Inside
MEETING NO TICES
See
Page 4
V olume 109
Number 12
J une 20, 2008
P ortland
Experienced mixer adds ‘salt’ to nonunion bakery
Union organizer gets job
at a nonunion bakery, was
found out, fired, then
reinstated in an
out-of-court settlement
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
A month into her new job as union
organizer, Georgene Barragan saw an
ad on Craigslist.
“Breadsong Bakery seeks experi-
enced mixer,” said the July 12, 2007 ad.
“$9 an hour.”
Barragan, 46, is an experienced
mixer. In 18 years at union-represented
Fred Meyer Clackamas Bakery, she
worked just about every bakery job.
She’s also done nearly every union job,
starting as a shop steward, elected pres-
ident, and now as full-time staffperson
at Portland-based Bakery, Confec-
tionery Tobacco Workers & Grain
Millers (BCTGM) Local 114.
What if Barragan applied for the
Breadsong job to help workers there
join the union? That strategy, known as
“salting” has a storied history in organ-
ized labor. Local 114’s top officer, Sec-
retary-Treasurer Terry Lansing, liked
the idea. Barragan applied the next day.
With about 30 production workers,
Breadsong, in Lake Oswego, is more
hands-on and less mechanized than the
large industrial bakeries Local 114
mostly represents. But that doesn’t
mean Breadsong workers should make
lower wages. The loaves they bake —
specialty and organic breads under the
Fred Meyer, Franz and other labels —
sell for as much or more as the loaves
baked by unionized competitors. Inte-
grated Bakery Systems, Breadsong’s
corporate parent, owns a grain milling
operation in Arlington, Oregon, and in
2005 the company had been acquired
by agribusiness giant Cargill.
“We knew this was a company that
could afford to pay employees more,”
Lansing said.
To get hired, Barragan figured she’d
have to get creative on the application.
“Most recent position: union rep” prob-
ably wouldn’t win her an interview.
And listing the Clackamas bakery
might raise questions: Why would she
have left a $19.83-an-hour union job to
work for Breadsong at half the wages?
She didn’t reveal any of that informa-
tion on the job application.
Breadsong directed her to apply
through a temp agency. She had no
trouble getting the job.
From the moment she began at
Breadsong, Barragan worked to spark
a union campaign.
“I started talking about the union on
break, in the lunch room, and I’ll be
honest, on the shop floor too,” she said.
Co-workers could tell she was an
Local 114 organizer Georgene Barragan holds a notice by Breadsong Bakery
of Lake Oswego promising, among other things, not to discriminate against
employees for supporting a union. It will be posted at the bakery for 60 days.
experienced baker and were interested
to hear what things had been like at
union shops. “I’ve been here nine
years,” one co-worker told her, “and
haven’t had a raise in three.”
Barragan had to bite her tongue at
the treatment of employees. As a union
steward, she would challenge supervi-
sors when they violated a member’s
dignity. At Breadsong, her mission was
organizing, but sometimes she couldn’t
hold back. “Don’t yell at employees
from across the room,” she told one
manager. “If you have something to say
(Turn to Page 7)
Film crew documents postal security
breaches by Beaverton contract carrier
Carpenters strike Robinson Construction
The Carpenters Union launched an unfair labor practice strike in Oregon
June 2 against general contractor Robinson Construction. On June 9, more
than 100 people (pictured above) paraded a half-mile down North Basin
Street on Swan Island to a United Parcel Service (UPS) hub expansion project
where Robinson is the general contractor. The Pacific Northwest Regional
Council of Carpenters filed ULP charges May 22 with the National Labor
Relations Board after Robinson “unilaterally changed the terms and
conditions of employment” and “unlawfully threatened employees with
termination if they did not resign from the union.” Robinson has been
signatory with the Carpenters since the mid-’90s, said Pete Savage, regional
manager for the PNWRCC. Over the past six months, Savage said Robinson
stopped using the Carpenters hiring hall and implemented new insurance
and pension benefits. The contractor then sent letters to its unionized
workforce saying they had until May 23 to resign from the union. Savage said
the Carpenters now will leaflet Robinson construction sites throughout the
Western United States to inform customers at UPS, Costco, Toys R’ Us, and
elsewhere that the contractor is undermining area standard wages and
benefits.
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
Union leaders warned management
this would happen. If the U.S. Postal
Service (USPS) contracted out mail de-
livery in places like Beaverton, Oregon,
there would be accountability problems
and breaches of mail security, said Na-
tional Association of Letter Carriers
(NALC) officers like L.C. Hansen,
president of Branch 82 in Portland.
And that’s what Hansen found in
June when she and a hidden camera
crew followed Beaverton postal service
contractor Kerri Hattig for several days.
NALC’s national office had decided
to hire a film crew to document the
union’s struggle against postal privati-
zation. Their work will be shown at
NALC’s July 21-25 convention in
Boston. Members of the USPS Board
of Governors appointed by President
Bush have pushed postal managers to
privatize newly-formed postal delivery
routes in urban areas. [Rural routes
have long been delivered by private
contractors.]
Last year, as part of a union contract
settlement, USPS declared a morato-
rium on further subcontracting, but that
expires July 31.
The camera crew first traveled to
Miami in late May, where they filmed
one side of postal privatization —
worker exploitation. They followed a
poorly-paid Haitian-born legal immi-
grant as he drove his postal route,
which took him all over town.
Hansen said the Beaverton case
shows another side of privatization —
waste, inefficiency, and possibly nepo-
tism.
Hattig, who was the girlfriend of a
postal supervisor’s son when she got her
four-year contract last year, is paid
$24,380 a year for what Hansen esti-
mates is just over an hour a day of work.
In preparation for the film crew’s ar-
rival, Hansen read Hattig’s contract and
drove out to look at her sorting area in
the Beaverton post office and the route
itself.
Hattig’s contract requires her to de-
liver to 89 addresses in four “cluster
boxes” at Arbor Parc — a half-built
condominium development on which
construction had halted after the real es-
tate downturn hit. The development is
surrounded on all sides by routes deliv-
ered by union letter carriers, and Hansen
has argued for over a year that it would
make a lot more sense just to add Arbor
Parc to those union workers’ routes.
Hansen spent several days looking
in on Hattig and asking other USPS
employees about her work. She discov-
ered some irregularities.
A scanner that’s supposed to be
(Turn to Page 3)