Retiree Report

RETIREE REPORT

By Barb VerSteegh

The All Craft Conference proved to be very interesting and once again filled with surprises. I made my reservations based on trying to save our chapter money by leaving Friday evening. Of course when I arrived and registered for the conference I noticed that meetings had been scheduled for Saturday morning and no one was notified ahead of time. VERY FRUSTRATING!! I simply can not understand poor communication from our national officers.

The conference started with President Burrus notifying the delegates that he is calling it quits after this term. He does not plan to seek reelection. Needless to say this kept the conference buzzing through to the finish. Lots of rumors about who will be running and for what positions. After I returned home I heard that current Secretary/Treasurer Terry Stapleton has left the APWU to work for the AFL-CIO. Needless to say the next year will be VERY interesting with national elections, national convention and contract negotiations.

I attended the Clerk Craft meeting to start the first day and found that we retirees really need to step up and help the current employees. It appears the Postal Service is determined to close down some stations and branches. The Postal Service seems to want to contract all retail services out to cheap labor. Do you really want to take your package to some person who has never been properly trained, has no sense of security, and makes minimum wage so therefore not really concerned about the security of your package? Do we really want our stations and post offices closed? I say no and we need to step up and help with the fight to keep our post offices open. We need to contact our Congressmen and Senators to keep these offices open and current employees gainfully employed. The grievance procedure can not keep an office open, only Congress can do that and we can help. Like Clerk Craft Director McCarthy stated, “We and organized labor are in a fight for survival.”

I then went on to the start of the retiree conference. Retiree Director Judy Beard put on a great conference. We had numerous workshops presented by expert instructors from each group. We had workshops on, Aging With Grace, Solutions to Elder Care Stress, Care Giving, Social Security, Medicare, Thrift Savings Plan, Organizing and Finances, Communications, Retiree Benefits, Effective Retiree Chapters and Hands on Computer Training. I did not attend the Hands-On Computer Training class but did attend the others. I got a lot of ideas from other chapters on activities they have had in their chapters. I also realized how fortunate our chapter is to have the total cooperation from our local. Some chapters have had total nightmares trying to work with the locals. Some have been banned from the local union office and have had the retiree chapter monies spent by the locals. Hard to believe that once you retire your local union would want to ban you from the office. I do believe some of this attitude started at the top with our national officers but needless to say we now have the opportunity to find new officers who are willing to work with retirees. We can be a big help especially on the legislative issues that are becoming so very important to the very existence of the Postal Service.

Basically it was a very good conference, very informative and quite interesting in many ways.