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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (April 7, 2006)
Inside MEETING NO TICES See Page 6 V olume 107 Number 7 April 7, 2006 P ortland Labor all over map in governor’s race NW Oregon Labor Council ‘recommends’ Kulongoski, plus several other local candidates. For the upcoming May 16 primary election, most Oregon unions have de- cided by now whether and who to en- dorse for governor. Uncharacteristically, a number have taken a pass on the in- cumbent Democrat, and some have even backed a challenger. Governor Ted Kulongoski has the endorsement of the Oregon State Build- ing and Construction Trades Council, Teamsters Joint Council 37 and United Food & Commercial Workers Local 555, plus a “recommendation for en- dorsement” from the Northwest Oregon Labor Council. Under AFL-CIO bylaws, in state- wide races a central labor council can only make a “recommendation” to the state body for an endorsement. Recom- mendations are addressed by the labor federation’s Committee on Political Ed- ucation. The Oregon AFL-CIO’s COPE meeting was held March 10 — prior to the March 27 meeting when the North- west Oregon Labor Council made its decision. State COPE took no action in the gubernatorial primary and no fur- ther COPE meetings are scheduled prior to the election. And no public employees union has thus far endorsed Kulongoski, despite his having been an early union favorite in the 2002 election. As a labor attor- ney, in 1973 Kulongoski helped write the state’s public employee collective bargaining law. But as governor, he sup- ported making cuts to the Public Em- ployees Retirement System, angering many public employees. Oregon Council 75 of the American, Federation of State, County and Munic- ipal Employees declined to make a en- dorsement in the governor’s race. None of the Democratic primary candidates could muster enough votes for an endorsement from the Oregon Education Association, though it came close to backing the campaign for gov- (Turn to Page 10) Postal Workers donate to Union Food Bank Marie Clark of the American Postal Workers Union Auxiliary presents a check for $365 and more than 850 pounds of food to Mike Fahey of the Portland-based Union Food Bank during a banquet March 31 of the APWU’s Auxiliary and Multi-State Northwest Region Convention (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Alaska and Montana) at the Benson Hotel. The convention was hosted by Portland Local 128. Food and personal care bags were collected as part of the auxiliary’s Two-Can Do project to help those in need. The Union Food Bank distributes food boxes to 500 families monthly out of the Carpenters Union Hall in Northeast Portland. Portland on short list of massive Change to Win organizing drive LAS VEGAS — Portland is on a list of 35 cities the Change to Win labor fed- eration has selected to be part of a mas- sive organizing campaign it plans to launch the week of April 24. The seven-union federation unveiled its recruiting plans at a gathering of 2,000 CTW officials, organizers and members here last month, adopting as its slogan, “Make Work Pay.” The objective, said CTW Chairwoman Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union, is a joint effort to organize workers in “transportation, distribution, re- tail, construction, leisure and hospitality, health care, property serv- ices, laundries, food production and processing and other services.” Burger, speaking at the conference, estimated those sectors have 50 million workers combined. CTW’s unions — SEIU, Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers, UNITE HERE, the Labor- ers, the Carpenters and the Farm Workers — have an estimated 6 million members. They have also pledged to devote most of their money to organizing. The unions will be reaching out to unorganized workers as well as members of the public and politicians to support the notion that the United States cannot exist without a “vibrant middle class,” Burger said. “This campaign will empower the millions of workers to help them effect real change to make work pay.” Gene Pronovost, president of Tigard- based United Food and Commercial Work- ers Local 555 and an international union vice president, said CTW unions in the Port- land area are meeting to finalize their organ- izing plans. On the short list, he told the Northwest Labor Press, are possible cam- paigns at Three Mile Canyon Dairy, Wal- Mart, the Benson Towers condominium, Port of Portland drivers and the Oregon Lottery One of the focuses of the CTW convention March 19-21 was the creation of local cross-union campaign teams, which will work to- gether as single entities to unite workers of all the unions in their cities. “It’s a little different” from past union organizing drives by CTW members and others,” Burger stated. “Truth is, we’ve always done campaigns — but we’ve done them individually, union by union. And we still have these campaigns. But now, as we work on these in- dividual campaigns, we will be tying our work together and make it ‘In every campaign, no matter what union, we will be telling the world that working people are uniting to make work pay.’ all add up to something bigger.” “In every campaign, no matter what union, we will be telling the world that working people are uniting to ‘make work pay,’” she added. In practical terms, that means CTW unions will field joint organ- izing teams, just as two of the member unions — UNITE HERE and the Teamsters — are doing in their current drive to organize 17,000 workers at Cintas, the nation’s largest launderer of uniforms and other materials. But Burger also said CTW seeks worldwide support for the drive, because “corporations are global and so must we be.” Only with global cooperation, she stated, can unions “make global corporations raise living standards and respect workers’right everywhere — rather than dragging them down to the lowest level everywhere.” Some CTW leaders are comparing their organizing campaign with that of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) of the 1930s, when millions of workers joined unions. “We must remember that auto, steel and other basic manufactur- ing jobs weren’t always the good middle-class jobs they became af- ter World War II,” Burger said. When a large percentage of the workforce was unionized, labor was able to change low-paid manufacturing jobs into jobs that were the “backbone of the American middle class,” she said.
