Frank Dolce Honored With Leadership Award
The Dolce Panepinto family is proud to announce that Partner Frank Dolce has received the Leadership Award from the Western New York Council on Occupation Safety and Health (WNYCOSH).
“I’ve known Frank for 20 years, and the thing that he is most proud of, aside from his wife and children, is being a founding board member of WNYCOSH,” explained Senator Marc Panepinto while introducing Dolce to the crowd at WNYCOSH’s 6th Annual Oktoberfest, where the award was given. “He holds this organization near and dear to his heart.”
Frank Dolce has spent his life advocating for the rights of workers because it is something that he truly believes in; something he was clear about during his acceptance speech.
“Our legal system is built on the concept of the master/servant relationship. The balance of power is skewed toward the masters and it is inherently unjust,” said Dolce. “I learned as a young attorney that you can use the law to promote and support a progressive agenda and I am proud to say that’s what we do as a law firm and that’s what WNYCOSH does.”
Dolce helped to create WNYCOSH as a founding board member in 1979 and has remained active in the group throughout its entire 36 year history. WNYCOSH began by leading a coalition of area labor unions and community groups that worked to ensure the passage of New York State’s Right to Know Law in 1980 which afforded workers the right to request information from their employers about hazards and health effects of workplace chemicals. This bill became a model bill for other states and eventually for the federal government’s Hazard Communication Standard.
Since that time, WNYCOSH has been instrumental in fighting for worker safety and rights at both the local and state level. They have operated an occupational and environmental safety and health training center since 1980 and recently helped to establish the Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine (COEM) of Western New York, where Dolce is also a member of the center’s Advisory Board. The COEM, home to a full-time Occupational Medicine Doctor, is devoted to the prevention and management of occupational and environmental injury, illness, and disability and is designed to assist workers who have been injured on the job or who are suffering from an occupation related illness.
Frank Dolce’s longstanding advocacy of workers safety and health rights has benefitted not only WNYCOSH but the law form of Dolce Panepinto as well.
When informed about the award, Partner Sean Cooney said, “Frank is always talking to me about how to make the workers’ center better, how to make the COEM better, he is thinking about these things all of the time. Every day that he comes to work and fights on behalf of injured workers as a lawyer he applies things that he learned at WNYCOSH. There couldn’t be a more fitting recipient of the Leadership Award.”