The Pulse

The end of the school year has arrived ... perhaps more significantly, another COVID-school year! Whatever your summer looks like - working as usual, working part-time, travelling, or enjoying a slower pace of life - I hope that you're able to take some time to rest, reflect and re-energize. As for your AFT Washington team, we'll be here to support our locals and continue moving our state-wide programs.

2024 has started out with a burst of challenges and opportunities. We already knew this would be an enormously significant election year and Tuesday’s Iowa primary outcome reinforces that reality. The ongoing lack of effective functioning of the Republican-led House of Representatives offers a tiresome déjà vu, where passage of the federal budget is held hostage to extreme right-wing efforts to wreck our democracy and ignore the needs of people. Here in Washington, we have a solid state budget and have finally moved out of our first place position as the most regressive tax system in the country to a still embarrassing second-worst place, with wealthy interests doing all they can to push us back to first by fighting the capital gains tax that has raised $900 million for education and early learning. Even though the Supreme Court declined to hear the challenge against the capital gains tax, one of the six “Let’s Go Washington” initiatives repeals the tax, and this tiresome fight is not over.

You may have seen in the news that several Seattle Central College professional-technical programs, aka workforce development programs, were on the chopping block – the administration’s “solution” to their budget woes. It is true that the community and technical colleges are hurting due to a significant decline in enrollment across the system during this pandemic, though that decline is not reflected overall in the programs in question. The need to increase enrollment makes the decision to close programs that bring in enrollment all the more troubling, on top of the impact on the people working in the programs, the resulting lack of access to affordable choices to develop a career, and the disregard for the decades of investment in and storied pasts of the program. Read more about that here.

As 2023 wraps up I’m thinking about our achievements alongside our challenges; we’ve seen significant union organizing followed by big wins across the country and here at home. Last year, we saw a Supreme Court decision take away women’s rights to bodily autonomy and healthcare, and we saw voters in several states push back hard and protect those rights. We saw re-energized UAW workers demand their employers restore concessions made in earlier years and get creative with Stand Up strikes, resulting in winning far more at the table than they otherwise would have. Academics at Temple, Rutgers, University of Chicago and elsewhere have walked out to get what they need; right now, contingent faculty at Columbia College in Chicago are walking the line for the 49^th day, the longest strike of contingent faculty ever! PreK-12 staff and teachers have also stood firm for better wages, smaller class sizes and more support staff. The message of Workers is loud and clear: Enough is Enough! And it’s working.

Does anyone remember what we were focused on in 2018? The first sentence of my June Pulse letter was “Every Monday morning I wake up and think, “oh shoot…did I sleep through the announcement of the Janus decision???” If the Freedom Foundation’s slew of public information requests, our member recommitment campaign, or the looming SCOTUS decision don’t spring immediately to mind, let me refresh your memory. The Janus decision was the decision by SCOTUS to end agency fee, meaning that bargaining unit members could reap the benefits of representation but were not required to contribute fees to the cause. The Freedom Foundation and other funders of the lawsuit hoped that the labor movement would die off when starved of members and revenue, leaving workers at the mercy of employers, with no voice or power in their jobs.

No letter from Karen this month – we’re hard at work on prepping for the legislative session, getting our resolution work well underway, and digging into our coalition work! Look for a new letter next month.

As is always the case, there is a lot going on. I’m happy to report that our two bills, ESSB 5847 (Public Service Loan Forgiveness) and SB 5539 (healthcare funding for Head Start members) are headed to the Governor’s desk and we have every reason to trust that they’ll be signed. These bills represent significant gains for our members; our Advocacy Team worked smart and hard to get them passed. I especially want to mention HyeEun Park and Anna-Marie Magdalena, brand new members of the team, who were unrelenting in our push for the win. The strength of our relationships is core to a successful legislative session, and this year we made the most of those relationships. We tapped into our labor siblings, partnered with the employer of our Head Start members, co-conspired with the Student Borrower Protection Center and AFT staff, and engaged our membership to speak to legislators and in hearings. We turned over every stone we could find to win in Olympia.

Fall has clearly arrived, and our union has reached the “school-year pace” at the local, state, and national levels. Many of you are in bargaining or preparing to go to the table, new local leaders are in the process of acclimating to new responsibilities and demands, our Advocacy Team and Leg Affairs Committee are working together to finalize our agenda for the 2024 session, and AFT is out front on strengthening the working conditions that allow us to thrive. Most recently you may have seen President Weingarten’s New York Times opinion piece regarding AI, which sheds light on the multi-pronged challenges and opportunities AI offers. The presence of AI has escalated rapidly in the last year, and it is essential that the voices of educators and union leaders – that is, you – are prominent as we navigate this terrain.

In July of 2020, our executive board passed resolution 2020-04, Becoming an Anti-racist, Unified and Inclusive Union. Leading up to and since then we have initiated new programs and implemented several strategies. In the midst of the divisive political and cultural climate and aggressive efforts to reinforce racist and sexist institutions throughout our sociiety, I’d like to provide a snapshot of the work we’re doing and ways we’re looking at continuing to advance our racial equity goals.

We’ve had an eventful first six months of 2023, kicking the year off with Lobby Day in February, ClassCon (our classified workers annual conference) in March, a Day of Action in April and Convention in May. All but ClassCon involved in-person activities and the consensus is that it feels really good to talk face to face to get re-acquainted or to meet for the first time IRL! We look forward to continuing our work in ways that take advantage of tech tools while maximizing the opportunities to build relationships through human contact. As I said in my remarks at our Friday evening convention celebration, I want to have those conversations on the way to the bathroom or making our way through the buffet line that may seem minor, but which open up possibilities.