Shaleah Blackshear has lived in Lake County most of her life. The people who work for the Lake County Health Department are her neighbors. They’re the friendly faces she sees at the grocery store. Some are longtime family friends.
On Jan. 27, the Trump administration issued a memo halting disbursement of all federal funding appropriated by Congress. The public sector was a particular target, with services like Medicaid brought to a screeching halt, payment portals for Head Start and other vital programs shut down, and the jobs of tens of thousands of public workers in jeopardy.
The ongoing wildfires in Los Angeles have devastated parts of that city, destroying tens of thousands of homes, killing dozens of people, and upending countless lives. Yet as AFSCME members in Los Angeles have experienced unimaginable destruction, they continue to serve their communities, putting others first even while they face incredible personal losses.
Following a long and arduous process, the Chicago City Council passed a budget for 2025 on Dec. 16. The good news: The $17.3 billion budget contains no layoffs or furloughs of AFSCME members.
State Rep. Gregg Johnson is an AFSCME retiree and the former president of AFSCME Local 46 at East Moline Correctional Center. On Nov. 5, he won re-election to his seat as state representative from Illinois’ 87th District in the Quad Cities area.
Brittany Adams sticks out among the long-haul truckers at the DMV when she goes to renew her Class B Commercial Driver’s License. That’s because she’s not an over-the-road trucker; she works at the Bloomington Public Library, and she drives the library’s 32-foot-long Bookmobile.
If you live in the Chicago area, the twist of your faucet yields some of the cleanest, purest drinking water in the world—and you have AFSCME members to thank for it.
Some 250 school bus drivers and bus monitors serving the Unit 5 School District in Bloomington-Normal have won a fair new contract that includes strong wage increases, guaranteed daily hours, and improved paid leave language in line with the Illinois Paid Leave for All Workers Act.
Registered nurses (RNs) at Loretto Hospital in Chicago have won a new contract, defeating management’s proposals that would have compromised staff safety and worsened the quality of care for patients at the hospital.
Thousands of public service workers—members of AFSCME and our allied unions in the We Are One Illinois coalition—gathered in Springfield on Nov. 13 to demand lawmakers fix the broken and unfair Tier 2 pension system.
A new report published by AFSCME Council 31 confirms what IDOC employees have long been saying: Drugs have increasingly become a massive problem in Illinois prisons, and management’s inaction has had serious consequences for staff and individual
The 60 employees of the Urbana Free Library (UFL) voted unanimously to form their union, which was certified by the Illinois Labor Relations Board on Nov. 6.
The UFL has been Urbana-Champaign’s public library since 1874.
There’s yet another crest in the historic wave of workers forming unions at Chicago cultural institutions: Employees at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium have formed their union with AFSCME Council 31.
Members of AFSCME Local 2811 who work for the Illinois State Board of Education started bargaining a new contract for their 45 members while negotiations for a new State of Illinois master contract were already well underway.
AFSCME Local 3236 at Illinois State University has secured two strong new contracts for its clerical and healthcare bargaining units that can both point to a chalking action as their contract campaign’s turning point.
