Members in Politics: From Call Center to Capitol

A few years ago, as Zach Hudgins put it, "I was a regular Joe worried about my job." Now, at just 37, he's a Washington state legislator "making decisions about all kinds of things."

Hudgins is a WashTech-CWA member who started out at Amazon.com answering phones and was soon promoted. But when the tech bubble burst in 2001, he was among 1,300 Amazon workers laid off. He wound up as a contract employee at Microsoft with no benefits or job security.

"I was fed up with the way things were going," he says. "I looked around and realized that we didn't have many voices in the legislature that understood what it was like in a high-tech economy."

Backed by CWA and other unions, he decided to run for office, focusing on jobs and "bread and butter issues." He personally knocked on 13,000 doors in the south Seattle area, finding out exactly what worried working families. In 2004, he was reelected with 67 percent of the vote.

"There's no reason why there shouldn't be more union members in legislatures across the country or on school boards or water boards" and so on, he says with boundless enthusiasm. "I love what I'm doing."