Mario Cilento
As a member of the Newspaper Guild-CWA since 1990, Mario Cilento has a long history of fighting for working men and women. His work at the New York State AFL-CIO began in 1992; he was elected president in 2011.
Throughout his time in office, President Cilento has concentrated on harnessing the collective power of the State AFL‐CIO’s 2.5 million members by transforming the existing political campaign framework into a proactive year‐round legislative action network.
Cilento’s renewed focus on membership engagement combined with new communication strategies helped lead to the resounding and historic defeat of the 2017 constitutional convention ballot proposal despite early polls showing close to 70 percent support. The measure was eventually defeated by 83 percent to 17 percent.
Cilento’s new approach to grassroots campaigns has resulted in the enactment of legislation that has made a real impact on the lives of working families.
Under his leadership, the New York State AFL-CIO working with its affiliated unions has secured several protections for workers across New York State in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Janus v AFSCME, preserving a public employee’s right to join a union and protecting their rights after they have joined.
To assist workers and their families through the COVID-19 pandemic, the Union Movement secured several emergency protections.
Additional legislative victories include the historic Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act giving farmworkers labor rights including the right to organize, a mandatory day of rest, and the right to overtime pay.
Other victories include laws protecting workers from retaliation for refusing captive audience meetings, where employers communicate negative views on the decision to join or support a union. Another achievement secured historic labor standards on renewable energy projects. Those protections include prevailing rate, project labor agreements, Buy American, labor peace agreements, protections for public sector workers, and training for employment in the renewable energy sector.
The federation and its affiliates won Labor Peace Agreements as an ongoing condition of licensure for adult-use cannabis, additional funding for the Child Care Facilitated Enrollment program, ground-breaking Paid Family Leave legislation, raising and indexing the minimum wage, the permanent reauthorizations of the World Trade Center Health Program and the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund to aid the thousands of brave men and women who risked their own lives to help in the rescue and recovery after 9/11, the first increase in unemployment benefits in 14 years with historic indexation, a 50 percent boost in the minimum workers’ compensation benefit with indexing, and passage of the Safe Patient Handling Act.
President Cilento also launched the Federation’s “Union Strong” branding campaign which promotes the benefits of belonging to a union, amplifies union victories, and demonstrates the strength of what working people can accomplish when we all work together.
President Cilento graduated from Fordham University in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science Degree.