About Us
The Worker Center, AFL-CIO was organized in 1986 by a range of progressive labor, religious, and community groups, with the basic mission of promoting labor-community linkages to support “high road,” or “worker-centered” economic development. In 1995, it became part of the King County Labor Council.
The Worker Center's mission is to carry out projects that generate high-skills, high-wage jobs, improve workforce training systems, improve delivery of services for dislocated workers, and build alliances between labor, community organizations, local government, and employers. Past highlights of activity at the Worker Center include:
• coordinating the fight to reopen Lockheed Shipyard and to get unemployment insurance for locked-out Lockheed workers;
• establishing the Puget Sound Shipyards Industrial Jobs Commission which brought government, Puget Sound Metal Trades and industry together to study causes and solutions for shipyard decline and to retain shipyard jobs;
• catalyzing and staffing the Build Them In Washington Coalition which brought labor, industry and environmentalists together to pass legislation to require that new Jumbo-class ferries be built instate which resulted in the retention of hundreds of union shipyard jobs;
• conceiving and developing the nation's first Community Voice Mail system which uses state-of-the-art technology to provide a means for homeless individuals to receive critical phone messages.
• initiating the Duwamish Coalition which brought a unified approach to the economic and environmental issues confronting Seattle's industrial Duwamish corridor.
And much more...