The following will be delivered to the Governor tomorrow, either through email, or in-person:
Governor Bob Ferguson Office of Governor PO Box 40002 Olympia WA 98504-0002
RE: Washington Public Employees Association – Contract Funding for the 2025-2027 Biennium
Governor Ferguson:
For over twenty years, WPEA members have accepted contracts that fell further behind inflation, losing over 20% of their purchasing power while the state refused to address growing inequities. Members were clear: acceptance would not continue indefinitely. Last fall, they voted down the tentative agreements because they offered no meaningful wage recovery, no serious improvement to working conditions, and no respect for the sacrifices workers have made.
The agreements ignored repeated warnings about worsening pay gaps, took no action to repair broken promises on healthcare, and dismissed even no-cost proposals to improve workplace conditions. Meanwhile, top administrators secured double-digit raises while frontline workers — including firefighters risking their lives — continued to fall deeper into poverty. Members had no choice but to reject another agreement that demanded more sacrifice without delivering the dignity or security they have long deserved.
On October 1, 2024, after WPEA members voted to reject the State’s offer, we immediately reached out to OFM with a request to reconvene bargaining. Your designee for bargaining refused to meet and stated that they had no bargaining obligation. WPEA had to sue them to get them to back off of that illegal position, along with other illegal positions that they took in October and November of 2024. Even after reluctantly returning to the bargaining table, OFM was unwilling to agree to an expedited bargaining schedule and claimed that “staffing issues” prevented them from bargaining on an expedited basis. In an attempt to further stall negotiations, OFM’s negotiators wasted hours of bargaining arguing that they did not believe they had the authority to continue bargaining for a two year agreement – we literally lost months of what should have been productive bargaining time on this argument alone.
The position that WPEA members find themselves in today is remarkably similar to the position that Pat Sullivan, OFM Director, threatened in his September 27, 2024, letter to WPEA. In the letter, Director Sullivan threatened to withhold funding in the first year of the biennium for our 5,300 members covered under these agreements, unless I was willing to circumvent our members’ votes to reject the contract.
While our teams ignored those threats and continued to meet, at their own expense, with management; they made little to no progress on non-economic issues between December 2024 and March 2025. It became clear in March that we were running the risk of not getting our agreements funded, while OFM was continuing to drag their feet and participate in surface-level-bargaining, so WPEA bargaining teams decided to rerun the ratification vote with the current Tas – that TA was ratified in early April. We have now heard that the budget writers are saying that WPEA was “too late” to get funded. This is unacceptable. Harming WPEA members because your designee was unable or unwilling to meet in good faith, at reasonable times, is just not the fair or correct thing to do.
As President of WPEA, I am appealing to you to assure that this does not happen and asking that you not sign any budget that does not include funding for all labor contracts that were ratified and presented during the 2025 Legislative session. I recognize that the position you find yourself in is not an easy one – please recognize that signing a budget that harms over 5000 of your employees for asserting their legal right to participate in their Union is not the correct way out of this situation.
In solidarity,
Amanda Hacker
President
Washington Public Employees Association
UFCW Local 365
