The 11th 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.
LaVawn is a veterans service representative at VBA Philadelphia Regional Office and Insurance Center. She has been a member of AFGE Local 940 since 2006. Her job is to help veterans file claims for service-connected disabilities.
She joined AFGE after discovering that the work they were doing wasn’t recorded correctly for the purposes of performance. She noticed that something needed to change, and when she talked to management, she was stonewalled.
“So the employee that I sat next to was a union rep, and he said you would be perfect for the union. You asked the right questions. They would never answer them, but you asked the right questions,” she recalled. “I became a union member and shortly afterward a steward.”
Besides getting to make a difference, being a union member provides her with a lot of benefits, including additional training for upward mobility, education benefits, and assistance with personal goals.
Listen to LaVawn talk about what it’s like working for the VBA:
In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit kept the largest collective bargaining agreement covering Department of Veterans Affairs employees in place.
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The Trump administration’s plans to replace many of the career federal employees who ensure the safety of the flying public with private contractors ignores the lessons learned from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and would result in weaker airport security.
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In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in April undermining a key tenant of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, AFGE National President Everett Kelley recently joined more than 5,600 concerned citizens in Alabama to protest the decision and its impact on marginalized communities nationwide.
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