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.
Big decisions about our working conditions and livelihoods were made in Olympia during the 2024 legislative session. Through our union, we had a seat at the table and came away with major improvements for public employees.
In this year’s State of the Union speech, President Joe Biden highlighted his administration’s achievements over the past three years and vowed to continue fighting for working people.
AFSCME applauds his accomplishments and strongly supports the Biden-Harris administration’s vision for the future, which includes defending our nation’s democracy, protecting a woman’s right to choose and making the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes, among other things.
The public sector has finally recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of last year, there were 22,000 more public service jobs in the nation than in February 2020, just before the pandemic started.
This is cause for celebration for everyone in our communities, but especially for workers of color, who have been historically overrepresented in state and local government jobs.
Connecticut Rep. Jahana Hayes recently introduced a resolution calling on Congress to affirm its support for providing living wages, good benefits and fair working conditions to paraeducators, classroom assistants, bus drivers, custodial workers and others who are vital to our public education system.
Despite the growing wave of worker organizing across the country, the union membership rate last year ticked down slightly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported today, underscoring the importance of initiatives like AFSCME’s Staff the Front Lines to fill job vacancies in the public sector.
