ASEA Local 52 Executive Board Meeting Sunday February 6, 2005

Women’s Issues Committee has the following to report:

We met face to face in Anchorage in November.

We began our weekend meeting with an open house Friday night at the new ASEA office. Several guests did come to the open house and made us aware of their concerns. The most dramatic testimony came from a registered nurse. She shared with us the shortfalls of the letter of agreement previously made with the state and nurses and of the fear the nurses have for their personal safety since the preferred hospital provider in Anchorage became the same hospital used for prisoners. She told us that she could one day be caring for a prisoner and another day possibly be their hospital roommate. She concluded with her statement that she loves working as a nurse: she may not be able to continue doing so as a state employee.

We would like the Executive Board to be aware of these deep concerns of our health care providers and work to alleviate these job related concerns they have.
 
During the scheduled meeting, we finalized the results of our First On-Line Survey. These results indicated 2 priority needs of the voting membership:
#1 is ASEA membership health care
#2 is career and leadership training

In response to the primary concern of health related issues, the WIC has created a second on-line survey to address just health related issues.
This second survey is ready to be posted to the Pink Link web page.
It has been submitted to Reber who will post it there.

Regarding the second priority concern learned from the survey, we are taking action on the need for Career Related/Leadership Training.

Committee members are working together preparing power point presenta-tions to be posted on the Pink Link for all ASEA members to access at appropriate times to learn from the material. These power points will not have any music or video embedded in them, so there will be no data stream that would require any additional band width to view them.

We are still working towards putting together a training program in the Spring 2005 with the funds provided by the Executive Board and the donation from the Midnight Sun Chapter in the amount of $1,000.00.

Optimally, we would hope for each chapter to participate. They could help to pay for participants to travel to a training location. Or, if they have a large number of participants they could pay to have the AFSCME trainer come to their location. Training content and dates have not been established.

We do recognize that a very large percentage of Alaska state employees are due to retire in the next 5 years. For instance, within the Employment Security Division up to 50% will be eligible in the next 5 years. Our intention is to help the remaining ASEA membership prepare themselves for 21st century workforce diversity, organizational changes, and promotion within their field. We also want to newly hired persons to be forward thinking in their career opportunities.

Recently we did have one of our original WIC appointees take a job in the private sector. Susan Killary was a very active and supportive member of this committee and she will be dearly missed.

We are still seeking representation by Anchorage and Rural Alaska to serve on the Women’s Issues Committee. Our need for participants was included in the statewide email recently sent out by Jim Duncan reminding members that participation is needed on several committees.

We hope to have an article available for each Solidarity Update. Barbara Brandt has submitted an article for the next edition. Her topic is the origins of Women’s History Month in America.

We are hoping to network with other Women Committees in the lower 48.

Sincerely yours, in solidarity, the Women’s Issues Committee