A message from PEF Retirees President Ray Ferraro:
Interest in retirement issues growing
Statewide officers were elected at the May PEF Retirees Executive Board meeting. I was re-elected president for the next two years. New York City Chapter President Lorraine Ballard was elected vice president. And Rochester Chapter President Don Poulin was elected secretary.
I'm pleased to have this opportunity to continue working with fellow members of the Retirees Executive Board. It's important to organize our retirees and fight for the protection of pension and health benefits, as well as attaining an equitable and dependable cost-of-living adjustment to our pensions in the near future.
Active employees are becoming more interested in retirement issues. In April, I addressed a workshop at the International Association of Personnel in the Employment Services (IAPES) convention in Binghamton. Attendees had lots of questions for me and were obviously paying attention to retirement issues.
I also attended an April meeting of the AFT Retiree Committee in Washington, which was addressed by Social Security Administration Director Ken Apfel. He stressed the entire federal budget surplus is actually a Social Security surplus. Surpluses in the federal general budget will not occur until at least next year.
We must bombard our congressmen and senators with the message: "Do not raid Social Security funds!"
At the request of AFT, I attended the AFL-CIO Federation of Public Employees National Conference in May. The event drew about 400 activists from all 50 states. Workshops included protecting Medicare and Social Security, retirement planning and retiree organizing. I attended all of these and was a presenter at the organizing workshop.
I also spoke on state Comptroller H. Carl McCall's proposed COLA 2000 program at the May meeting of PEF Region 5 Veterans in Binghamton.
No chapter meetings are scheduled until September.