“The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas” –George Santayana
Welcome to the new Education Website from AFGE’s Field Services & Education Department.
We are very excited about this new feature and we hope that you will be as well. Our site aims to keep you–AFGE members and leaders–informed of new internal education programs, materials and offerings, as well as provide you with resources to help you with union building.
Our union has just reached 270,000 dues paying members. In addition we have 20,000 retirees who are part of AFGE and we are very proud of that. Yet we represent more than 600,000 workers in our various agencies, and there are plenty more totally unrepresented Federal workers that need to be brought into the union family. So, while continuously growing, AFGE has a ways to go before we can ever feel satisfied and comfortable.
For this reason we believe that internal member education and leadership development to be so critical. To build a strong union, not to mention a strong union movement, we need cores of activists and leaders who feel capable of leading, but also are provided with the tools and materials that help them visualize where we need to go as a union and as a movement.
When you are reviewing this site there may be things that come to mind, or questions that you might have regarding the work of this department. Please feel free to email me at fletcb@afge.org, but let me tell you a little about our department.
Field Services & Education is a department that has two major functions. The first is to assist with national collective bargaining (mainly through assisting bargaining councils). The second is to provide membership education and leadership development programs and materials. Overall we work primarily through the AFGE Districts led by our National Vice Presidents. So, if you are a local union officer we encourage you to first check in with your National Vice President and ask them for the support that you need. We, then, work with the National Vice President (or his/her representatives) to provide you with the best possible assistance.
The National Vice Presidents offer District trainings normally twice a year. We work with the NVPs to build those trainings. We help with curriculum design as well as identifying possible instructors.
There are occasions when there are special trainings that our department offers. For example, some bargaining councils have expressed an interest in contract campaigns or member mobilization efforts around contract negotiations. Our department offers trainings on how to put such campaigns together.
Field Services and Education also offers scholarship assistance for AFGE members who choose to apply and qualify. We produce various booklets and other materials that are available for our local unions on different aspects of union activity.
So, that is a brief summary and we hope that it helps you better understand our department and what we do.
On a regular basis I will be updating this part of our website with thoughts and observations regarding the union movement and labor union activity with a particular focus on how we can strengthen AFGE. We look forward to your feedback.
–Bill Fletcher, Jr.
