Portland School District caused hardship for fired custodians
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
Five years, one month and 15 days
after her last work day, Elaine Smith
got her last paycheck.
Smith, 55, is one of about 320
union custodians who were fired by
Portland Public Schools in 2002 when
the School Board decided to out-
source its custodial department.
Thanks to the out-of-court settlement
to a class-action lawsuit, on Sept. 15
she found two checks totaling
$25,945.90 in her Southeast Portland
mailbox.
But the windfall came years after
the hardship it was meant to compen-
sate. Her husband Ken, a former
union boilermaker, drives a garbage
truck for the Housing Authority of
Portland as a member of Teamsters
Local 305. After her termination, they
totally exhausted their savings. They
sold an RV, took out a second mort-
gage, and even thought about cashing
in a life insurance policy. Last month
she took early retirement. Her first
monthly PERS check, for $2,200, will
arrive later this year.
“So many of our people suffered a
lot worse than I did,” Smith said.
Some co-workers lost their homes.
But Smith’s story — one of more
than 300 — is not untypical.
Smith says she grew up poor but
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The district had 900 custodians —
all members of School Employees
Local 140, an affiliate of the Service
Employees International Union —
when she began. By the time she was
terminated, it had just over 300 and
Local 140 later disbanded.
“The superintendents that make
these decisions come and go like
CEOs,” Smith said, “and people like
us, that have history with the district,
have to live with their decisions.”
Smith had worked 23 years when
PPS got rid of its in-house custodians,
replacing them with private janitors
who earned two-thirds the wages and
less than half the benefits.
“When they fired us, I lost a fam-
ily,” Smith said. “The teachers and the
students were part of that family.”
ceived the district’s new contract offer
— a roughly 30 percent cut in wages,
and a requirement that they start to
pay out of pocket for a portion of their
health insurance premiums.
Smith said she’s outraged for her
former co-workers, but glad she’s not
among them. Her blood pressure went
down greatly after she left the district,
and now she has time to care for her
dogs, raise and sell flowers, and spend
more time with her husband. “Still,”
she said, “I miss the kids.”
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Roger G. Worthington, P.C. leads the fight to find a cure
ELAINE SMITH
happy in St. Johns as the daughter of a
PPS custodian. Her father worked at
Roosevelt High School (where she
graduated in 1970) and earned enough
to keep the family just above the
poverty line. In her 20s, though she
made good money as a union-repre-
sented waitress, Smith found she had
to pay $30 a month for individual
health coverage through Kaiser. So
she went to work as a School District
custodian in 1979, because the district
paid the health insurance for its em-
ployees. Her brother later joined her
as a PPS custodian. Her father retired
in 1981.
“When I started, the district was
very family-oriented,” Smith said.
“Now they’re running it like a corpo-
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Smith had worked at Southeast Port-
land’s Lane Middle School her last
three years at the district. She worked
hard to keep in touch with her fellow
custodians. Her brother, who also lost
his job as a district custodian, found
work at the Housing Authority of
Portland.
After an Oregon Supreme Court
decision forced the district to offer re-
call to the custodians, Smith was one
of the majority who chose not to go
back.
“People don’t trust the district any
more,” Smith explained.
Smith’s instincts proved true. The
custodians returned under what Smith
calls an “illegal contract” — a set of
terms that no custodian had voted to
approve. And a year later, their union,
Service Employees Local 503, re-
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