Senator Tim Kennedy; our community and labor partners who stood with us, including SEIU32BJ, the New York State Nurses Association, the Working Families Party, and others; and to Bob Master, Hae-Lin Choi, and our CWA District 1 team, especially to each and every one of our members who called legislators, traveled again and again to Albany to speak with legislators in person, wrote letters and postcards, and fought tooth and nail for years to make this bill a reality for New York’s call center workers. I couldn’t be more proud to be a CWA member today.