J. Ward Morrow has served, since 2003, as an Assistant General Counsel and Legislative Counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents over 700,000 federal and DC government employees across the country, including employees of the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Environmental Protection Agency, Social Security Administration, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, Housing and Urban Development, Bureau of Prisons, among others. In this capacity, Mr. Morrow has served as primary legislative counsel for the union on all types of legislative matters that impact the union and federal sector labor relations. He handles administrative litigation and labor issues before the Merit System Protection Board, the Federal Labor Relations Board, the Office of Special Counsel, the Federal Services Impasses Panel, Administrative Judges, and Arbitrators. His work on a variety of federal employee Hatch Act cases and whistleblower cases have been covered significantly by media outlets, in particular his work with whistleblowers at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Beginning in 2000, Mr. Morrow was the General Counsel and Legislative Director for the American Federation of Teachers-Maryland which represented around 15,000 state, county, and city employees. Those units included Baltimore City Teachers and School Police, Baltimore City and County 911 Operators, Baltimore County Correctional Officers, Maryland State Healthcare Professionals and other white collar state employee professionals, among others. His representation included handling a variety of matters before labor boards, legislative bodies, state court, and executive branch officials. He filed the first ever Unfair Labor Practice charge under the Maryland State Employee Collective Bargaining Act.
From 1990-2000, Mr. Morrow was an Assistant State’s Attorney for Baltimore City handling approximately 20,000 misdemeanor cases in District court and 2,000 cases in Circuit Court over a decade of service. The last year of service, he was also cross-designated as a Special Assistant United State’s Attorney for large scale felony drug gang investigations and served as an Acting Felony Drug Trial Team lead in the State’s Attorney’ Office Felony Drug Unit.
After graduation from the University of Maryland School of Law, Mr. Morrow served as a Judicial Law Clerk to the Honorable Mary Arabian (deceased), Circuit Court Judge for the Baltimore City Circuit Court. During law school, Mr. Morrow clerked at the Division of Advice, General Counsel’s Office at the National Labor Relations Board, and for the National Association of Letter Carriers-General Counsel’s Office, where he worked/negotiated on what was then the largest labor-management collective bargaining agreement in the US, covering 900,000 post employees spread over three different unions.
Prior to his graduation from the Johns Hopkins University with a BA in Political Science, Mr. Morrow was, for 3 years, the Director of the Maryland AFL-CIO’s youth program, then called Frontlash, and for one year was a project staff organizer for Council 67 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).
Mr. Morrow is currently the chief shop steward for the staff union at AFGE and Executive Board Member of Local 2, Office, Professional Employees International Union, a Council Delegate of the Metropolitan Baltimore and Metropolitan DC AFL-CIO Central Labor Councils. He has been twice elected to the Maryland State Democratic Central Committee, once from Baltimore City, and currently from Howard County. He has twice been the Democratic nominee for the Maryland House of Delegates, and formerly served on the Baltimore South-East Community Development Corporation and the former South-East Community Organization. He is a member of the bars of Maryland, the U.S. District Court for Maryland, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and the Supreme Court, as well as the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee.