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Alaska union leader resigns to take bigger job
by The Associated Press
Mano Frey, a leader of organized labor in Alaska for a quarter century, is leaving the state to accept a new and more powerful job in Seattle.
Frey, 53, will resign in January as the executive president of the Alaska AFL-CIO and business manager for Laborers’ International Union Local 341.
Frey will take over as vice president and regional manager for the Laborers’, overseeing union operations in eight Western states, Alaska and four Canadian provinces.
Frey’s wife, Eileen, a teacher, will finish the school year before joining him in Seattle. The couple’s two grown children, who live in Alaska, will stay behind.
Frey has helped shape policy and has been at the forefront of virtually every major battle between management and labor since being elected head of the AFL-CIO in Alaska in 1984.
Rode pipeline boom Frey rode the oil boom, arriving to Alaska in 1970 with Steve McAlpine, a former lieutenant governor. The two buddies, taking a semester off from university, showed up in Valdez and worked as laborers building the pipeline. McAlpine went back to school and became a lawyer.
“I was satisfied working,” Frey said.
He joined the Laborers’ in 1971 and became business agent, a staff position, six years later, Frey said. He moved to Anchorage in 1978.
Frey also serves on the executive committee of the Resource Development Council and is co-chair of Arctic Power.
Frey’s likely successor is Jim Sampson, a former state labor commissioner and former mayor of the Fairbanks North Star Borough. Frey said he will recommend Sampson.
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