Our History

Washingtonians depend on qualified public workers to keep their communities running. But before our union won Civil Service Reform in 1960, state jobs were won based on who you knew rather than what you know.  

Every new governor would fire most of the state employees from the previous administration and replace them with political supporters, friends and family members. Who was hired, fired or promoted depended on political loyalty rather than merit.  

It was called the “spoils system” because to the victor of the governor’s race went the spoils, including thousands of state jobs.  

This system was bad for state employees, who were vulnerable to autocratic and abusive treatment, but it was also bad for Washingtonians who couldn’t depend on qualified or experienced public servants.  

The spoils system was also bad for trying to organize a union and improve working conditions. With no official protections, being seen as sympathetic to the union was enough to get you dismissed. Esther Stohl, secretary to Norm Schut from 1954 to 1974, recalled workers “sneaking into somebody's house to have a meeting one by one instead of it being like they were holding a meeting.” 

Many state employees went years without taking a vacation for fear somebody else would be occupying their desk when they came back to work. 

After trying and failing to put an end to the spoils system through multiple legislative sessions and governors, our union decided to bring the issue directly to the people via an initiative. This was no small task as we needed 90,319 signatures to make the ballot.  

WFSE kicked off its campaign for a civil service initiative in January 1960. Having established a reputation for ourselves with our 40-hour workweek win, organized labor and the League of Women Voters were behind our effort. So were young folks interested in politics. Seattle University students collected signatures on ferries crisscrossing Puget Sound and outside the major retail stores in downtown Seattle. 

But it was an uphill fight. Neither party, Democrats or Republicans, would get behind Initiative 207. 

"I never had so many doors slammed in my face in my life," said Wanda Riley, a WFSE Local 443 member working for the Department of Labor and Industries. WFSE members reported wearing out multiple pairs of shoes pounding the sidewalks to get signatures.  

"Frankly, there were many times I didn't think we would get enough signatures," said George Masten, a WFSE member at Labor and Industries who had joined the union as staff the year earlier and would go on to become our union's Executive Director in 1974. "There were times when I went to local union meetings and frankly when they would ask me how it was doing and I would tell them, 'Great, it just needed a few more'... and the truth was we weren't even close." 

The signature drive came down to the wire. On the deadline day to submit enough valid signatures, our union chartered a helicopter to fly the final civil service initiative petitions from Seattle. Local 443 member and state capitol gardener Joe Lewis arranged for the helicopter to be landed on the capitol lawn. 

After a massive statewide campaign driven by WFSE and supported by organized labor, the civil service initiative passed by a margin of 606,511 to 471,730 on Nov. 8, 1960, the same election night when John F. Kennedy was elected president.  

Civil Service Reform provided a baseline of stability, dignity and respect on the job that our union built from in the coming years. 

Economic justice and social justice are inseparable. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?” Since the beginning, WFSE has fought for the dignity of workers as full people.  

During the Civil Rights Movement, WFSE took a leading role by aggressively organizing across economic, racial and social lines to guarantee that anyone could find fair pay, dignity and respect in the public sector. 

Even before AFSCME established a committee for civil rights at the international level, WFSE had one to fight workplace discrimination in Washington. In 1961, WFSE’s Executive Board created the Civil Rights Committee, which lives on today as the WFSE Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee.  

As the committee’s first chairman, WFSE member Walter Hundley was tasked with “ensuring that state laws prohibiting discrimination in employment and promotion because of race, religion and national origin and/or because of age are fully complied with.” 

Hundley was hired as the first African-American counselor at the Department of Corrections’ Monroe Correctional Complex in the late 1950s, and was elected president of WFSE Local 452 in 1960, likely the first African-American ever to hold such a position in a WFSE local. He would go on to serve as Seattle’s Superintendent of Parks and Recreation and Director of Management and Budget.  

"The union was really ahead of most other institutions at that time," Hundley said. "So I was proud of that. I never recognized I guess that I was leading a vanguard or anything, I was just trying to person-by-person-by-person move 'em ahead. And that's what makes me proud." 

WFSE not only fought discrimination here in Washington, we also helped ensure that AFSCME became a fighting force for civil rights nationwide.  

Several years after being hired as WFSE’s first Executive Director in 1952, Norm Schut joined several other AFSCME activists in founding COUR, the Committee on Union Responsibility. 

COUR was modeled on the pioneers of nonviolent direct action in America’s civil rights struggle, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). COUR’s mission was two-fold. First, it aimed to put more power into the hands of rank-and-file AFSCME members. Its second goal was more complex.  

AFSCME in 1960 could be described as a white-collar dominated, civil-service focused reform organization. COUR aimed to turn AFSCME into a militant, collective-bargaining focused industrial union that would aggressively organize blue-collar workers and lend its muscle to the civil rights movement. COUR’s leader was Jerry Wurf, the radical president of AFSCME’s District Council 37 in New York City, with WFSE’s Norm Schut considered its second most influential figure.  

While COUR began as a vehicle to advocate for these reforms, following the 1960 AFSCME International Convention, it became an opposition group to Arnold Zander, AFSCME’s first international president.  

At AFSCME’s 1962 and 1964 conventions, these two competing visions for AFSCME’s future were clearly laid out for AFSCME members in the elections for International President. After losing a close race in 1962, Jerry Wurf won in 1964.  

Under Wurf, AFSCME surged to the forefront of the labor movement and became organized labor’s most outspoken allies of the Civil Rights Movement.  

Fortune magazine, hardly a friend to organized labor, marveled that AFSCME had “an exuberant atmosphere reminiscent of the C.I.O. organizing drives of the Thirties.” There was, the magazine noted, “an élan to the organization, an air of bustle and excitement, a sense of great plans underfoot, and an evangelical zeal that one rarely encounters these days in the stately mansions of Big Labor.” 

AFSCME’s new platform of lifting up the hardest-worked, least-recognized, workers directly aligned our union with the growing Civil Rights Movement.   

In 1965, a special AFSCME convention rewrote AFSCME’s Constitution and included a Bill of Rights for union members, a first in the American labor movement, which protected members’ rights regardless of their “race, creed, color, national origin, ethnicity, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, immigration status, or political belief.” 

The melding of labor rights and civil rights was most dramatically expressed in fighting for the dignity of Memphis sanitation workers in 1968. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while in Memphis to bolster the striking AFSCME workers. 

By the end of the 1960s, AFSCME had succeeded in interracial organizing where others had failed. A third of AFSCME’s members were African American, dwarfing even the most progressive unions like the United Auto Workers. 

As a member-run organization, this diversity was reflected in our union’s leadership. At the 1972 AFSCME Convention, Norm Schut had the honor of nominating William Lucy to the post of AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer, a position he won, and a post that made him the highest ranking Black official in any major union in the country.  

The sense that WFSE and AFSCME had a higher social purpose than simple material benefits was forged during the civil rights struggle. It set us apart from other unions and positioned us to play a leading role in the burgeoning struggle for women’s equality.  

Our union has fought gender discrimination since its earliest days. In 1957, WFSE defeated a plan to restrict state employment to only one member of a household, a ban that would inevitably have taken jobs away from many working wives. We equalized pension benefits and put an end to the practice of paying women less in retirement benefits because they were expected to live longer than men.  

But by the mid 1970s, state jobs that were predominately held by women were still systematically underpaid.  

The Equal Pay Act, signed into law by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, made it illegal to pay men and women different wages if they were doing the same job. But what if the jobs were different, and the woman’s work is just as valuable as the man’s, but the woman is still paid less? 

Winning this kind of pay equity meant proving that many of the jobs predominately held by women had the same or greater “worth” or value as many jobs that were paid more. It was a high bar, requiring a reexamination of sexist beliefs that are baked into our society.  

Our union had started the ball rolling in this direction with a win for state psychiatric hospital workers in the 1960s. Ward attendants and nurses, primarily women, who had by far the most contact with patients, were paid less than carpenters, painters and truck drivers. Our union made the argument that workers should be paid “on the basis of how important their job was to the mission and the role of that institution.” This line of reasoning resonated and resulted in significant raises for many women.  

WFSE Executive Director Norm Schut sent a letter to Governor Daniel Evans highlighting the fact that discrimination was baked into salaries statewide and asked for a study.  

Evans agreed, moving forward with an evaluation of 121 female-dominated and male-dominated jobs to establish a benchmark. It assigned numerical scores to the key facets of the work WFSE members did for the purposes of comparison. If the metrics showed two jobs – a secretary and a maintenance worker, for example – provided similar value, then they should be paid the same. 

The results were conclusive. Women were paid 20 percent less than men for work of comparable value. In one example, a Clerk Typist and a Warehouse Worker 1 both received scores of 94 based on the four components of the study. But Clerk Typists were paid ten salary ranges below the warehouse workers. For some, the results were a revelation. For many women, they confirmed what had been obvious all along: their contributions were systematically undervalued. 

At this critical juncture, WFSE experienced a major change in leadership. Norm Schut retired in 1974 after over twenty years of service. Taking his place, and taking on the comparable worth fight, was George Masten, a long-time WFSE staffer and former member at the Department of Labor and Industries.  

WFSE’s Executive Board passed a resolution calling on the state to incorporate the findings of the study into their budget, which Evans did in his proposed budget for 1977. 

But then the political tide began to turn. On the national level, anti-worker billionaires began blaming unions for rising unemployment and inflation. Public sector unions were a favorite scapegoat. The big-business-driven backlash against the New Deal and the social safety net it created was wholesale, finding its most dramatic expression in the 1980 presidential election of Ronald Reagan, who famously uttered: "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” and “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” 

Never mind that empowering workers through unions and investing in public services pulled America out of the Great Depression and created the middle class – big business sought to reduce taxes and maximize profits. That put public sector unions like ours in the crosshairs.  

In the midst of this backlash, the state’s first woman governor, Dixy Lee Ray, was elected in 1976 and wiped Evans’ $7 million comparable worth appropriation from her budget. The next governor, John Spellman, refused to resurrect the funds.  

Tired of waiting, in 1981, our union filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) arguing that Washington’s pay disparities violated the Civil Rights Act. But the Reagan-era EEOC did nothing. 

So in July 1982, WFSE filed a discrimination lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Tacoma with eight women plaintiffs. In September 1983, the U.S. District Court ruled that the state was guilty of “direct, overt, institutionalized discrimination” and ordered back pay and raises for 15,000 state workers in female-dominated jobs. The tab was estimated at $840 million. The celebration was short-lived. 

The state appealed to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, where it drew worldwide attention. The case made the front page of the New York Times. Walter Mondale, John Glenn and other Democratic presidential candidates declared their support. Meanwhile, President Reagan called the notion of comparable worth “cockamamie.” Members of congress labeled it “The Sexist Socialism Act” and “Feminist Folly.”  

In September 1985, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the District Court ruling. But WFSE members did not give up. Through letters, phone calls and rallies, we won a key ally, gubernatorial candidate Booth Gardner, who came out as a vocal supporter during an appearance at WFSE’s 1984 convention. 

Because the odds of winning an appeal all the way up to the United States Supreme Court were low, the hope was to negotiate a settlement. Now elected, Governor Gardner agreed to negotiate a settlement with our union in 1985. Our lead negotiator was WFSE Executive Director George Masten. 

11 years following Washington’s historic gender equity study, WFSE and the Gardner administration reached an agreement on Dec. 31, 1985. The settlement brought $482 million and significant pay raises to 35,000 workers whose jobs had been undervalued on the basis of sex. 

Comparable worth faced one last test: getting Legislative approval to fund the settlement. Again, corporations and anti-worker billionaires mobilized to defeat comparable worth, fearing that pay equity for women in the public sector would create pressure for a similar policy in the private sector. The Association of Washington Business, Safeco and Boeing sent teams of lobbyists to prevent funding.  

Two Boeing lobbyists camped out in an office used by the Senate majority leader and succeeded in delaying a Friday vote until the following Monday, giving them more time to massage senators. 

But when the vote was called, the result was decisive, 30—16 in favor of the settlement. 

Raises began showing up in paychecks three months later. A quick glance at how the plaintiffs in the lawsuit benefitted from the decision drove home the significance of the win. Willie Mae Willis, a Food Service Worker II at the University of Washington, Seattle, saw her monthly salary increase from $1,087 to $1,614, a 67% increase in pay.  

To this day, new state employees today continue to benefit from these massive increases to their base pay. 

There is more work to be done. While the gender pay gap nationwide fell by a penny a year in the first eight years after WFSE’s comparable worth win, the pay gap has remained relatively stable over the past 20 years, with women earning on average 82 cents per every dollar earned by men.  

But if WFSE’s comparable worth victory is any guide, there is no problem that cannot be tackled if WFSE members stand together. 

Before 2002, our members didn’t have the legal right to negotiate over wages and benefits. We didn’t have collective bargaining rights. We had collectively begging rights. 

We’d won a baseline of rights on the job with Initiative 207 and civil service reform, and we’d had contracts with some employers that addressed workplace conditions. But any raises we’d won had to come about through requests submitted directly to the Legislature, which could ignore our proposals or make any changes they wanted to.  

Our members knew that for our union to thrive, they needed a direct and final say in the economic conditions they worked under.  

In 1988, fresh off our comparable worth victory, our union decided to press for full-scope collective bargaining in the Legislature. Delegates to the next WFSE convention unanimously voted to set the union in that direction. Every convention thereafter renewed that commitment, but our efforts were frustrated as numerous collective bargaining bills fizzled out in the legislature or met unsympathetic governors.  

The matter came to a head in 2001 when our luck with “collective begging” ran out. Faced with an unacceptable budget proposal from the legislature that included program cuts, unfair pay, and drastic hikes to our healthcare costs, WFSE engaged in its first ever strike. 

In February 2001, WFSE’s Executive Board set a strike vote for April. Rallies were held at the voting sites to generate media attention and educate the public about the most damaging sections of the legislature’s proposed budget. When the results were counted in April 13th, over 80 percent of voters opted to strike.  

With a strike vote in our pocket, we declared a four-day cooling off period to allow legislators to reconsider their pay and benefit offers. When legislators failed to return an improved offer, we moved ahead with strike actions to commence during the final days of the legislative session. 

Now, you may be wondering. Isn’t it illegal for state employees to strike? In Washington state, while we have no established legal right to strike, it’s not illegal by default and there’s no law on the books establishing the penalties for striking. Basically, if the strike threatens public safety, Washinton’s attorney general can declare it illegal and attempt to stop it through an injunction. 

To not endanger the public and reduce the likelihood of an injunction, we opted to engage in a “rolling strike,” hitting specific targets with one-day work stoppages. These actions produced a “fear of the unknown” on the part of the administration. They never knew until the last minute what worksite would be hit next. 

At 24/7 institutions and critical care facilities, skeleton crews remained on the job to provide vital services, like feeding, bathing and clothing. Workers on the picket line outside these institutions carried pagers or walkie talkies so they could be called back inside if an emergency arose.  

The first day of the strike, April 18, started with a bang. Five worksites were shut down, including human services locations and Department of Agriculture grain elevators adjacent to three ports: Vancouver, Kalama and Tacoma. The success of Day 1 was sealed when longshore workers represented by ILWU refused to cross the picket lines at those ports.  

Day 2 focused on state institutions and included 13 work stoppages. Day 3 included 24 actions with a focus on higher education, a general strike at the State Capitol, and a 5-mile march ending on at the Capitol. On day 4, we rallied with union siblings from the wider world of organized labor and AFSCME President McEntee on the Capitol Lawn. Despite a successful first week, the legislature failed to come to an agreement on a final budget at the end of the legislative session on April 22.  

Settling in for a long strike, we began knocking on doors in the districts of key legislators before the Legislature reconvened for a special session in May.  

Despite 28 strike actions over the first two weeks of May and a statewide work stoppage that brought many state agencies to a standstill, the first special session ended without a final budget.  

A second Special Session was called in June, and we shifted our focus to direct pressure on holdout legislators. Thousands of calls were placed to the legislative hotline, and the House finally agreed to the fair pay raise we’d requested, a reduction in healthcare costs, and other improvements. WFSE members packed the galleries during a Senate Vote. The budget passed.  

Not only had we won our economic demands, we’d set a precedent for how our union could strike legally and avoid an unfavorable court ruling that would put our ability to strike in the future in jeopardy. The strike also paved the way for our ultimate goal: full-scope collective bargaining.  

Given WFSE’s ability to plan, execute, and sustain a 10-week strike, the legislature looked at our union’s bill calling for full-scope collective bargaining in a much different light a year later during the 2002 Legislative Session.   

WFSE members had finally won the right to directly negotiate pay, benefits and other economics with the state. In 2004, WFSE members bargained and ratified the first full-scope collective bargaining agreements in our union’s history. Today, thanks to full-scope collective bargaining rights, WFSE members have an active role and a final say in their economic futures.  

Though this major hurdle is now behind us, our union continues to push the envelope and expand bargaining rights to more and more workers.  

In 2010, our union passed a groundbreaking law granting collective bargaining rights to freelance spoken language interpreters. Interpreters United (WFSE) Local 1671 was the first union of its kind in the country. Independent contractors, who don’t enjoy many of the worker protections established by the New Deal and 90 years of ensuing labor law, had the right to collectively bargain for better pay and better working conditions for the first time. 

But trouble was brewing. That same year, in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions with the Citizens United decision, enabling corporations and anti-worker billionaires to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections and buy pro-corporate policies.  

Riding to the governorship of Wisconsin on a wave of corporate money in 2011, Scott Walker cut taxes for businesses and created a budget deficit. To fill the hole, he proposed Act 10, which took direct aim at Wisconsin AFSCME members. It took capped raises and made pensions and healthcare illegal subjects of bargaining for public employees. Organized labor responded on a national scale, but to this day it remains the law of the land in Wisconsin.  

Act 10 was part of a broader national program funded by corporations and anti-worker billionaires through groups like the Heritage Foundation and the “Freedom” Foundation. The next attack was in 2018 with the Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court decision. 

Meant to deal a fatal blow to public sector unions, it established that even when the majority of a public sector workplace votes to form a union, paying dues to contribute to that union’s success is optional. It hasn’t worked out that way. 

In the years since Janus, more and more workers have chosen to empower themselves through a collective bargaining agreement with WFSE: 

• Assistant attorneys general

• Administrative law judges

• Environmental workers at the King and Thurston County Conservation Districts 

• Professional staff at the Office of the Attorney General

• Professional staff at the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorneys Office 

• Advisors at South Puget Sound Community College

• Employees at the Office of Deaf and Hard of Hearing

• Employees at the Department of Financial Institutions

When the wave of union organizing among cultural workers arrived here in Washington in 2022, workers at the Tacoma Art Museum announced their intention to form the first wall-to-wall museum workers union in the state. They chose to undertake this unprecedented work with WFSE.  

Two years after the Janus decision, our union faced another test, this time in the form of a global pandemic.  

COVID-19 arrived in Washington state first, and WFSE members jumped into high gear to assist those facing unsafe working conditions and financial strain.  

We set the standard for what organized labor could accomplish during a pandemic, pushing back on furloughs and cuts, keeping our universities, medical facilities, and communities running, and winning important workplace protections that were then extended to workers across the state.  

By organizing on the ground and winning at the negotiating table, we made sure that our members didn’t have to choose between their safety and providing for their families. When workers on the frontlines didn’t have the personal protective equipment they needed, we organized and got it. In one instance, UW Medicine was slow to install protective glass on patient-facing areas, so our union went to the hardware store and built our own. 

Our members didn’t just fight for public health; they served as a financial lifeline. When Washington was hit with a historic surge in unemployment claims, WFSE members at the Employment Security Department worked the phones 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week to ensure workers got the help they needed.  

With a strong union at their back, Washington’s public workers met the crisis head on, helping  Washington achieve one of the lowest COVID fatality rates in the nation. 

Our members were rightly hailed as heroes. Commercials were made, airtime was bought, and billboards went up thanking our members and other frontline workers for sacrificing their safety for the rest of us.  

Then, suddenly, we found ourselves rowing against the current.  

Washington’s budget projections fell off a cliff. An $8.8 billion budget deficit was predicted. A chorus of voices including the Editorial Board of the Seattle Times and – you guessed it, anti-worker billionaires and their think tanks-- called on the governor to reopen our contracts, cancel previously negotiated raises scheduled for July 2020, and make ‘bold’ cuts to the services we provide. 

After putting our own safety and security on the line and losing some of our co-workers to the pandemic, we found ourselves having to hold the line for our jobs, families and communities. 

It’s true, the signs were dire for the economy. Economists warned that we were facing an economic catastrophe of unprecedented scale, a Great Depression-sized crisis. But beyond the obvious ethical problem with disinvesting in the very people and services that were helping Washington get through the pandemic – it didn’t make economic sense.  

As we learned during the Great Recession, reductions in government spending on wages and services actually hurt the economy. Budget cuts further depress consumer spending and make recessions worse. It was a mistake we could not repeat. 

Our members spoke up, successfully protecting our previously negotiated raises. Then, that Fall, it was time to negotiate our 2021-2023 contracts – not an easy thing to do when the numbers said we should be preparing for 30% workforce reductions. 

So we launched the largest educational campaign in our union’s history, the Put People First campaign. In dozens of virtual workshops held with members from across the state, participants learned how to communicate a vision for adequately funded jobs and a fair revenue system to elected officials and the public. 

Always a priority, the need for a fair tax structure that holds the mega-wealthy accountable became clearer than ever during the pandemic. While state revenue plunged, billionaire profits skyrocketed. And because Washington has the single most unfair tax system of any state in the nation, the majority of those profits would not go toward our jobs, our families, or our communities just when we needed them the most. 

The campaign worked. Against the odds, we managed to negotiate 2021-2023 contracts with no cuts – preserving yearly step increases and maintaining our healthcare costs. Preventing increases to healthcare was truly a historic achievement. In the past, much smaller economic crises had resulted in substantial increases. 

A few months later, when the economy began to recover and the worst-case economic scenario did not come to pass, we launched a campaign to reopen our contracts – not for cuts, but for a raise.  

6,000 WFSE members wrote letters to the Inslee administration calling for an investment in them and their work. We succeeded. The unprecedented mid-contract raise that went into effect in July of 2022 invested most heavily in lower wage earners who were most impacted by the pandemic. It also put us on solid footing to negotiate our next contract. 

Next, we launched our 2023-2025 contract campaign, #StrongWorksitesStrongContracts, to set Washington state on the right footing coming out of the pandemic. We were in the midst of a 20-year staffing crisis that had been worsened by COVID-19. Significant pay disparities and workplace safety issues needed to be addressed. The pandemic had exposed gaping holes in our state’s safety net that needed to be mended with a fair compensation package.  

After months of negotiations, we won. The 2023-2025 compensation package that came about as a result was the largest in our union’s history. When it came time to call for funding for those contracts, new WFSE members got involved to push our contracts through the legislature. 71% of those who lobbied were doing so for the first time.  

We made it through the greatest challenge of our lifetimes and ensured a fair recovery from the pandemic. We did it together.  

In our 80 years of history, our union has overcome every obstacle that has come our way. We’ve faced setbacks, but we have always come back stronger.  

Who decided to create a modern civil service system, one in which workers who serve the public are hired based on their ability, not on their political allegiance? Who pushed for our union to take a leading role in the struggle for civil rights and gender equality? Who led us to undertake our first and only statewide strike, finally opening the door to full-scope collective bargaining rights?  

You did. Members did by exercising their rights, by attending local meetings, by running for elected office, by getting involved. Through our union, each of us holds immense power to shape the future.  

Every major victory in our history has started with small steps. Members are taking them every day. We invite you to take them with us.