About the Local
About
Who We Represent
AFSCME Local 1227 represents the City of Detroit's non-supervisory building, safety, and housing inspectors: the people who make sure the places Detroiters live and work are safe.
Our History
AFSCME began in 1932 in Madison, Wisconsin, when a small group of state employees organized to protect their civil service jobs from political patronage. Their idea, that a professional civil service of people devoted to their communities is essential to a strong democracy, still guides the union today.
Similar employee associations soon formed in other states. In 1936 the American Federation of Labor granted AFSCME its own charter, and Arnold Zander became its first International president. Two years later, 2,000 sanitation workers in Philadelphia went on strike and won AFSCME's first bargaining agreement with a major city.
Jerry Wurf was elected the union's second International president in 1964 on a platform of aggressive organizing and collective bargaining rights for public workers. In 1965 AFSCME rewrote its constitution to include a Bill of Rights for union members, a first in the American labor movement.
In the 1960s, AFSCME's fight for respect on the job joined with the civil rights movement. In 1968, sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, went on strike for union recognition and against the city's discriminatory practices. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched with the strikers and was assassinated while in Memphis to support them. The city agreed to recognize their union, AFSCME Local 1733.
AFSCME's membership passed one million in 1978. Gerald McEntee became the union's third International president in 1981, and in 2012 Lee A. Saunders was elected as its first African American president. In August 2026, members at the 47th International Convention in Chicago elected Patrick Moran as International president and Nicole Pollard as secretary-treasurer, the first African American woman to hold that office.
Today AFSCME is the largest union of public employees in the United States, representing about 1.3 million public service workers and retirees in roughly 3,400 local unions across 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The union's historical archives are kept here in Detroit, at the Walter P. Reuther Library.
Part of a Larger Union
Local 1227 is an affiliate of Michigan AFSCME Council 925 and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), AFL-CIO, one of the largest unions of public service workers in the country.