The Puget Sound area labor and social justice movements lost a fierce activist with the passing of Norma Kelsey on September 21, 2024, at age 89.

Norma was a leader of the Office and Professional Employees Union Local 8 (Secretary-Treasurer 1985-1989, President 1989-2001) and worked for Plumbers Local 32 and Laborers Local 440 for many years.

Norma also held various leadership positions with El Centro de la Raza, Mothers for Police Accountability, Coalition of Labor Union Women, and the Martin Luther King County Labor Council. Norma served on a citizens’ panel of the Seattle City Council’s World Trade Organization Accountability Review Committee and was a member of Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans (now PSARA). Norma was a true trade unionist and believed in the movement with her heart and soul.

Norma was born September 19, 1935, in Independence, Kansas. Her grandparents settled there years before, having arrived in a covered wagon. In her youth she was a member of the Salvation Army Church where she was taught that her role in life should be to help others. Later, when she began to work for unions, she recognized a familiar belief system of helping and giving to others.

She brought those values full strength to her work for unions and the community.

Norma was married at age 16, but this brutal first marriage ended in divorce. She later married Bob Kelsey and moved to California and eventually to Washington, where they raised four children and several adopted and foster children.

Norma and Bob, usually with their son Jack, traveled extensively to Nicaragua, Venezuela, the Philippines, Haiti, and throughout Europe and Central America. The travel often involved reconnecting with former refugees who had fled violence in their home countries and who had been aided by Bob and Norma when seeking housing and assistance in the United States.

Norma provided a key leadership role in the mid-1980’s, when a group of women, led by former Local 8 Board Member Maureen Bo (who after the revolution was elected Business Manager), decided their union was headed in the wrong direction. Norma’s kindness, vision, and belief in social justice and creating a humane community helped to provide a focus for their shared work.

Maureen, Norma, Nancy Greenup, and Janet Graham, along with others, ousted Local 8’s leadership at the time. They fought off a hard push for an ill-advised merger with another union, which would have stripped Local 8 of its own direction. Instead, they reshaped their local into the vibrant, progressive labor union it is today.

These founding mothers focused on building a transparent, fiscally responsible, and democratically run local with organizing made a top priority.

Norma’s labor friends remember her passion and kindness, which will live on in so many of the hearts she touched. Her determination was unmatched. And she never lost sight of the important goals she had for a more just world. Norma taught us endless lessons in perseverance with dignity.

She was truly one of a kind. The world is a better place because of her.