Introducing Pete Ford
By Pete Ford
Hello!! I am Pete Ford, the newly hired APEA Southeast Regional Manager,
and newly arrived Alaskan.
I am
very pleased with the opportunity to work for APEA and to be entrusted with
the privilege and responsibility to provide union representational services
to CEA members, as well as to all other APEA members. And I am equally
pleased to finally have the opportunity to find a job which permits me to
move up here to Alaska, a place I have visited over the past 20 years, but
had little hope that I might actually be able to arrange (or discover)
circumstances which would allow me to move up here.
Although I am new to
Alaska,
and certainly new to the “Alaska rules” of labor relations and collective
bargaining, I have some familiarity with collective bargaining in general.
For more than 25 years, I have worked as a labor relations advocate (both
for unions and employee organizations and as an independent consultant), and
as a private investigator, with a special emphasis in workplace issues,
disputes and litigation. I have functioned both in the private sector and
in the public sector, and I have worked under seven (7) different public
sector bargaining laws in four (4) different states.
With
the help of Business Manager Bruce Ludwig, Assistant Business Manager Dennis
Geary and Southeast Field Representative Angie Parker, I hope to become a
true full-service representative for
Southeast CEA members very quickly.
As you
may already know, Angie Parker and I currently comprise the primary
representational service staff for Southeast. The Juneau Office is located
at 211 Fourth Street, Suite # 306, in downtown Juneau; our office number is
(907) 586-2334, or 1-800/478-9991; in addition, I can be reached by e-mail
at
pford@apea-aft.org. Angie and I have distributed the Southeast
workload so that I am the primary representative for CEA members, but you
may, of course, call upon either of us.
Please
do not hesitate to call whenever you may have any question about collective
bargaining, provisions of the contract between CEA and the state or any
other workplace issue or concern. “A stitch in time saves nine”, “(a) ounce
of prevention is worth a pound of cure” and all those other homilies and
truisms apply to problems, issues and disputes in the workplace: the sooner
they are addressed, the more likely there can be a successful outcome.
Meanwhile, I will look forward to meeting as many of you
