Management officials from several states joined union leaders in Washington, D.C., to discuss recruitment and retention issues--including pay and benefit policies--during a recent meeting of the FPE/AFT Recruitment and Retention Task Force. This year, FPE/AFT locals will step up their efforts to educate lawmakers about the impending labor crisis in the public sector and lobby for pay and benefit enhancements as recruitment and retention tools.

Art Foeste, president of the FPE/AFT-affiliated Wisconsin Professional Employees Council (WPEC), says recruitment and retention "is the primary issue of this new millennium," particularly for the public sector, which has a higher percentage of older workers nearing retirement over the next 10 years. Fifty percent of WPEC's bargaining unit is 46 or older, he says.

"A lot of people think that [work force planning] is the employer's problem," says Foeste, who was accompanied to the meeting by Mike Soehner, acting director of Wisconsin's Department of Employment Relations' Division of Merit Recruitment and Selection. "I believe it also is a union issue. How does the labor organization ensure that we maintain our leadership and meet the needs of the people coming in the door?"

"We all understood it is our problem," says Betty Vines, president of the FPE/AFT-affiliated Kansas Association of Public Employees (KAPE), who also is a member of the task force. Bobbi Mariani, Kansas' personnel director, attended the FPE/AFT meeting with Vines.

In addition to monetary and nonmonetary incentives, such as flexible work schedules, that governments could offer employees, the group discussed alternative compensation plans, such as pay for performance and broadbanding. Paula Stoll, Montana's labor relations bureau chief, and Todd Lovshin of the FPE/AFT-affiliated Montana Education Association/Montana Federation of Teachers (MEA-MFT), discussed the alternative pay plans that have been negotiated in Montana. "The purpose behind [these plans]," says Stoll, "is to be more flexible as an organization" and to decentralize recruitment and retention efforts.

"With tight budgets, we are going to have to start working closer with management to try to settle some of these things ourselves," says Vines. "I just think it is going to be a necessity."

The task force will reconvene in March to continue its discussions. "Looking at issues that will affect the public sector in the future shows a lot of foresight on the part of the FPE/AFT," says Foeste.