Delegates attending the Oklahoma AFL-CIO convention last Friday in Tulsa elected State Rep. Forrest Bennett to succeed the retiring Jimmy Curry as president of the labor organization.
Bennett, 36, started his new job on Monday. He said Sunday he had already notified House leadership, and Dec. 1 will be the date of his “irrevocable” resignation from the Oklahoma House of Representatives after nine consecutive years of service. He said he hopes Governor Stitt will schedule a special election to select his replacement “as soon as possible.”
Bennett is a Bartlesville native who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Oklahoma. His wife is a member of the Oklahoma City Public Schools Board of Education, and his grandmother served as a Washington County Commissioner and was the first female county commissioner in Oklahoma.
Bennett, a Democrat, entered the Oklahoma House of Representatives in 2017. He was elected to succeed the late Rep. Richard Morrissette in House District 92 in south Oklahoma City, and is the Minority Whip. Republicans have an 81-20 supermajority in the state House.
“I have loved my years in the Legislature but it was time to move on,” Bennett said. “I’ve worked with unions my entire time in the Legislature, and I’ve grown tired of watching union money go to people who don’t really care about labor unions.”
He said he intends to “focus on family issues and on other things I think are important to our membership.”
The Oklahoma AFL-CIO was created in 1957 by the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It is a “voluntary federation of 230 local labor unions that represent more than 100,000 working people,” the state website states. “We are teachers, firefighters, bakers, engineers, pilots, public employees, doctors and nurses, painters, plumbers – and more.”
Union representation in Oklahoma “is relatively low now but there’s a lot of potential,” Bennett said. For example, unions represent “about a third of the municipal workers in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, and we think we can grow that representation,” he said. “We care about the dignity of work.”
Jimmy Curry was first elected president of the Oklahoma AFL-CIO in 1997 and has been reelected every four years since. Prior to his election, he was the president of the Northeastern Oklahoma Labor Council and served for four years on the State AFL-CIO Executive Board. He has been a member of the Transport Workers Union Local 514 of Tulsa for more than 30 years.
Before his election, Curry was a Federal Aviation Administration- licensed aircraft mechanic for American Airlines in Tulsa. He was born and reared in Oklahoma City and graduated from Spartan School of Aeronautics in 1978. Curry and his wife, Deborah, live in Edmond.