Team MAPE supports MAPE friendly candidates and legislation. Our issue priorities include: achieving fair compensation for state employees, fixing our broken health care system, preventing outsourcing and privatization of state services and protecting our pension and retirement benefits.

MAPE BA Tom Dougherty retires April 1

Submitted by mcody on February 14, 2012 - 10:03am

‘… For the last thirty-five years, I’ve worked on the side of the angels’

When MAPE Business Agent Tom Dougherty retires April 1, he will be concluding a 35-year career in labor. He has traveled the country and served in almost every role.

(In the photo on the right, Dougherty is pictured serving root beer floats at an ice cream social for MAPE and AFSCME members in the Lafayette area.)

That includes serving as a BA for MAPE for the last 13 years. As a business agent for MAPE, the only part of the membership he hasn’t served is in southwestern and northwestern Minnesota.

What are his retirement plans? After he spends some time traveling and visiting friends and family around the country, he will join his wife, Sherrie, as a volunteer helping inter-city children learning to read.

Although Dougherty hadn’t planned on a career in labor, “… when the opportunity afforded itself, I didn’t think twice. I don’t regret a minute of it,” he said. “I figure, for the last thirty-five years, I’ve worked on the side of the angels.”

Dougherty majored in journalism in college. Then, after school, he made what he thought was a temporary move from his native Southern California to Provo, Utah.

But then he was offered and accepted a BA job for Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) in Denver, Colo. The offer came from the father of a high school friend of his, who was serving as an international representative for OPEIU in Denver. Dougherty told him he didn’t have any experience in labor. “He said it didn’t matter; ‘I’ll be your mentor.’ ”

In 1981, Dougherty became an international representative for AFSCME, serving in roles from Florida to Alaska. “There’s really not a part of the country I wasn’t assigned to,” Dougherty said.

While some may consider frequent moves around the country for work as a great way to see the sights, Dougherty sees a less romantic side to it. “The reality is you’re working and you don’t get a chance to savor the ambiance,” he pointed out. He’s grateful that he had the opportunity to travel the country, but he’s also glad that he doesn’t have to do it any longer.

When he accepted the business agent job at MAPE, he had completed his assignment in the Twin Cities and he would have had to move to Albany, New York. He chose to work for MAPE, instead.

Some feel the battles labor is having now in Minnesota and all across this country started last year in Wisconsin or much earlier when the Reagan administration fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981. But, Dougherty traces the strife back farther to when Coors replaced its workers who went on strike in 1977 and later decertified the union.

“Here we are so many years later in Minnesota seeing an extension of that siege,” he said.

What is it going to take to turn things around for labor? “Any success we see is going to be prefaced by success in the election arena,” said Dougherty, who added that he was “hard-wired” to be a progressive. “Democrats have to convince Americans that they need to invest in America.”