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NwPACC Executive Director Is Seminar Presenter
GREENVILLE, Pa. -- Health care routinely is the first item on the agenda for labor contract talks and the last to be solved. Sometimes it doesn't get settled -- a primary cause of labor strikes. In 1998, three years after operating a health care purchasing cooperative, employers and union members of the Northwest Pennsylvania Cooperation Council pioneered a Taft-Hartley benefit trust, providing health care to 7,000 lives. The plan is one of a few multi-employer, multi-unionTrusts offering health care benefits in the United States, according to Dick Miller, executive director of NwPACC. The trust is one of only two initiated and administered by a labor-management committee such as NwPACC; the other, Miller says, is based in Peoria, Ill.Focusing on the trust, Miller, will be among the presenters June 10 when the Labor Education Institute and Keystone Research Center host a conference, "New Ways of Working Together:Partnerships for Change in the Workplace and the Community," at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Harrisburg. This seminar invites policy makers and practitioners to discuss and buildnew networks.Pennsylvania faces an array of momentous tests: shifts in the economic and labor markets, changing family and work responsibilities, urban sprawl and challenges to development in rural areas, and the decline of older communities, Miller says. To respond, Pennsylvanians are engaging in collaborative approaches to these changes.The symposium will feature sessions in which nationally known practitioners provide a framework for the social and economic transitions, and also identify concrete efforts to work together in new ways. Key speakers include: state Secretary of Labor and Industry Stephen Schmerin; Drs. Amy Liu and Mark Muros, authors of the Brookings Institution's report on Pennsylvania entitled "Back to Prosperity"; Amy Dean, president of Working Partnerships USA; and Dr. Nina Sazer O'Donnell, vice president and director of child, family, and community programs for the Families and Work Institute in New York.For symposium information, visit: www.keystoneresearch.orgVisit Northwest Pennsylvania Cooperation Council: www.nwpacc.org"