Council 4 mourns the loss of Lawrence “Larry” Amendola, former President and founding member of AFSCME Local 3144, New Haven Management and Professional Employees.
Our union is a voice for library professionals. Nationwide, AFSCME represents more than 25,000 library workers at the state and local levels. Council 4 proudly represents more than 500 library professionals in cities and towns across Connecticut.
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."
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.
The way in which a public library benefits its community is always worth celebrating, especially on National Library Workers Day, which falls on April 9, 2019.
In Bethel, the 14 members of Local 1303-481 of Council 4, representing full- and part-time staff at the Bethel Public Library, appreciate the civic importance of their institution.
“We are the central gathering place for our community,” Library Assistant and Union President Linda Kral said.
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.
Our union gained more than 9,000 dues-paying members and nearly 19,000 dues-paying retirees in the last year, suggesting that billionaires and corporations are failing in their effort to “defund and defang” public service unions.
Training union members to be strong advocates for their co-workers and defenders of their contractual rights and freedoms is a critical part of the AFSCME mission.
“Our union is only as strong as our activist core,” said Council 4 Education Coordinator Joe Aresimowicz. “That’s why we’re dedicated to providing training that meets the needs of our union members.”
That’s the message AFSCME-represented court recording monitors are delivering to the public and to lawmakers as they press the fight to stop their employer, the Connecticut Judicial Branch, from outsourcing their transcription work to a private company.
