AFGE’s Organizing Department, Ward Morrow Win Labor Awards

May 12, 2025

Categories: The Insider

It is an honor to announce that AFGE’s Membership and Organization Department won an Organizing Award from the Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO, for its outstanding work, including an 8% membership growth last year. 

AFGE Assistant General Counsel James Ward Morrow also received the council’s first-ever Legal Champion Award for his role in helping an AFGE local reporting unsafe working conditions at one of the world’s largest agricultural research facilities in the world. 

“The award honors AFGE - Membership and Organizing Department for having organized the largest number of members, and increased your membership through organizing and using creativity, organizing tactics, campaign strategies, and member engagement for Federal and DC government workers,” said the council. “This event is a cornerstone of our efforts to celebrate the achievements and contributions of labor leaders and allies in the region. Your dedication to the labor movement to improve the lives of working families and communities throughout the country makes you deserving of this recognition.” 

The council also gave another organizing award to UNITE HERE Local 25.

Over the past year, AFGE has achieved significant membership increases through a combination of targeted workplace organizing, digital outreach, and strategic engagement. Some of our key accomplishments include: 

• Membership growth: AFGE has seen thousands of new members join across various federal agencies, with an overall growth of over 8% in the past year, with many locals increasing their membership by over 100%. 
• New bargaining units: We successfully organized and won recognition for several new bargaining units, including our two largest units in over a decade, bringing roughly 5,000 more federal and D.C. government workers into the labor movement. 
• Internal organizing: Many locals have converted a high percentage of non-members into dues-paying members, strengthening existing bargaining units. 

AFGE’s organizing success has been driven by innovative and aggressive strategies, such as workplace mapping and data-driven targeting, one-on-one organizing conversations, issue-based campaigns, call center outreach, digital organizing, and our own dues collecting system called E-Dues. With a threat to payroll deduction, AFGE has converted tens of thousands of members from payroll dues deduction to direct pay with E-Dues. 

“The change in model that was recognized in the award is reflected in the growth of AFGE and its ability to pivot so quickly in a crisis, and the award really does belong to the whole federation- staff, locals, councils, leaders and most of all, the membership,” said M&O Director Dave Cann.

Morrow was nominated for his award by AFGE Local 3147, which represents employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) in Maryland. The massive 300-building complex, which housed about 800 people at the time, was full of moldy walls, collapsed ceilings, and flooded offices. The local reported the issues to management several times over the years, but nothing got done.

In 2023, they filed a whistleblower complaint with the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), disclosing that leadership at the research center had put workers at risk and undermined their scientific experiments by failing to properly maintain the worksite. The OSC found a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing. USDA announced it was shutting down the building to make repairs only after the local filed the OSC complaint.