Bob Master is the Director of Legislative/Political and Mobilization Activities for District One of the Communications Workers of America, which represents 160,000 workers in New York, New Jersey and New England. He began his career at CWA in 1986, and his responsibilities now include overseeing membership mobilization activities during contract campaigns, as well as all aspects of legislative and political action for the union. This has included major responsibility for CWA’s contract campaigns at Verizon, where the union represents 22,000 workers throughout the northeast, and for CWA’s New Jersey State Worker bargaining unit, covering 40,000 state workers.
As CWA’s Political Director, Bob played a central role in bringing together the coalition of unions, community organizations, and progressive activists that founded the New York State Working Families Party in June, 1998. Bob has served as one of the statewide co chairs of the Party since its founding. In New Jersey, he helped to found the New Jersey Fairness Alliance, a coalition that led the fight for passage of the so-called “millionaires tax” in 2003 and 2004. Since 2005, he has been a leader of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, a coalition of unions and community organizations that organizes in support of progressive electoral candidates and a progressive legislative agenda in the Garden State. Bob also serves as the Vice President of Citizen Action of New York.
Bob began his career in the labor movement as a reporter for the newspaper of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in 1977, and later won the AFL CIO’s Max Steinbock Award for Humanistic Spirit in Journalism for a story about injured workers at J.P. Stevens, a southern textile company that the union was organizing at the time.
Bob is married to Nancy Goldhill, Director of Legal Services of New York’s Staten Island office and they have two children–Ben, aged 22 and Ilana, aged 19—and lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He is an avid baseball fan (Mets) and an increasingly less serious runner, having completed (just barely) three New York City marathons a long time ago.