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New York correctional officers and sergeants continue their strike for a second week outside of the Coxsackie Correctional Facility as mediation continued for a fifth day Friday, Feb. 27, 2025, in Coxsackie, Greene, New York. The prison workers say they want to roll back the 2022 HALT Act, which has reduced solitary confinement because it caused assaults on them to rise. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images/TNS)
A group of striking corrections officers from both Greene and Coxsackie Correctional Facility on the picket line on Route 9W on Friday. The crowd was smaller after the workers' union and the state reached an agreement.
State prison officers at Coxsackie and Greene Correctional facilities continued to strike Monday after a deal was reached between the union and the state Thursday. The striking employees risk losing their jobs and their health insurance coverage.
State prison officers at Coxsackie and Greene Correctional facilities continued to strike Monday after a deal was reached between the union and the state Thursday. The striking employees risk losing their jobs and their health insurance coverage.
State prison officers at Coxsackie and Greene Correctional facilities continued to strike Monday after a deal was reached between the union and the state Thursday. The striking employees risk losing their jobs and their health insurance coverage.
New York correctional officers and sergeants continue their strike for a second week outside of the Coxsackie Correctional Facility as mediation continued for a fifth day Friday, Feb. 27, 2025, in Coxsackie, Greene, New York. The prison workers say they want to roll back the 2022 HALT Act, which has reduced solitary confinement because it caused assaults on them to rise. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images/TNS)
Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America/TNS
A group of striking corrections officers from both Greene and Coxsackie Correctional Facility on the picket line on Route 9W on Friday. The crowd was smaller after the workers' union and the state reached an agreement.
Shawn Ness
State prison officers at Coxsackie and Greene Correctional facilities continued to strike Monday after a deal was reached between the union and the state Thursday. The striking employees risk losing their jobs and their health insurance coverage.
Shawn Ness
State prison officers at Coxsackie and Greene Correctional facilities continued to strike Monday after a deal was reached between the union and the state Thursday. The striking employees risk losing their jobs and their health insurance coverage.
Shawn Ness
State prison officers at Coxsackie and Greene Correctional facilities continued to strike Monday after a deal was reached between the union and the state Thursday. The striking employees risk losing their jobs and their health insurance coverage.
COXSACKIE — A wildcat strike by New York state prison guards stretched into a third week Monday, prompting officials to start firing workers for failing to abide by a deal to end the illegal labor action.
The state's homeland security commissioner, Jackie Bray, said terminations began Sunday and that on Monday the state would begin canceling health insurance for correctional officers who have remained on strike. Their dependents will also lose coverage.
Fewer than 10 officers have been fired as of Monday afternoon, Bray said, while thousands are in line to lose their health insurance benefits.
“None of these actions we take lightly,” Bray said. “We have tried at every turn to get people back to work without taking these actions.”
A message seeking comment was left with the officers’ union, the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association did not immediately respond for comment on the striking officers.
“My message to you is this is the final push,” Daniel Martuscello, commissioner of the Department of Corrections and Community Supervisions, said in a statement Sunday. “Tomorrow, Monday, March 3, anyone who remains on strike will have their’s and their dependent’s health care removed retroactive to the first day they were AWOL, and you will be not be eligible for COBRA [Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act].”
According to a March 2 memo from DOCCS, any employee that was not back at work Sunday will be considered a resignation and adds employees must return all of their DOCCS-issued equipment.
The federal COBRA law gives employees who lose health care coverage the option to continue group health care benefits from their health plans for limited time when faced with job loss, according to the federal Department of Labor’s website.
Despite the threats of losing their jobs and health care coverage, Coxsackie and Greene Correctional employees continued to walk the picket line Monday.
“All I know is this, you cannot ask people to work seven days a week, 17 hours a day,” Sean Ellis, a retired Coxsackie Correctional Facility prison officer, said from the picket line Monday. “And the reason people still are out here is because nothing's changed in there. And if you ask anybody, ‘what is the biggest issue in there,’ it's all pretty much the same: It's not safe.”
The wildcat strike began Feb. 17 and had roughly 150 people on the Coxsackie and Greene Correctional facilities’ picket lines through Feb. 27, when DOCCS reached an agreement with the striking employees’ union, New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, Inc. [NYSCOBA], the union that represents the striking employees. Independent mediator Martin Scheinman negotiated the pact with the two sides over a four-day period culminating in last week’s agreement.
In Scheinman’s Feb. 27 memo outlining the agreement, all striking staff were required to return to work by Saturday to avoid discipline.
There number of striking employees has decreased each day, and by Monday, roughly 30 people were on the picket line outside the state prisons on Route 9W in Coxsackie.
Corrections Commissioner Daniel Martuscello said Monday the number of facilities with striking workers had dropped from 38 to 32.
The deal reached by the two sides includes changes to address staffing shortages and provisions to eliminate mandatory 24-hour overtime shifts.
The deal included ways to address staffing shortages and minimize mandatory 24-hour overtime shifts. It also offers a temporary bump in overtime pay, a potential change in pay scale and the suspension of a prison reform law that strikers blamed for making prisons less safe.
The strike violated a state law barring walkouts by most public employees. Hochul deployed the National Guard to some prisons to take the place of striking workers.
Visiting is still suspended at all state prisons, Martuscello said.
The deal to end the strike included the 90-day suspension of a law limiting the use of solitary confinement. During the pause, the state was to evaluate if reinstating the law would “create an unreasonable risk” to staff and inmate safety.
The state also agreed to pay overtime for the next month at a rate of 2½ times regular pay instead of the usual 1½ times and, within four months, to finish analyzing a union request to raise the salary grade for officers and sergeants.
The state and union agreed to staffing and operational inefficiencies at each facility in an effort to relieve strain on existing staff.
"No matter when this ends or how this ends, our long term plan must be and is to recruit more corrections officers because our facilities run safer when we’re fully staffed," Bray said, noting incentives that would include a $3,000 referral bonus for existing employees. “That work can’t really begin in earnest until folks return to work and we end the strike.”
The striking employees have been asking for additional safety protections and for provisions to help hire and retain staff. A sign outside the prisons on Route 9W in Coxsackie on Monday said the negotiated deal did not address those concerns.
“There's nobody like us [prison officers] sitting at the table,” Ellis said. “These guys are out here by themselves. Now, my father went through a big strike in 1979, and the union was right with them at the table, talking about their concerns, talking about what they wanted.”
He added this time around, the strikers feel they do not have a seat at the table.
Ellis said many of the striking prison officers are willing to lose their jobs.
“I think they're prepared to lose their jobs if it means they are going to lose their sanity and their humanity and everything else by going in there,” Ellis said as he pointed to the prisons’ walls behind him.
The wildcat strike is not sanctioned by the workers’ union, NYSCOBA, and has been called illegal by DOCCS and Gov. Kathy Hochul. Prison officers who continue to strike will face punishment, NYSCOBPA said in a statement.
“The decisions to return to work is not a collective vote by members of NYSCOPBA,” union spokesperson James Millers said in a statement Friday. “It will be up to each individual who currently is refusing to work to decide whether to return to work or risk termination, potential fines and possible arrest for violating the court order.”
The union encouraged all striking employees to return to work.
Prison officers at Hudson Correctional Facility stopped striking Feb. 26.
