Legislation

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The Legisletter is published on an as-needed basis and will be active during the Washington State legislative session, general elections, and potentially primary elections and other times of year. 

The 2024 Legislative Session has ended, and we have progress to celebrate and policies to resurrect in a future session. This session, a non-budget short session, saw a lot of progressive policies brought to the legislature, and saw challenges to those policies as well. Some of the sweeping investments we and partner organiza­tions called for failed simply on the basis that the budget being debated wasn’t large enough for ambitious goals, but every session lays the groundwork for the next, and we did a lot of building in this one.

Our legislative agenda as of the start of the session is here

AFT Washington is a state federation of 40 locals representing thousands of education workers, including Head Start educators, preK-12 classified workers in roles including bus drivers, nutrition workers, paraeducators, and more, K-12 teachers, and staff at 26 community and technical colleges, and faculty at five four-year colleges and universities.

The 2024 session is a non-budget session, so our priorities for this session are largely policy oriented, as well as laying the groundwork and building momentum for the 2025 budget year.

PreK-12

• School Related Personnel wage increase campaign: S

AFT Washington has a robust program to engage in political and legislative advocacy to advance policy, legislation, funding and electoral candidates supportive of our members, public education, workers in general, and thriving communities across Washington State. Our advocacy work is driven by our members through committees and councils of elected leaders and we believe that working in coalition with organizations and allies is essential to improving the lives of all. Partners with whom we have worked closely in recent years include Communities For Our Colleges, the Washington State Labor Council, Balance Our Tax Code, Puget Sound Advocates For Retirement Action, Health Care Is A Human Right, Economic Opportunity Institute, and many more.

There are a number of very useful links within the Washington State Legislature website. Here are the most commonly-used ones we get asked about.

Find My Legislator: This page uses your address to identify your three state elected officials. Due to the districting map, you must provide your full address, but the site does not retain that information.

Contact My Legislator: All legislators and a form to contact them.

Sign Up For Legislative Updates: Provided by the Legislature, this is a great way to be notified of hearings, floor activities, and more. 

Bill information: You will need the bill number. Please note that bill numbers are reused! Make sure that the year selected is correct. The system defaults to the current session. If you are unsure of a bill number and go through Google, it will almost always pull up a past year's bill with the same number.