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Keeping our commitment to open communication
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By Tom Bethel National President In keeping with our commitment to greater communication with the American Maritime Officers membership, this administration will host informational area meetings in key Gulf Coast and West Coast ports in the next several weeks. The schedule is:
AMO Plans Executive Director Steve Nickerson, Smith Barney Vice President Larry Goldstock and attorney Michael Reny will accompany us in all four ports. Like the informal AMO membership meetings we held in Baltimore and Portsmouth/Norfolk in May 2007, these Gulf and West Coast meetings are intended as conveniences for AMO members and applicants who cannot easily attend regularly scheduled monthly AMO membership meetings in the constitutional (official) ports of Dania Beach, Toledo and Brooklyn. Many AMO members and applicants live in or near New Orleans, Houston, San Francisco/Oakland and Tacoma or work aboard vessels that either call routinely at these ports or are berthed nearby. The agenda each time will be wide open, but topics will include administrative reform in our union since January 2007, collective bargaining, pending and forthcoming government shipping charters, AMO finances and properties, union policy initiatives and legislative and political developments that bear directly on job and benefit security for all AMO members and their families. Nickerson will report on the AMO Medical, Pension, Vacation and Safety & Education Plans and on measures taken to increase the day-to-day operating efficiency of the funds and enhance service from AMO Plans to AMO members and their families. Goldstock will explain his firm's management strategy for the AMO 401(k) Plan and the AMO Pension Plan Money Purchase Benefit, or MPB. Reny, who specializes in U.S. Coast Guard policy and procedure and the regulation of U.S. merchant mariner employment, will summarize the newly expanded AMO Coast Guard Legal Aid Program. Time will be set aside in New Orleans, Houston, San Francisco/Oakland and Tacoma for questions and comments from the floor. As in Baltimore and Portsmouth, no question will go unanswered. Each AMO official and each AMO Plans executive will be available all evening to meet individually with AMO members and applicants. The meetings in New Orleans, Houston, San Francisco/Oakland and Tacoma reflect this administration's permanent policy of bringing AMO meetings to the AMO membership whenever and wherever possible and practical. We believe strongly that the more AMO officials can get together with seagoing AMO members for open discussion, the better off we all are as a union. We also believe that every dues-paying member of American Maritime Officers and every applicant for membership in AMO is entitled to speak his or her mind freely and comfortably. We welcome dissenting views, professional criticisms and provocative questions because we believe everyone benefits from honest exchange. In that spirit, I encourage all AMO members and applicants living and/or working on the Gulf and West Coasts to make one or more of these meetings. I encourage you to bring whatever is on your mind and to speak up and speak out. |
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