As a founding faculty at the UW Tacoma, Honey helped to hire and review faculty and build curriculum in interdisciplinary arts and sciences and other programs. Since its founding in 1990 with about 150 students and 12 faculty, the UWT now has over 5,000 students and hundreds of faculty, and has helped to revive a major part of the downtown of Tacoma. Honey’s service to the UW included serving as the endowed chair of the UW’s Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies (2000-2004), and the UWT’s Fred and Dorothy Haley Professor of Humanities (2007-present). He founded and directed the UWT Center for the Study of Community and Society, and is well known in the Tacoma community for his social justice activism. He served as the President of the national Labor and Working Class History Association (2007-2009), and in numerous capacities for the Southern Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and as a manuscript and external faculty reviewer for various publishers and universities.
Honey served two terms as Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies at the University of Washington and has helped build links between the UW and UWT and organized labor and civil rights organizations. He continues to work with the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the AFSCME and other unions and equal rights groups around the country, and with the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association, and others