Dear John,

As we begin a fresh year in 2024, we're looking back on all we accomplished together in 2023. With this record of success, we know it's true: Together We Rise! United We Triumph! Let's make 2024 another great year for AFGE.

Here are some of our biggest victories in 2023:

TSA officers won a historic 31% pay increase, the largest in TSA history

After two decades of fighting for fair compensation for a group of workers who protect our skies and air travelers, our hard work finally paid off. Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) received their first pay increase of up to 31 percent in July, putting them on a scale similar to General Schedule pay.

AFGE and our TSA council’s persistence also led to more workplace rights similar to Title 5 for the TSA officers.

An additional 33,000 feds will get a locality pay bump in 2024, thanks to AFGE

Federal employees working in Fresno, Calif.; Reno, Nev.; Rochester, New York; and Spokane, Wash., are slated to get a locality pay raise next year as the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) took one of the final steps to implement the new General Schedule (GS) pay localities.

New counties also will be added to 43 existing localities, so those working and living in these counties will get a locality pay bump as well. The changes mean about 32,900 federal workers will see a locality pay raise starting on the first pay period after Jan. 1, 2024.

This is a direct result of AFGE pushing the Biden administration to adopt the Federal Salary Council’s pro-labor recommendations that would increase pay for tens of thousands of General Schedule employees who are making 24% less than employees outside the federal government doing similar jobs in the same areas.

We broke so many organizing records as government workers flocked to join AFGE

More and more government workers are joining the AFGE family because they want to have a say in their working conditions, where changes are not just shoved down their throats but are negotiated and fairly implemented. We saw that trend in 2023.

Thanks to changes in organizing strategies where we emphasized worker power and one-on-one conversations, we scored net increases for several months in a row. In March, for example, we added 5,652 new members – far surpassing our goal of recruiting at least 3,500 members a month. 

Factoring in members who retired, changed jobs, or otherwise left the union, we ended the month with a net gain of 1,446, the highest since June 2016, pushing overall membership to the highest total since September 2021. By July, our union already reached our goal of achieving a net gain of 8,000 members in 2023.

The historic pay increase at TSA continued to drive TSA officers to join. Member mobilization also has delivered great new collective bargaining agreements for the Department of Veterans Affairs and Social Security Administration. 

We won big on Election Night

AFGE successfully got our endorsed candidates elected left and right on Nov. 7 in states where key issues were decided, setting the stage for the presidential election next year! We worked hard for months to get out the vote and educate union members on why these races were important to them and their families. We knocked on doors, we texted, we phone banked, we mailed materials, and our efforts paid off.

In Kentucky, for example, AFGE-endorsed Governor Andy Beshear was re-elected to a second term. 

In Virginia, we helped flip the House of Delegates and hold onto the State Senate as AFGE-endorsed candidates up and down the ballot won. This helps dim Governor Youngkin’s aspirations for higher office and his anti-labor policies, including his proposed change to eliminate labor history from Virginia’s educational curriculum.

The 2023 full-year, catch-all bill with AFGE priorities became law

Thanks to AFGE members and staff’s hard work and perseverance, the full-year fiscal 2023 funding bill that became law in January contained several provisions that made it easier for government workers to provide services to the American people. Several agencies received increased funding to implement new laws and fund staffing increases to meet new demands.

A few highlights of the bill:

• At the VA, the bill not only included a 22% increase in funding for VA health care but also defunded the AIR Commission that would have considered closing or eliminating services at hundreds of VA facilities.
• At the Department of Defense, the bill limited DoD’s ability to put personnel caps on the civilian workforce and reduce the number of civilians. It also limits conversions of civilian jobs to military and contract performance. The president’s budget proposed eliminating this provision, so its inclusion is a very significant victory. The bill also included language continuing the governmentwide moratorium on conducting public-private job competitions under the OMB A-76 Circular, which helps protect most federal civilian jobs from being outsourced.
• At the Bureau of Prisons, retiring law enforcement officers can now access savings without penalty. The Protecting Public Safety Employees Timely Retirement Act, which was included in the catch all funding bill, allowed eligible law enforcement and public safety officers to make penalty-free withdrawals on their Thrift Saving Plan savings once they attain 25 years of service in a covered retirement plan or when they turn 50 years old, whichever is earlier. The new law was one of the AFGE Council of Prisons Locals’ priorities.
• At TSA, the bill included hundreds of millions of dollars to implement the new pay system as well as hire and retain TSOs.
• At the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, funding was provided for refugee operations so that they are no longer fee-funded from citizenship and visa applications, which led to the threat of furloughs in 2020.

AFGE scored a major victory at the Supreme Court in a case involving dual-status National Guard technicians

AFGE represents more than 32,000 National Guard dual-status technicians in every state except Mississippi, and 2023 turned out to be a good year for them as the Supreme Court in May ruled in favor of the union, preserving collective bargaining rights for dual-status technicians working for National Guards in a civilian role. AFGE’s General Counsel Office argued the case for our union.

The case was appealed to the Supreme Court by the Ohio National Guard, which in 2016 unilaterally ended a collective bargaining agreement with AFGE Local 3970 when its then contract expired. Despite a more than 40-year history of bargaining with AFGE and its dual status technicians, Ohio claimed that technicians had no collective bargaining rights and that it was not bound by the Federal Service Labor Management Relations Statute.

AFGE launched a new local to represent federal workers in Europe

It has been a long time coming, but AFGE in 2023 launched a new local that seeks to cover more than 10,000 federal employees working for U.S. agencies in Europe who currently lack a collective voice at work. The new local was formed under AFGE District 14, which already represents small pockets of federal employees working in Europe.

Membership in the new at-large local is open to federal employees throughout Europe at any agency who are not already represented by an AFGE local. Employees can be under the General Schedule, Wage Grade, or Non-Appropriated Fund pay systems. Most federal employees in Europe work for the Defense Department at military hospitals, child care centers, commissaries and exchanges, as firefighters, and in combat support and logistics.

AFGE continued to win union elections, protect workers’ rights

More and more federal workers are forming a union under AFGE to have a voice at work. Employees at the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), for example, have voted to form a union with AFGE as their representative.

At the National Park Service’s Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, employees voted to continue representation by AFGE, rejecting efforts to decertify the AFGE local and take away workers’ rights and protections.  

A discovery that remote workers at an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) facility in Ann Arbor, Mich., were about to get kicked out of the bargaining unit led an AFGE local to spring into action and save the employees’ workplace rights. AFGE Local 3907 subsequently held union elections for 19 remote workers, and the employees voted for AFGE and therefore did not lose their union protection.  

VA agreed to roll over the contract, the largest in government

AFGE’s National VA Council and the Department of Veterans Affairs agreed to roll over the remainder of the union’s 2011 master collective bargaining agreement for the next three years and modernize VA hiring procedures. 

The agreement marks the end of a five-and-a-half-year struggle between AFGE and VA that began with the former administration’s reopening of the contract in December 2017.

We won a contract for 42,000 SSA employees

42,000 Social Security Administration (SSA) employees have an updated contract in November following the employees’ ratification vote in October.

AFGE and SSA in July agreed on updates to six articles of the contract, originally ratified in 2019, covering such issues as employee training and career development, employee rights, childcare and elder care, disciplinary and adverse actions, and employee details to alternative duty stations. 

The updated six-year contract not only benefits employees but also the American public they serve as several provisions directly affect customer services.

We won 25% retention bonuses for BOP officers at 8 severely understaffed prisons

AFGE and the union’s Council of Prison Locals have been calling on the administration to approve the additional pay to help address dangerous understaffing at federal prisons.  Our hard work paid off when the Biden administration authorized 25% retention bonuses for correctional officers and staff at eight federal correctional facilities overseen by the Federal Bureau of Prisons: Federal Correctional Institution Dublin, Calif.; FCI Herlong, Calif.; Metropolitan Correctional Center San Diego, Calif.; Metropolitan Detention Center Los Angeles, Calif.; United States Penitentiary Atwater, Calif.; Federal Correctional Complex Florence, Colorado; FCI Sheridan, Oregon; and Federal Detention Center SeaTac, Washington.

AFGE now represents workers at DHA in 18 locations

AFGE filed certification requests with the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) seeking to represent all health care workers who have transferred from other military services to the new Defense Health Agency (DHA). It took a year and a half, but AFGE has so far won the FLRA’s decisions to represent workers in 17 markets and headquarters.

These employees are part of the 45,000 civilian bargaining unit employees who have been transferred to DHA as part of the largest reorganization in the Defense Department since 1947. Most of the transferred employees had been represented by AFGE locals when they were with the military services.

Martin O’Malley is confirmed as SSA commissioner

The Senate Dec. 18 voted to confirm AFGE-endorsed O’Malley to be the next SSA commissioner. AFGE and our SSA General Committee endorsed O’Malley when he was nominated by President Biden back in August. SSA is an agency in crisis, so we urged the Senate to confirm the former Maryland governor based on his prior commitments to strengthen and expand Social Security and his successful, data-driven approach to improving government at both the city and state level.

Here’s to many more accomplishments to come!

In Solidarity,

Everett Kelley
AFGE National President