The sixth episode of AFGE’s new series, The Activist, highlighting our union members who have stepped up to help make a difference in the lives of their colleagues and our government.
Joyce Howell is senior attorney at EPA Region 3 in Philadelphia and executive vice president of AFGE Council 238 representing EPA employees across the country.
Joyce has been working for the EPA in Philadelphia for 30 years. As an attorney, her job is important to her local community and the American public as she prosecutes and enforces environmental laws to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we live on.
She has been an AFGE member for about 10 years since our union started organizing lawyers in Region 3. She believes that workers’ voice is stronger when everyone joins together.
“When we stand in solidarity, we represent the workers, and, in our case, I think we also represent our mission and help it survive political throughflow and keep our eyes on the mission and defend the workers,” she said.
Joyce is the chief negotiator of the council’s contract negotiation team, which has been in negotiation with the agency but has also hit a partial impasse over the council’s proposed diversity article to make the EPA a more inclusive agency as it plans to hire 1,800 employees in the next year.
Joyce is passionate about defending her colleagues and her agency’s mission. But there’s another thing she’s trying to defend through AFGE as well. Listen to her talk about what she’s defending and why she got involved in the union in the first place.
After months of tirelessly working with the Social Security Administration (SSA), elected officials, and our partners in advocacy like Social Security Works, AFGE Council 220 and Local 2608 are thrilled to report that the SSA field office in San Juan, Puerto Rico, has now been reopened.
The AFGE Communications Department has won 10 awards from the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA) for excellence in labor communications.