CWA Local 1180 had its origins in the Municipal Management Society (MMS), a group founded in 1954 to represent Grade 5 Clerks in the New York City civil service who were considered to have managerial responsibilities. The new organization soon had about 120 members, drawn from nearly every agency in city government.

In 1960 New York City agreed to collective bargaining with unions representing specific classes of workers employed in more than one department, and this ushered in a decade of rapid organization of municipal employees by several unions. The MMS, under president James Gaffney, launched a campaign to become the bargaining unit for administrative employees; this required affiliation with an AFL-CIO international union. After discussions with several unions, the MMS membership voted to join the Communications Workers of America, and in May 1965 the MMS was chartered as CWA Local 1180, the first public employees' local in the CWA. The new local proceeded to bargaining on behalf of approximately 2,000 members. After many grueling months of negotiations, its first contract was approved in April 1967.

The following decades saw the rapid growth of public-sector membership in CWA. The city's severe fiscal crisis of the 1970s resulted in some concessions affecting newer members, but Local President Leonard Katz and CWA District 1 Director Morton Bahr managed to protect the membership from massive layoffs. Expansion of the Department of Social Services created new administrative titles, many of them held by women and minorities. A state take-over of the court system in 1977 gave the Local its first experience with bargaining for state workers. The Local's staff grew to include full-time officers, grievance representatives, and managers of the Security Benefits Fund.

After a hard-fought election in 1979, Arthur Cheliotes took over as local president, pledging his opposition to the city's massive program of consolidation of administrative titles (known as "broadbanding") and promising to defend the principle of promotion by competitive exam. Cheliotes, representing a younger generation of leaders within the Local, involved the membership in a wide range of social and legislative issues, including workplace health and safety, participation in electoral campaigns, affordable housing, opposition to Apartheid, and support for labor rights at the national level. The local has an active education program through the Center for Worker Education at City College and the LEAP Program at Queens College. In March 1986 the local initiated a radio program dealing with issues of concern to public employees and other trade unionists. By 1988 the local represented 9,000 members in high-level supervisory titles, including administrator, principal administrative assistant, and computer associate; two thousand members were supervisors in welfare centers. From its beginnings as an association dominated by white males, the local has evolved into a union in which seventy per cent of the members are women, many of them African-American, Asian-American or Latino.

Sources:

Augsberger, Deborah. Twenty-five Years: Working for a Better New York, Local 1180, Communications Workers of America. New York: CWA Local 1180, 1991.