Washington State Workers Take the Fight to the Governor

Hundreds of Washington state workers streamed into the capitol building in Olympia on April 9 demanding, “No cuts! No furloughs! Tax, tax the rich!”

Our booming chants echoed through the rotunda, making it difficult for legislators to carry on their work. The governor’s office locked the doors on us, so we staged a sit-in in the hallway and marched throughout the capitol building.

When the doors were finally opened, we crowded inside—but the only sign of Democratic Governor Bob Ferguson was a small photograph on the front counter. His chief of staff informed our union president, Mike Yestramski, that he would let Bob know we had stopped by.

That wasn’t good enough, so we headed over to the governor’s mansion, where we rallied outside, rang the bell, and hollered a few choice words into the megaphone.

After the rally, a few dozen of us walked over to our union hall, WFSE Local 443, to phonebank union members in priority legislative districts.

PUBLIC SERVICES UNDER ATTACK

Washington is facing a multi-billion-dollar budget shortfall. Our state has the nation’s second-most regressive tax code, meaning poorer people pay more of their income than richer people; only Florida is worse. Washington’s distribution is so skewed because the state has no income tax and relies heavily on sales tax.

Rather than fix that by making corporations and billionaires pay their fair share, elected Democrats are unfairly trying to balance the state’s budget on the back of its workforce.

They are proposing furloughs (temporary layoffs) for state workers, one day a month, which amount to a 5 percent cut in pay, as well as cuts at every state agency, cuts to higher education, and closing schools for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities and facilities for incarcerated people transitioning back into the community.

Based on past experience, if these cuts go through, people will die, and countless Washingtonians will lose access to vital public services. We’ll be paying the price for generations if we don’t more evenly spread the responsibility for funding public services now.

BARGAINING RIGHTS TOO

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, state Democrats also introduced legislation to strip away our right to collectively bargain over health care costs.

Attacking public sector collective bargaining is unfortunately all the rage right now. Utah Republicans stripped bargaining rights from state workers in February, and Trump did the same to federal workers in March.

To see those same union-busting tactics employed by Democrats, though—and in Washington, one of the most union-dense states in the country—was truly outrageous. But because of our concerted efforts culminating on April 9, Senate Democrats walked back that proposal.

BAD BOSS, GOOD ORGANIZER

Nothing unites members more than a bad boss trying to take away their wages and benefits. In the months leading up to April, we targeted the governor and legislators with a series of actions that built upon one another.

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We met with legislators on the capitol campus. We called and emailed legislators and the governor. We wrote personal letters, which retired public employees mailed out. We made lots of social media posts.

To extend the struggle beyond our union, we sent delegates to our local labor councils. We joined Transit (ATU) Local 1765 in their contract fight with the Intercity Transit Authority in Olympia. And we rallied with other organizations on the Capitol steps to advocate for fixing our state’s regressive tax code.

Most of this lower-level action is fairly routine for our union during legislative sessions, because every two years the legislature has to fund the labor contracts we negotiate with the state. So we were well-situated to escalate when needed.

MEMBERS CALLED DAY OF ACTION

By mid-March, members in the capitol were agitated enough to begin demanding that our union intensify the fight. We passed a resolution in WFSE Local 443 to organize a day of action in Olympia and called on our statewide union, WFSE (AFSCME Council 28), to partner with us.

We tapped into member-to-member networks to spread the word throughout our local, which has 7,000 members across three dozen state agencies and colleges, and we reached out to leaders in other locals and unions to do the same.

We worked with WFSE’s communications department on emails and online ads; its Olympia field office for union swag and staff for the rally; and its legislative and political action department to facilitate a phonebanking party afterward.

We were “militant, but smart,” as Labor Notes’ Secrets of a Successful Organizer advises. Under the First Amendment, we have the right to peacefully assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances, so we did exactly that. And we followed the rules that capitol campus security gave us during the rally.

Nonetheless, our Local 443 President Ava Clarridge was informed by the capitol campus events office that they never intend to give us an event permit again. That’s not going to stop us, though, from making noise and getting into good trouble again in the future.

WHAT’S NEXT?

By taking action and winning some demands—the legislators backing off our collective bargaining rights—we built confidence and generated support among people who have been reluctant to get involved.

Participation in our local meetings has grown. Members are calling for greater escalation like slow-downs, sick-outs, and a strike. And there has been a marked shift in members’ attitudes about how our union should wield its political endorsement power in the future.

The legislative session is still going, so we don’t know yet what the final budget will look like. But if we are furloughed, we will hound every legislator who voted in favor to also take the 5 percent pay cut themselves.

Chris Vasseur-Landriault is a program specialist at the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions and the organizing chair of WFSE Local 443 in Olympia.