As a socialist feminist organizer for two decades, Linda Averill, 45, brings a unique perspective to this year’s race for Seattle City Council, Position Four.

Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Averill grew up in northeast neighbor-hoods and moved to the city’s south end in 1986, where she still lives today. An activist since the early 1980s, she has learned and demonstrated the power of working at the grassroots level to bring about real change. She dived into politics while attending the University of Washington, getting involved in campaigns to oppose tuition hikes and U.S. intervention in El Salvador. In 1982, she became Director of the U.W. Women’s Commission, overseeing educational forums on women’s healthcare and domestic violence and working with community and campus groups to organize demonstrations for abortion rights and to support childcare for students and staff.

In 1984, she helped launch Registration Age People, a group dedicated to resisting military conscription and educating about its disproportionate impact on workingclass youth, especially youth of color.

After graduating from the U.W. in 1986 with degrees in journalism and political science, she served as Organizer for Seattle Radical Women until 1990. During that time, Radical Women collaborated with other feminists, community activists and organizations to defend women’s health clinics, oppose forced testing for AIDS/HIV, protest and publicize the ongoing Green River murders, and preserve the U.W.’s women and ethnic studies programs.

From 1986 through 1992, Averill put her analytical and writing skills to use, working for several community newspapers as a freelance journalist. She contributed articles on state legislative issues, Seattle neighborhoods, civil rights and social-justice issues, including police brutality, the drawbacks of Weed and Seed for communities of color, and violence against women. In 1992, she joined the staff of the Freedom Socialist newspaper. She has written about the union movement, healthcare, unemployment, the class and race bias of the criminal justice system, lesbian/gay history, and more.

In 1992, Averill also became a city bus driver for Metro/King County. She has been a rank-and-file activist for almost as many years in Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 587, which represents 4,000 public and para-transit workers. In August 2002, she collaborated with her union to win a groundbreaking ruling from the Public Employment Relations Commission affirming the right of county workers to speak out and organize at the job site during off-duty hours. The case stemmed from a successful campaign at the shop-floor level that she and co-workers initiated and led in 1998 to improve wages, and working conditions and safety on public busses. Averill is also an ATU delegate to the King County Labor Council.

Within her union and the labor council she has effectively campaigned for affirmative action and equal rights for lesbians/gays/bisexuals/transgendered people while advocating for the political and economic empowerment of working women. She has also consistently raised labor’s need for a strong voice in the electoral arena that is independent of the pro-big-business Democrats and Republicans. A staunch believer in the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all, Averill has testified to the Seattle school board on behalf of Laidlaw bus drivers fighting for improved pay and benefits, organized support within ATU for striking Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer workers, and helped to build ATU and community involvement in an anti-Nazi rally in Enumclaw, Washington, sponsored by the King County Labor Council.

Most recently, Averill is known as a co-founder of Organized Labor Against the War, an organization of rank-and-file unionists who are dedicated to building labor opposition to the war on terrorism, with its accompanying U.S. military intervention around the world, and bipartisan attacks on civil liberties, immigrant rights, social services and unions. In January 2003, as a representative for OLAW, she attended the founding conference of U.S. Labor Against the War in Chicago. The organization is building national opposition within the labor movement to U.S. militarism and union-busting.

As a visitor Cuba, Averill has witnessed firsthand the successful implementation of many of the programs she is proposing as a Seattle City Council candidate. She participated in an International Feminist Brigade to Cuba in 1997, co-sponsored by Radical Women and the Cuban Federation of Women. As a brigade member, she was able to meet and talk with women of all colors, doctors, lawyers, journalists, and dentists, who have benefited from the island’s impressive system of affirmative action. She also toured daycare facilities and neighborhood healthcare clinics, factories, and medical-research institutions.