POINTS TO PONDER
Issue 05-06
From: CSFC President Helen Zajac
CATEGORY: Membership April
10, 2005
Subject: NARFE NAME CHANGE
This is the article from the April 7, 2005 issue of The Washington Post, and is referenced in the NARFE Hot Line of April 7, 2005.
Of particular interest is the statement "NARFE is not a union" which we have heard from many federal agencies as the reason they will not let us recruit.
Please share this information with your chapter members and perhaps put in your chapter newsletter.
NARFE Changes
Its Name in an Effort to Broaden Its Appeal
By Stephen Barr, The Washington Post
In a bid to pump up membership and reach out to federal employees, the
organization that has represented the interests of government retirees since
1921 has decided to retire its name.
The National Association of Retired Federal Employees has renamed itself the
National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association. The group will
continue to use its well-known acronym, NARFE.
"What drove this is our desire to be more appealing to a wider group and to try
to bring in the active federal employees," said Charles L. Fallis, NARFE's
president. "One of these days, they are going to be retired, and they need to be
looking to this organization, which will be the only one fighting for them, the
rights they have earned, their annuities and their health care."
Although NARFE has 400,000 dues-paying members, Fallis said membership has been
sliding over the past decade. "All of the associations around here are finding
it difficult to grow. People today are not joiners like they were years ago," he
said. "We are hoping, with the name change, to sort of stem the trickle."
The typical federal worker gets interested in the group when nearing retirement,
and NARFE hopes to make the case that employees, regardless of how much longer
they plan to work, have a stake in ensuring that the association remains viable
and continues to lobby for them in the legislative and executive branches,
Fallis said.
For example, he said, Social Security is part of the retirement package provided
employees covered by the Federal Employees Retirement System -- a program of
major importance to NARFE. Delegates at the group's last national convention
voted to oppose individual savings accounts in Social Security and to oppose
investing Social Security funds in anything other than Treasury securities,
Fallis said.
He added, however, that while NARFE may be drawn into larger policy debates from
time to time, the group plans to focus most of its energy on traditional federal
retiree issues -- holding down health insurance premiums, backing legislation to
allow the premiums to be paid with pretax dollars and repeal of Social Security
provisions that reduce the retirement income of many retirees.
Fallis said NARFE is especially looking to current workers, especially those
covered by the old Civil Service Retirement System, to help overturn the Social
Security provisions -- the Government Pension Offset and the Windfall
Elimination Provision -- that, he said, "will slaughter them when they retire."
Changing the organization's name has been debated for years inside NARFE, but
the idea took hold last year at the group's convention in Reno, Nev. NARFE,
based in Alexandria, recently completed the legal paperwork for the name change
and has started the process of changing its name on signs, brochures and its Web
site (www.narfe.org).
Employees may join for $25 a year, $45 for two years or pay $60 for a three-year
membership. Benefits of membership include a subscription to the NARFE magazine,
e-mail alerts on policy issues and discounts on products sold by NARFE partners.
Fallis, a
Navy veteran of World War II and the Korean War and a former postal inspector,
said NARFE plans to begin offering pre-retirement seminars this summer to
federal employees. "The name change fits right in with that," he said.
NARFE is not a union, but it operates a political action fund that distributes
about $1 million annually on a nonpartisan basis to members of Congress and
candidates that share its policy goals, Fallis said.
The name change and recruitment effort could lead to competition between NARFE
and federal unions for new members -- what Fallis called "the downside" of the
name change.
But he said NARFE intends to partner with federal unions on shared concerns
while maintaining is traditional focus as "the personnel office, if you will,
for retirees."
NARFE's strength comes from members who are willing to bring retiree concerns
before members of Congress in their home districts, Fallis noted.
"If the grass roots aren't working, we are in trouble," he said. "We need full
engagement by all our people."