Every year on April 28 – the date when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was formed – the AFL-CIO and affiliated unions such as AFSCME observe Workers Memorial Day to honor workers killed or injured on the job.
Council 4 held its remembrance on April 26, in front of our AFSCME Workers Memorial Monument, which lists Council 4 member who have died on the job.
Michael Fitts of the Connecticut Council on Occupational Safety and Health joined Council 4 Executive Director Jody Barr in a call to protect workers and hold employers accountable.
AFSCME members touch the lives of students in countless ways. They get them to school safely, brighten their classrooms and schools, and even prepare them nourishing meals while away from home. Among the students AFSCME members work with, those with disabilities hold a special place in their hearts.
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.
