Last year you made a decision to ensure that PEF had the resources necessary to continue to build our ability to fight for stronger contracts, job security, pension reform, and full staffing. With that decision we began the process of building PEF’s strength for the challenges which certainly lay ahead. Since the last convention we have worked toward achieving those goals and will continue to build on the success of the past year.

PEF made significant strides in many areas, with perhaps the most significant gains in the area of pension reform. The enactment of pension enhancements last October, such as COLA and the elimination of pension contributions for tier three and four members after ten years in the state retirement system were major achievements and the culmination of many years of effort. However, much more work remains to be done.

We continued to press for additional pension enhancements and greater tier equity. At the federal level, through PEF’s efforts and with the assistance of our international affiliates AFT and SEIU we were able to achieve a change in the Federal Tax Code that allowed the rollover of 457 accounts into other tax deferred savings plans. On the state level we are working for tier equity, and introduced legislation that if passed will provide additional pension service credit to our tier three and four members who have paid into the retirement system beyond the current ten-year cut-off for contribution elimination.

Our mobilizing activity has been broadly increased throughout our membership. We have identified issues threatening our terms and conditions of employment and created initiatives to respond that will protect our member’s jobs, contract rights, workplace safety, and professionalism.

Our efforts have brought the issue of short staffing into focus for much of the public, by raising the issue and identifying the dangers of short staffing and its threat to the vital public services our members provide across the state.

We have attacked these problems through legislation, mobilization and media outreach by demonstrating its negative impact on everything from care for the developmentally disabled and mentally ill to nursing care and parole.

We’ve introduced and shepherded legislation in both the Assembly and Senate that would establish safe staffing levels and eliminate mandatory overtime for our nurses.

We fought the State’s efforts to eliminate treatment options for the state’s most vulnerable, children and adults with mental illness, and stopped the state’s plans to close and consolidate children’s and adult psychiatric centers.

We’ve worked with the legislature in their attempts to reform the Rockefeller drug laws to provide the most effective and appropriate treatment for drug offenders. We’ve worked with the legislature to increase public safety by increasing programs available to prepare inmates in the state’s correctional facilities for release into our communities and to increase the level of post release supervision once the inmates are released.

We’ve worked to bring an increased level of accountability in the state’s “shadow” agencies by introducing legislation requiring that those agencies be covered by the state’s civil service system.

We have taken steps to protect and enforce the contract we negotiated, despite the state’s attempts to reinterpret and achieve through implementation memos what they did not achieve through negotiations.

We are currently in arbitration on the implementation date for stand-by/on-call pay and the state’s implementation of time-keeping requirements that violate what was negotiated in the contract.

With our efforts to protect what was negotiated in the last contract as a backdrop we are preparing to negotiate our next contract. We have learned what works well in a contract fight and what does not. We will have the resources and mobilizing network in place to begin to level the playing field with the state and negotiate peer to peer.

As successful as we have been in moving legislation, raising the profile of our issues, and mobilizing around our causes, we must remain focused on our goals to achieve them. The theme for this year’s Convention is “Charting the Course.” We have identified the direction we need to take and the goals we need to achieve. With your help, we can move forward to improve the lives of the members we have all been elected to represent.