SOLIDARITY — PEF members Susan DuBois and Steve Redler march in solidarity with the United Steel Workers striking against the Goodyear and Dunlop tire companies. This march was held in December in front of the Goodyear Tires store on Wolf Road in Albany. Photo by Prarie Wells, courtesy of the Capital District Area Labor Federation

Decades of quiet activism earn award

By SHERRY HALBROOK
PEF member Steve Redler is a quiet, behind-the-scenes activist who never loses focus on a wide range of issues he cares about intensely.

In December, the spotlight caught up with Redler when he was awarded the Jim Perry Progressive Leadership Award for his long history of activism.

Redler was one of three Albany-area activists honored by Citizen Action of the Capital District for their hard work and leadership on behalf of progressive issues. Redler is a former Citizen Action board member.

PEF Region 8 members know Redler as assistant council leader of PEF Division 234 at the state Office of Children and Family Services where he is a contract management specialist. And his fellow union activists know him as second vice chair of the Region 8 Political Action Committee and a delegate to the Albany Labor Council.

Redler is also a member of the Capital District Steering Committee of the Working Families Party (WFP) and he chairs the Political Committee of the Sierra Club’s Hudson-Mohawk Group.

Redler explains his constant activism as his way to, “help PEF have influence and public-sector involvement politically. It’s good to keep those public-sector issues on the political radar screens.”

His activism began when he was a student at SUNY Albany, where he was active in the university’s Protect Your Environment Club, working to protect the Pine Bush Preserve, and organized opposition on campus to the nuclear power plants on Long Island and in New Hampshire. Later, he helped found Friends of the Pine Bush.

He began his political activism in 1972 by joining a Vietnam War protest march in Albany and by founding a group called Albany Friends of the Farm Workers to support the United Farm Workers national lettuce and grape boycotts. In 1975, he joined the UFW staff in California as an organizer and worked on Gov. Jerry Brown’s presidential campaign.

Redler returned to Albany in the late ’70s, and soon went to work for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU which has evolved into UNITE), organizing a national boycott.

In late 1980, he took a job as a public assistance examiner with the Albany County Department of Social Services. Within months, he was a steward in his Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA) local and by 1983 he was president of it. He soon advanced to the CSEA Executive Board and became chair of CSEA’s Albany County Political Action Committee.

In 1987, when he went to work for the state Department of Social Services, Redler brought his wealth of political experience and contacts with him to PEF, where he never skipped a beat.

“Steve is always active and always involved. He just quietly gets the job done,” said PEF Region 8 Coordinator Tom Comanzo.

The Communicator Feb. 2007

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