Oct 2025 Spotlight: Page 7

By AFT Washington Staff

These are the 2025 general election endorsements of AFT Washington, as approved by the AFT Washington Committee on Political Education (COPE) and the Executive Board. If you aren't sure of your legislative district, you can find it at the Washington State Legislature District Finder. Many of the endorsements we made are familiar faces that members know and have spoken with before. We believe all of these candidates have strong, clear visions in line with our values, and would serve well in their districts.

We have endorsed candidates for the State Legislature, King County Council, Lacey City Council, Olympia City Council, City of Seattle, City of Tacoma, and Tumwater City Council. You can read more detailed endorsements of all candidates here.

If you’re interested in getting involved with COPE, contact us at rburton@aftwa.org.

Become A COPE Contributor!

By AFT Washington Staff

Our COPE contributors play an important role in our efforts to elect education and labor-friendly candidates! COPE stands for Committee on Political Education, and is our political arm. It is chaired by Vice President for COPE Mark Gorecki and made up of AFT Washington members.

This committee works diligently every election cycle to...

• draft candidate questionnaires for each of the respective offices to ensure the questions being posed are relevant to changing conditions and represent our members’ interests and our union’s values;
• review completed questionnaires to assess candidates’ answers;
• conduct follow-up candidate interviews;
• discuss the various legislative and statewide electoral races, and decide on which, if any, of the respective candidates to endorse;
• recommend these endorsement decisions to our AFT Washington executive board for their approval.

In addition to vetting candidates and making endorsements accordingly, COPE also donates to our endorsed candidates. That money does not come from member dues. AFT Washington is firmly committed to never use dues money for political donations; instead, the money comes from our donation-funded COPE account. We have over 250 regular donors, and our typical donations are not very large – usually between $1 and $10 a paycheck. That adds up, and helps us advance the campaigns of candidates who we feel will best represent members’ interests and needs in Olympia.

Last year, all four of our endorsed candidates for statewide positions won their elections, and two of our endorsed legislative candidates flipped their seats, along with many more who won their races. It is because of electoral results like this that we can build on key legislation and important budget priorities in the coming session.

In 2025, bills our endorsed candidates supported that got passed included:

• The 2025 state budget, which established record-setting dollars in progressive revenue, keeping cuts to state services much milder than the worst-case scenario.  While we didn’t get as much as we needed through new tax laws, nevertheless historically significant strides were made for progressive revenue; legislators we elected fought hard to make the wealthy pay their share, and they are prepared to take moneyed interests on again in future sessions.
• Lifting the cap on PreK-12 special education funding, and allocating over $300 million more per biennium for special needs students.
• More funds going to school meals to cover a potential shortfall if the USDA stopped reimbursing districts for nutrition expenses; as well, any leftover funds can be put to summer meal programs.
• Improvements to Washington’s gun safety laws, including requiring purchasers to complete a safety training course and obtain a permit to purchase a gun.
• Unemployment for striking workers passed this session, giving striking workers six weeks of unemployment benefits and making strikes – one of our most powerful labor movement tools – possible for many workers.
• A cap on yearly rent increases at 7% plus inflation or 10%, whichever is less, which helps Washington renters, 40% of the state’s residents, to gain predictability and control over their living expenses.

These bills make a real difference for our members and our students and their families.

To keep building on the investment we as education workers need, making our collective voice heard in the political realm is imperative. If you would like to become a COPE contributor, or get involved with the committee, please contact Richard Burton at rburton@aftwa.org to learn more! Your participation makes that possible. 

Our 2026 Legislative Agenda

By AFT Washington Staff

This week, the AFT Washington Executive Board voted to approve the Legislative Agenda put together by our Legislative Affairs Committee. While parts of the agenda are not fully finalized, the session is coming up very quickly, and we are already talking to legislators! If you want to get involved, please contact Richard Burton at rburton@aftwa.org.

And don’t forget – we will be in Olympia on Monday, February 16th, to talk to legislators at our primary Lobby Day. More information to come!

PreK-12

• School-Related Personnel Salary Disaggregation: In state documentation, wages for school-related personnel are shown with administrative salaries, which skew the data and create a false sense that SRP members earn better wages than we know they do. Disaggregating the data allows unions and the state to have a clearer picture of real wages for both SRPs and administrations. We anticipate using this accurate data for a wage campaign in the next budget years.
• Committee Study Session on SRP Work: In the last several electoral cycles, many long-time legislators have retired or left office. The coalition of unions seeking improvement in SRP wages, which includes WEA, SEIU 925, PSE, and Teamsters, seeks to hold a study session with the House Education Committee and the Senate Early Learning & K-12 Education Committee to ensure that legislators are familiar with the scope of SRP members’ work and the importance of their jobs in our preK-12 education system.

Higher Education

• Committee Study Session on Professional Exempt Staff Work: Professional exempt staff, or pro staff, are underrepresented in the labor movement and in Olympia, which means their work is under-recognized by the Legislature. We are seeking a study session with the House Postsecondary Education & Workforce Committee and the Senate Higher Education & Workforce Development Committee to advise legislators on the work that pro staff do, with emphasis on the pro staff role in student success and the smooth running of our colleges.
• Contingent Faculty Pay Equity: The Legislature defined pay equity for contingent faculty as 85% of comparable tenured faculty compensation and directed the SBCTC to develop a plan to implement this policy fully by 2027. We will be advocating in the session for sustained, permanent funding to achieve the goal of pay equity, and keep contingent faculty pay at 85% as faculty salaries improve over time.
• Contingent Faculty Unemployment Insurance Reforms: While contingent faculty are eligible for unemployment benefits when their classes are out of session between quarters or over the summer, increasingly, colleges are challenging claims, leading to costly delays and a poor use of state resources. We will explore with legislators ways to decrease challenges, shortening delays and ensuring that contingent faculty get the benefits they are legally entitled to.
• Committee Study Session on Contingent Faculty Working Conditions: Similar to the above study sessions, we are requesting a study session with the House Postsecondary Education & Workforce Committee and the Senate Higher Education and Workforce Development Committee to bring new and veteran legislators up to date on the scope of work that contingent faculty do. In part, this is in support of our contingent faculty wage campaign; in part, the state is obligated to review best practices for part-time faculty and provide a report, which it has not done for many years, leading to legislators not fully understanding the nature of contingent faculty work.
• Shortening “Clawback” Time for Overpayment to Employees: Details are being worked out.
• Committee Study Session on Student Complaints against BIPOC Faculty: Details are being worked out.
• Critical scrutiny of developments in AI: Details are being worked out.
• Fixing the WEIA Funding Proviso: In the 2025 legislative session, changes were made to the WEIA funding proviso that we feel dilute its impact for education. Particularly in the climate of federal budget cuts and the state’s ongoing revenue shortfall, we want to tighten the language back up and ensure that the WEIA funds education.
• Reforms of the CTC Boards of Trustees: Details are being worked out.

Progressive Revenue

AFT Washington is active in the Balance Our Tax Code progressive revenue coalition. We will support the legislation proposed by BOTC and its revenue partners and are prepared to both defend against cuts and bring education-specific cuts to the coalition’s attention to defend against.

Communities For Our Colleges

We anticipate that there will be legislative proposals that support C4C’s policy goals that we will support as they are introduced.

Labor

AFT Washington is an active participant in the United Labor Lobby and we will work in solidarity with our union siblings to pass legislation that benefits our members and workers generally as we fight legislation with harmful impacts on working people.

Social Justice

We will advocate for or against bills of importance to our community partners, including the Racial Equity Team, Economic Opportunity Institute, Faith Action Network, PSARA, and others that create equity and social justice for Washingtonians.

Healthcare for All

We continue our participation on the steering committee of the Healthcare Is a Human Right coalition and will continue to support legislation that increases access to high quality healthcare and moves us toward universal healthcare for all.

Decline To Sign: Don’t Be Fooled!

By Pam Crone

He’s at it again. Multimillionaire Brian Heywood isn’t done yet messing with our rights and values. He's paying to circulate petitions for three new initiatives:

• 1L 26-001 Restoring the "Parents' Bill of Rights"
• 1L 26-638 Defending equity in interscholastic sports
• 1L 26-126 Requiring verification of citizenship for voter registration

The first one would allow parents to opt their children out of school classes and activities they deem objectionable, prevent their children from seeing books and other educational materials, and violate the privacy rights of their children by requiring the parents be notified of medical services provided.

The second would bar students from participating in sports that match their gender identity. Students would have to undergo intrusive tests to "prove" they were "biologically" male or female, whatever that means, in order to play their favorite sport.

The third initiative is a voter suppression effort. This one is from the Republican Party Chair Jim Walsh who teamed up with Heywood in 2024. We will do everything in our power in Washington State to ensure that everyone eligible to vote can do so.

We weren’t fooled in 2024 so let’s not be fooled this time. PSARA mounted a full on assault on initiatives that would have rolled back the Climate Commitment Act, WA Cares, and our progressive revenue source, the Capital Gains tax. And we won! Voters soundly defeated those initiatives at the ballot box.

Once again, these new initiatives would hurt Washingtonians, especially our young people. We are not fooled by these blatant attacks on our transgender community, our teachers, and the privacy rights of our young people.

So when you head out shopping this weekend or go to a sporting event, DECLINE TO SIGN. We can nip these harmful initiatives in the bud before they even go to the Legislature.

Pam Crone is a retired PSARA lobbyist and the Chair of PSARA's Government Relations Committee. This article was originally published in PSARA’s October Issue of the Retiree Advocate.