Three agencies continued to misapply the current SEBAC Telework agreement (DOT, DSS, and Office of the Attorney General). Although we had already prevailed in arbitration on the issue of an
The following is adapted from remarks delivered by President Saunders at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor’s Martin Luther King Day Breakfast on January 14, 2023.
Hartford, CT, April 22, 2019 – Members of Local 269 of Council 4 AFSCME who work at the Connecticut Department of Labor are urging Gov. Ned Lamont to reconsider contracting out a proposed paid family and medical leave program to a private company.
To emphasize their point that privatization is not in the public interest, local union leaders today presented the Governor with a petition signed within one day by hundreds of their fellow DOL employees.
Megha Desai is a public defender in Multnomah County, Oregon. In a given week, she might work upwards of 60 hours. Right now, she has about 145 open cases.
“It's like a conveyor belt. Every day you work on your assigned cases, new ones roll in,” said Desai, a member of Local 2805 (Council 75). “There's a joke in the office: If you don't come in on the weekends, you’re screwed for the next week.”
The first weekend of April was an exception: It was her wedding.
Breaking News: On April 21, the unions representing Stop & Shop workers reached a tentative agreement with the company to end an 11-day strike that galvanized the broader labor movement. Click here for the story from AFSCME.
Shawn Dougherty is a correctional substance abuse counselor at the Carl Robinson Correctional Institution in Connecticut. He is also a member of Local 391 of Council 4. On Tuesday, he testified on Capitol Hill about the need for lawmakers to fund the Loan Repayment Program for Substance Abuse Treatment Workers.
Using the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME as a jumping-off point, Council 4’s biennial conference served as a call to action to maintain strength and solidarity in the face of stern challenges ahead.
More than 200 members participated in the conference, which took place April 5-7 in Groton, and embraced the theme of “Our Union, Our Future” as we engaged further in the fight to protect our rights and freedoms.
“The Janus decision was supposed to be our funeral,” Executive Director Jody Barr said during his opening remarks to delegates. “But it wasn’t."
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.
