There’s another deal on the table to bring the striking corrections officers at New York prisons back to work — and the union that represents those officers is trying to kill it.

On Thursday, leadership at the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision began discussing a new deal to bring the thousands of striking COs back to work, after more than three weeks of strikes, walkouts and emergency operations at dozens of facilities statewide.

That deal was outlined late Thursday in a press conference headed by DOCCS Commissioner Daniel F. Martuscello III and state Department of Emergency Services and Homeland Security Commissioner Jackie Bray.

Under the terms, if officers returned to work Friday, penalties for the illegal strike will be reversed. Even the few dozen COs who were terminated over the course of this week for missing 11 shifts or more will be allowed to return to work without penalty if they came back Friday. Those who had not missed 11 total shifts but were still on strike started seeing retroactive penalties charging them the full cost of their state-provided health insurance starting Monday. The commissioners said the agreement struck Thursday would allow anyone returning to work to avoid those penalties.

Additionally, DOCCS will call together a committee, which the agreement says would include union leaders, to evaluate safety and the HALT Act, the 2022 legislation that many striking COs have cited as their main gripe.

The agreement includes terms that would include union officials on that committee. It’s unclear how that would work considering the union’s rejection of the agreement.

Martuscello also reiterated his commitment to using his legal authority to pause aspects of the HALT Act related to rehabilitative programming for up to 90 days, stop requiring 24-hour shifts for officers and commit to providing regular days off as often as possible for officers.

Additionally, the civil legal actions being taken against at least 100 striking officers will be dropped if those officers go back to work by 6:45 p.m. Friday.

“We will take the necessary steps for all employees who return to work tomorrow to adjourn Taylor Law contempt proceedings against the individuals that have already been named,” Martuscello said.

He said that other steps to meet CO demands, including body scanners for visitors, secured vendor programs for mail and packages sent to incarcerated people and other security measures, would be pursued as well.

An extended overtime plan is also in place for COs who return to work, and discussions on boosting CO pay will continue as well.

“We have agreed to sign this memorandum of understanding, which we will publish online on our website, reflecting both my signature and the signature of our director of public relations,” Martuscello said.

Absent will be the signature of Chris Summers, the president of the New York State correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, who is supposed to represent the interests of his union membership.

The deal was negotiated on Wednesday night into early Thursday morning, with Martuscello meeting with striking COs and representatives from more than a dozen state prisons via Zoom. Sources with knowledge of this situation said that union leaders including Summers were on that call.

Martuscello said that he had entered into a verbal agreement with Summers earlier Thursday that the union would sign onto this deal. But sources with knowledge of internal negotiations indicate that even though Summers was part of the calls to outline the deal, he decided to back away from it midday Thursday.

A press release issued by the union Thursday, but not shared with all media outlets, alleges that the union was not properly included in the deal reached by DOCCS and the striking officers. The union statement alleges that the agreement may not be considered legally binding because it was reached without the involvement of the state-appointed mediator who negotiated last week’s failed agreement.

“We are actively working to engage DOCCS and New York State in reopening the consent award process with the mediator,” the NYSCOPBA statement reads. “This would ensure that any resulting consent award is legally binding in court.”

Sources with knowledge of the internal discussions told the Watertown Daily Times that the union was actively trying to kill the deal, advising striking COs to reject its terms.

They said the main issues are not the terms of the deal, which take major steps toward meeting the COs’ expressed demands, but that the union was not involved in negotiations directly.

An unsigned memo circulated on NYSCOPBA letterhead Thursday just before 4 p.m. said the union was not properly engaged as this deal came together, and said that it leaves legal gaps that do “not represent the best interests of our membership.”

Striking officers and their families, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, have expressed quiet concerns that the union isn’t trusted by its members anymore, and that officers feel abandoned by their union representatives on issues of safety.

The union has pulled back from engaging with certain media groups, including the Watertown Daily Times and Johnson Newspapers, and did not answer questions when contacted Thursday night.

Martuscello said during the Thursday press conference that it appeared the union was declining to align with the deal reached directly with striking COs.

“The fact that the union will not deliver what the membership, my employees, want, and have now decided out of hand to dismiss this memorandum of understanding … I’ll let you draw your own conclusions,” he said. “I am here to say that I heard my workforce, I want to support them and continue to support them, and continue to work on the safety issues that they’ve raised while out on the line.”

It now falls to the individual COs to choose whether to accept the terms of this new deal or not. Many reached by the Watertown Daily Times on Thursday night said they are willing to return to work under these terms, including some officers who had received termination notices earlier this week.

Those officers, citing internal discussions, said that the union had been fully aware and involved in these negotiations, but backed away after some leadership expressed potential concerns over the union appearing weak and out of control over the final agreement.

“They don’t want to look weak, but they do,” one north country CO said.

Late Thursday, the union issued a statement to its membership attempting to combat the narrative that it has failed its membership.

“You may be hearing right now that NYSCOPBA is ‘failing your’ or ‘turning its back’ on the members,” the letter reads. “This could not be further from the truth, and we must urgently set the record straight as time is of the essence.”

The memo, signed by the “NYSCOPBA Executive Board,” argues that union leaders have been pushing for the concerns of its membership.

“Do not mistake our intentions or motivation, we want to reach an agreement that gets our members back to work as soon as possible, but we cannot allow our desire for a quick result to jeopardize our ability to obtain a fair agreement that adequately protects our members’ health and physical well-being and ensures their ability to reclaim a work-life balance in the immediate future.”

In the memo, the board alleges that they were only informed about the new agreement “mere hours ago,” although multiple sources say that the union president was directly involved in the meetings where the deal was negotiated, and had been given a copy as soon as it was drafted for final approval.

“DOCCS and the Governor’s office tried to bully us into signing this agreement by threatening to pin the agreement’s downfall on the union,” the message reads. “We will not stand for this misinformation.”

The letter states that the NYSCOPBA leaders asked for “reasonable time” to review the deal, but they were not given that time, and “had no choice but to decline to sign the agreement in its current form.”

“We will not be intimidated, we will not back down,” the NYSCOPBA letter says. “Our commitment remains unwavering in delivering safety back to our facilities and bringing quality of life back to our membership.”