Ginette Rivard named recipient of our 2025 MSEA-SEIU Lifetime Achievement Award

MSEA-SEIU Retiree Director and Retirees Steering Committee Co-Chair Ginette Rivard, at right, accepts our 2025 MSEA-SEIU Lifetime Achievement Award from MSEA-SEIU President Mark Brunton and fellow MSEA-SEIU Retirees Steering Committee Co-Chair Penny Whitney-Asdourian on Nov. 7, 2025, during our 2025 MSEA-SEIU Annual Meeting Banquet. In presenting the award to Ginette, Penny made the following remarks:

By Penny Whitney-Asdourian
MSEA-SEIU Retirees Steering Committee Co-Chair

In 2013, our union established an annual Lifetime Achievement Award to recognize those retiree members who have demonstrated a lifetime of service to our union.

Recipients must meet the following criteria: active in being a leader; shows leadership in support of working families and retirees; advocates for retirees through the political process; promotes the spirit of retirees; and supports our retirees’ agenda.

Before we continue with this year’s recipient, let’s take a moment to reflect on two past recipients who are no longer with us:

• Billy Noyes of Jonesboro, who received our 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award, passed away April 25, 2025, at age 89.
• Bob Ruhlin, who received our 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award, passed away July 11, 2025, at age 82.

Please join me in a brief moment of silence in their memory. Thank you.

In choosing the recipient of our 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, the Retirees Steering Committee created a subcommittee of three past recipients to make the decision. This task fell to Lois Baxter, our 2019 recipient; Steve Keaten, our 2021 recipient, and yours truly as last year’s recipient.

We received several nominations, but only one of the nominees was nominated multiple times.  That spoke volumes to the three of us reviewing the nominations.  It is obviously reflective of the deep understanding and appreciation our membership has for this particular individual, whom we ultimately selected for this year’s award.

This year’s recipient has worked tirelessly for our union and all of us since joining state service and becoming a member of MSEA more than 3 decades ago.  They have served in so many capacities during that time, including, but certainly not limited to:

• A steward
• A member political organizer
• A member of multiple MSEA and labor/management committees
• An officer and delegate of their chapter, both as an active employee and as a retiree.
• A member of the Board of Directors
• Vice president of MSEA
• President of MSEA
• SEIU International Executive Board member
• Interim executive director of MSEA

By now most of you may have figured it out. Ginette Rivard, please step forward to accept our 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award!

Ginette’s record of service to our union is well-known, and we have all been empowered by her union leadership.

Steve Keaten may have put it best in describing Ginette’s leadership qualities back in 2007 when she ran for vice president, and I quote, “Ginette knows the importance of being politically active and is very experienced dealing with the members of our Legislature. I’m amazed at how many she knows. She has been in the Legislature many times until early hours in the morning successfully safeguarding funding for our contracts, health insurance and to stop the elimination of our jobs. She often takes her own earned time to do so and all of this while living in Caribou. That to me shows commitment and dedication to us as an organization.”

So that may be why, in 2007, we elected Ginette to serve as our vice president, a term she held until her election as our president in 2011. In fact, Ginette actually began serving as our president in late 2011 due to the retirement of past president Bruce Hodsdon. She actually has served as the longest-running president in MSEA history, from late 2011 through 2015.

Ginette led our union during one of our most challenging and difficult times: the LePage years. She understood we needed to fight back hard, and that we must continue fighting back hard, against his many cuts to state services, bargaining unit positions, attacks on workers’ rights, and attacks on our pensions, to name just a few. She put it this way in her first President’s Column in the Maine Stater: “We are going to need everyone participating to win for working families and retired workers in the next legislative session.”

Her words ring true to this day, and she continues to lead by example. She has continued her advocacy for public services, workers and our union as a retiree member of MSEA following her retirement from Maine DHHS in 2016.

One of the many shining moments in our history of advocacy in the political arena happened earlier this year, in January, and Ginette played a key role in it. Who remembers our fight to repeal the Social Security Offsets? We all joined in the decades-long fight to repeal the Offsets – the federal Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset. Almost 18 years to this day, on Nov. 6, 2007, Ginette traveled to Washington, D.C., with then-retiree member Phil Wolley to represent us at a U.S. Senate hearing in support of repealing the Offsets. This fight seemed like it would never end, but our union, in part through Ginette’s leadership, never gave up. And as you all know, this year we won with the signing of the Social Security Fairness Act of 2023 on Jan. 5, 2025! As a Retiree Director, Ginette returned to DC to represent us at President Biden’s signing ceremony at the White House.

The positive impact of repealing the Offsets has been enormous on MSEA members, myself included, and all other participants in the Maine Public Employees Retirement System. While emceeing our 2025 Retirees Day, Ginette shared that as a direct result of the law’s enactment, a total of 25,398 Mainers received retroactive payments totaling over $184.5 million, for an average retroactive payment of $7,265.76 as of June 2025. Their monthly benefits moving forward also have been increased as a result of the law’s enactment.

Ginette’s leadership has shown us that political action, while messy at times, does go hand in hand with our representational work in our worksites and our advocacy at the bargaining table.

Ginette, we are forever grateful for your service to our union. Congratulations on receiving our 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, and thank you for all you have done, and continue to do, for all of us!