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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (March 3, 2006)
Let me say this about that ...Cookie’s legacy (From Page 2) Telegraphers Local 92. After her retirement she devoted more time to work- ing on behalf of labor’s political action programs. “What we have won on the picket line,” she often said, “we must now protect through effective political action.” “She became the friend and confidant of many Oregon political leaders, including U.S. Senators Wayne Morse and Richard Neuberger, Congress- woman Edith Green, Governor Robert Holmes and Mayor Terry Schrunk” the Labor Press said in her obituary. Gov. Holmes had appointed Mrs. Cook to the Oregon State Committee on Services to the Aging. ANOTHER ACTIVITY of the woman known as Cookie was reported on by the Labor Press in these words: “She compiled huge files of clip- pings and source materials on labor and politics, and often worked on this project long after midnight.” In her will, she bequeathed her voluminous files to the Multnomah County Labor Council for a research library in the Labor Temple, a building situated on SW Fourth Avenue at Jefferson Street, diagonally across from City Hall. However, the labor council lacked the space for a library and gave her files to the Oregon Historical Society so that researchers could utilize them at the Oregon History Center in the Portland Park Blocks. The Labor Press obituary on Mrs. Cook also said: “She was our last liv- ing link with the pioneer days of unionism. The cause of labor was her re- ligion and her life. Mrs. Cook devoted her long life to the labor movement and to helping the underdog. She spent much of her life in near-poverty be- cause she was more interested in advancing the cause of unionism than in her own comfort or gain.” NEARLY EVERY UNION office in Portland was closed during O.D. Cook’s funeral on the afternoon of Wednesday, Dec. 10, 1958 so that those working in the offices could join her other friends at her last rites. Hundreds of people were there, this newspaper reported. (Information on Mrs. Cook’s life came from Labor Press articles written by then-Editor Jim Goodsell, who now lives in Twisp, Wash., and Associate Editor Emsie Howard, who is deceased.) Going back to the history of Western Union, the New York Times noted that the company completed installation of the first transcontinental tele- graph line in 1871. An old reference tome in my bookcase said that line ended on a San Francisco hill that became a piece of real estate known as Telegraph Hill. THE MONEY TRANSFER SERVICE of Western Union has long been its biggest money-maker and will continue to operate. Millions of cus- tomers worldwide have utilized the service, which enables customers to send and receive money without going through a bank. To handle the money transfers, the NYT said “ the company has 271,000 locations — 80 percent of them outside the United States — in more than 200 countries.” PEOPLE USED TELEGRAMS to notify family and friends of per- sonal events like births, deaths and other milestones of life. A 10-word telegram was the most inexpensive way of speedy communication. I can re- call that my family got news by telegram of a relative’s tragic death in a neighboring state in the Midwest — my uncle, my mother’s brother-in-law, had been crushed by the door of his barn when a cyclone wrenched it loose while he was standing near it. Another personal note from my childhood days; Another uncle, a bach- elor who often visited and occasionally brought me small gifts was a teleg- rapher for Western Union. After he received a telegraphed message for someone in his town he would print it out in strips of words on a yellow Western Union form; if a messenger wasn’t immediately available to deliver it, my uncle would inform the woman at the customer counter that he would deliver it. And off he would he’d go in a suit, white shirt and tie pedaling the office bicycle. FROM TIME TO TIME, I wouldn’t see my telegrapher uncle for a week or two. When asked about his absence, I learned that he’d been a U.S. soldier in World War I and that the Germans had attacked his infantry unit with mustard gas. The chemical had left him with a health problem for which he’d periodically undergo medical treatment at a Veterans Hospital. MANY ORGANIZATIONS used Western Union telegrams for internal communications with shops and offices at different locations. Newspapers were among the companies that made frequent use of Western Union. Earlier in my career, I worked on daily newspapers in other states, which depended on West- ern Union to transmit stories from reporters who were covering events at loca- tions within the papers’circulation areas but many miles from their newsrooms. MARCH 3, 2006 Portland Letter Carrier reports on Venezuela trip To The Editor: I recently spent two weeks in Venezuela, South America, represent- ing Portland Jobs with Justice and the National Association of Letter Carriers Branch 82, as part of a Portland fact- finding delegation to check out the rev- olutionary changes going on there. I particularly spent time with postal workers and with union activists. I walked into a post office in down- town Caracas, connected with the union shop steward, the union presi- dent, and spent six hours talking with letter carriers, clerks, supervisors and union officials. What I found was that the “revolution” is unfolding right in- side the post office. Before President Hugo Chavez was elected, the post office was rife with corruption. Top managers were siphon- ing off postal revenues into their own pockets and union officials were getting in on the take. Union bureaucrats had not held direct elections for decades. After Chavez’ election in 1998 and the creation of the new, pro-workers’ rights constitution, union activists forced democratic elections, disaffili- ated with the old-guard union federa- tion and later helped form the new, mil- itant UNT federation. They were able to use their newly-won right-to-strike to throw out the corrupt postmaster, to win one elected position on the Postal Board of Governors, an on-site child care cen- ter, and an on-site health clinic for workers and their families. Venezuelan postal workers have won 25-years-and- out with 100 percent of pay in retire- ment, and unlimited sick leave. This revolutionary labor union also won community access to their health clinic, and community access to post office class rooms, which provide basic liter- acy and high school completion for un- der-educated adults, so that they too could become postal workers. Venezuela has a lot of oil. So they have a lot of money coming in to lift up the poor and improve workers’ lives. But Venezuela also gets the attention of the Bushites, who like oil for them- selves. Venezuela is also promoting what it calls “food sovereignty” and “endogenous development,” which fa- vors local farmers and local industries and opposes market domination by U.S. imports and export-oriented U.S. cor- porate sweatshops. Venezuela is boldly challenging the Bush Administration and their free- trade, pro-corporate, privatization agenda on a world scale. Venezuela has been in the lead in organizing the dis- ruption of free-trade talks at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and at the Summit of the Americas. No wonder the Bushites and their corporate cronies are nervous and have made several unsuccessful attempts to unseat the elected President Hugo Chavez, including a military coup (2002), an oil industry sabotage and lockout (2003), and a recall referendum (2004). “U.S. Secretary of War” Don- Open Forum ald Rumsfeld recently heated up the rhetorical challenge by comparing Chavez to Hitler. The threat of continued U.S. intervention is very real, especially when looking at the history of repeated U.S. military and covert operations against pro-worker governments and movements in Latin America. What we found in Venezuela was a militant, democratic labor union move- ment sweeping the country; challeng- ing government bureaucrats and corpo- rate owners; dedicated to not only improving wages, hours and working conditions for their members but taking control of production and distribution decisions, serving the community and improving the lives of all workers. We found a government under a new constitution which guarantees not only the right to vote but the right to afford- able food and housing, free health care and education through university, a se- cure retirement, and land, seed, equip- ment, credit and technical assistance for small farmers and small businesses, es- pecially co-ops. President Chavez calls this “socialism for the 21st century.” A Venezuelan union leader will speak, Sunday, March 19, 7 p.m. at the Carpenters Union Hall, 2215 N. Lom- bard. PCASC is leading another labor delegation to Venezuela in November (503-236-7916). Check out www. venezuelanalysis.com. Jamie Partridge Letter Carriers Branch 82 Portland Organizing Oregon child care workers SALEM — Service Employees In- ternational Union (SEIU) Local 503 will have a role representing 6,000 unli- censed in-home child care providers in Oregon, thanks to an executive order signed by Governor Ted Kulongoski signed Feb. 13. The child care providers are typically family, friends, or neighbors of low-in- come parents, paid by the State of Ore- gon to care for the children while the parents are at work. Payment ranges from $1.60 to $2.20 an hour per child, and providers can care for up to three children not related to them without go- ing through licensing and certification. The same program also pays 1,600 “licensed and certified” in-home child care providers. Under a similar execu- tive order signed September 2005, Ore- gon Council 75 of the American Feder- ation of State, County and Municipal Employees represents that group, along with about 3,000 licensed in-home providers who don’t take the subsidy. The two unions have competed to represent in-home child care providers in Oregon and other states. Kulongoski split the group, with AFSCME getting the more-established providers and SEIU getting the lower-income, higher- NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS turnover group. The two unions’campaigns to repre- sent child care providers are quite un- conventional in several ways. The gov- ernor’s executive orders specify that the providers aren’t employees of the state. The unions won’t “represent” them in the classic sense of collective bargain- ing that produces a labor agreement; in- stead, the orders direct the Oregon De- partment of Human Services (DHS) to “meet and confer” with the unions over issues like training, reimbursement rates, and health and safety conditions. Any agreement they reach will be spelled out in a non-binding memorandum. Abby Solomon, lead organizer on the SEIU campaign, said that “meet and confer” language is similar to legal lan- guage in states that don’t have a public employee collective bargaining law. Solomon said in-home child care work- ers are similar in many ways to the in- home health care workers SEIU union- ized several years ago: Small-scale low-wage helpers, often related to the clients they serve. If anything, their sta- tus is somewhere between employee and program beneficiary, as many would be doing the work anyway. Child care worker Mary Bronson, 68, gets $1,600 a month from the pro- gram to look after her five great-grand- children. Bronson was doing the work anyway before her granddaughter found out about the program, but the income from the program enabled her to move to a safer neighborhood. When an SEIU representative knocked on her door, Bronson was ready to join. She thinks by teaming up with other child care providers in the same program, they can try to get better wages, and maybe even health benefits, so that she could afford dental care. It’s a basic principle of unionism — unifying for a common goal. SEIU won such benefits for the home health care workers it unionized in 2001, and Solomon said SEIU hopes to pull off a similar win for family child care providers. The group is very low wage, and without immediate hopes of a union contract, it’s not clear when they’ll get to the point of paying dues and achiev- ing full union membership. But for SEIU, representing the interests of child care providers is a way to organize very- low-wage workers into an economic and political bloc that will support adequate funding for public services. PAGE 11
