Inside
MEETING NO TICES
See
Page 6
V olume 108
Number 8
April 20, 2007
P ortland
Labor will honor
Or egon w orkers
killed on the job
“Mourn for the Dead. Fight Like
Hell For The Living.”
Mother Jones’s most famous quota-
tion has been at the heart of each
Workers Memorial Day since it was
first observed in 1989. Workers
Memorial Day is a day each year when
America’s workers and their unions
honor the thousands of men and
women killed on the job and the hun-
dreds of thousands more hurt or made
ill by workplace hazards.
On this Workers Memorial Day,
April 28, events and actions around the
nation also will celebrate the more than
a quarter of a million working men and
women alive today because of the far-
reaching and successful workplace
safety battles workers and their unions
have won.
The national AFL-CIO estimates
that more than 324,000 workers now
can say their lives have been saved
since the passage of the Occupational
Safety and Health Act in 1970.
Unfortunately, on an average day in
the United States, 152 people still lose
their lives as a result of workplace in-
juries and diseases, and another 11,780
are injured, according to the U.S. Bu-
reau of Labor Statistics.
In Oregon, the AFL-CIO will hold a
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memorial rally at noon on Friday,
April 27, on the steps of the State Capi-
tol in Salem. The keynote speaker will
be Gov. Ted Kulongoski. The memo-
rial service will include a reading of
the names of the 69 workers killed on
the job in Oregon in 2006, as well as
L 28
IT’S TIME
the 19 Oregon soldiers killed in mili-
tary service last year. (A list of those
names appears on Pages 8 and 9 of this
issue.)
The Oregon AFL-CIO also is asking
all union members to make arrange-
AFL-CIO
ments with their employers to observe
a moment of silence during their work-
day. Everyone is invited to the cere-
mony in Salem.
Portland union members tell Congress: ‘No new NAFTAs’
The week after their layoff, Portland Freightliner workers Sylvann Gilbertson (left), Tony Mims, and Joyce Gover
demonstrate outside Oregon U.S. Senator Ron Wyden's office April 4. Wyden supported NAFTA as a U.S.
congressman in 1993, which made it easier for companies like Freightliner to move factories to Mexico.
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
A week after Portland-headquartered
Freightliner Corporation ended local
manufacture of its most famous product
line, Freightliner workers gathered five
floors below an Oregon U.S. senator’s
federal building office to tell him how
they felt about it. NAFTA, the North
American Free Trade Agreement, made
it easy for Freightliner to shift produc-
tion, demonstrators said; trucks they
made in Portland will be now made in
Mexico by workers making less than
one-fourth their wages.
In 1993, when NAFTA passed 234-
200 in the U.S. House of Representa-
tives, Ron Wyden was a congressman,
one of the two-fifths of House Democ-
rats to vote in favor. President George
Herbert Walker Bush negotiated the
treaty, but President Bill Clinton pushed
it through Congress. The passage of
NAFTA led many labor union members
to feel the Democratic Party had turned
its back on working people.
Since NAFTA, eight other “free-
trade” agreements have passed Con-
gress, including agreements with Jordan,
Chile, Singapore, Australia, Morocco,
Bahrain, and Oman, plus CAFTA — an
agreement with the Dominican Republic
and five Central American countries.
Congress also voted to remove human-
rights-related restrictions on trade with
China and Vietnam.
Now, NAFTA-style treaties with four
other countries are up for ratification:
Peru, Colombia, Panama, and South
Korea. Of the four treaties up for ap-
proval, the Korean agreement is most
likely to impact the U.S. economy.
South Korea has almost 50 million peo-
ple. Its economy is the world’s 10th
largest, and one-tenth the size of the
U.S. economy. The AFL-CIO says the
pact would hurt workers in autos, tex-
tiles and electronics. It’s also opposed
by unions in Korea. One Korean worker
opposed to the treaty set himself on fire
in protest.
But some trade watchers think the
winds have shifted in Congress. In 1993,
NAFTA had the support of 102 Democ-
rats; CAFTA, in 2005, had just 15.
“The old Clintonite version of the
Democratic position on trade is in re-
treat at this point,” said Larry Weiss, ex-
ecutive director of the Citizens Trade
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