Like many DCYF workers in Washington, Taylor Andrews-Garcelon loves her clients but has felt her job get more stressful and dangerous in the last few years.
OLYMPIA, Wash. — When this year’s snow storm hit, the Evergreen State College failed to consider the economic impact on its lowest paid employees, denying them suspended operations pay. But 74 members took action, joining together in a group grievance.
“Everyone who was hourly was shocked. It was electric across campus. People were mad,” said Emmie Forman, a program coordinator in the Academic Dean’s Office since 2008.
OLYMPIA, Wash. - Employees at Washington's state-owned psychiatric hospitals say there's an urgent need to boost funding for their facilities, citing growing safety concerns for staff and patients.
All-knowing sources of information. Tour guides to the highways and byways of history. The friendly voice of a morning story time. If that’s all you think of when you think of your library staff, you’d do well to meet some of AFSCME’s library workers, whose reach goes far beyond their libraries’ walls.
Today is National Library Workers Day, when we honor those professionals who keep our libraries running: librarians, technicians and other staff, including custodians, security and maintenance workers.
Fifty-one years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Memphis to help rally the community around 1,300 AFSCME sanitation workers who had gone on strike.
In the 1980s, I was living and going to school in Minnesota when women who worked for state government won a big victory. They got the state to increase the pay of women in “female dominated jobs” by passing a pay equity bill. In other words, they put a dent in the gender pay gap. As a student, I researched and wrote about the process of crafting, passing and implementing that legislation. And I learned something that I have never forgotten: the union made it happen. And not just any union. Our union: AFSCME.
WFSE members from the Washington State Department of Transportation (DOT) held a summit over the weekend to identify workplace issues and strategize on how they can address them as a union.
Members brought up everything from outdated equipment to the need for biohazard training, issues they plan to take to management next Monday.
Joy Draper, a maintenance lead tech from Tacoma, said that taking on issues starts with becoming a union member.
