Group presses Oregon to
enact ‘sweat-free’ policy
Anti-sweatshop activists are hop-
ing to persuade Oregon Gov. Ted Ku-
longoski to enact a “sweat-free” pol-
icy by executive order.
Since April, representatives of the
group Sweatfree Northwest have been
meeting monthly with the governor’s
labor liaison and the state’s chief pro-
curement officer to discuss such a pol-
icy. Sweatfree Northwest coordinator
Elizabeth Swager said her group
wants Oregon to require uniform ven-
dors to disclose which factories are
making the uniforms, and to declare
that to the best of their knowledge, no
local labor laws are being violated in
those factories.
The campaign has been endorsed
by about a dozen labor organizations,
including Oregon AFSCME and Ore-
gon State Fire Fighters Council.
The State of Oregon buys uniforms
for all sorts of workers, from snow
plow operators to state police officers.
Activists have yet to demonstrate that
any of the clothing purchased by the
state was made in sweatshops, but in-
dustry trends make that increasingly
likely. Sweatshops — factories that
violate international labor standards
and local labor laws — are the norm
in the garment industry, in which
companies shifted production abroad
in the last 40 years to take advantage
of lower wages. While there are some
garment sweatshops in the United
States, by far the worst abuses are in
the poorer countries.
Uniforms have been one of the last
bastions of U.S. apparel manufac-
tures, owing to the small, quick turn-
around nature of the market — and to
the Berry Amendment, which requires
the U.S. military to buy products man-
ufactured domestically whenever pos-
sible. But Roger Heldman, co-owner
of Seattle-based Blumenthal Uni-
forms, thinks a majority of the uni-
forms sold in the United States may
now be supplied by foreign factories.
Heldman said the police and fire uni-
forms his company sells to Portland
and the state of Oregon are still made
by union workers in several U.S.
states.
Sweatfree Northwest is part of the
national group Sweatfree Communi-
ties. A July 1 report by Sweatfree
Communities faults Cintas, one of the
vendors that sells uniforms to Oregon,
for abuses at a Honduras factory it
does business with. The abuses in-
clude unpaid overtime, illegally low
wages, and lack of safety equipment.
If Oregon adopts the sweatfree pur-
chasing rules, it would become the
eighth state to do so, joining Califor-
nia, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, New
‘Unity Team’
goal is to aid
in organizing
A delegation from Oregon attended the National SweatFree Summit in
Philadelphia July 11-13. The summit coincided with a meeting of the National
Governors Association. Participants at the SweatFree Summit rallied across
the street from the governors’ gathering to urge the elected officials to join
the sweatfree consortium. Pictured from left to right are Wes Brain of SEIU
Local 503, Les Jones of Elevator Constructors Local 23, Deborah Schwartz
of SEIU Local 503, Arthur Stamoulis of the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign,
and Al Bradbury of SEIU Local 49.
York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. So
far, the state commitments are largely
symbolic, said Liana Foxvog, Sweat-
free Communities national organizer.
The next step would be to launch
the Sweatfree Consortium, which
would hire independent monitors to
visit factories where uniforms are
made. The consortium will be
launched when the group gets finan-
cial commitments from participating
governments that have $100 million a
year in combined purchasing power.
So far, just three local jurisdictions
have made the financial commitment,
pledging a small percentage of the
purchasing budget.
One of them is the City of Port-
land, which passed a “sweatfree” res-
olution last year. A Portland city coun-
cil resolution created a committee
that’s crafting an ordinance to go back
for the council’s approval this fall.
Steelworkers team with Britain’s
Unite to establish global union
‘Bush Legacy’ bus tour stops in Oregon
Ariel Brantley-Dalgish checks out the Bush Legacy bus July 23 at Portland’s
Waterfront Park. The union-backed Bush Legacy Tour kicked off June 24 in
Washington, D.C., and is traveling to 150 cities this summer. Portland was the
29th stop on the tour. The State Capitol in Salem was stop number 30 the
following day. Using video and guide-by-cell-technology, the bus is an
interactive museum on wheels that encapsulates how Bush Administration
policies and conservative ideology have harmed workers and the economy.
“We mustn’t forget that Bush didn’t do this alone,” said Julie Blust of
Americans United for Change. “He had the help of Congress — members like
(Oregon U.S. Senator) Gordon Smith, who rubber-stamped his most
disastrous policies.” Blust and the tour bus pointed to “reckless tax cuts” for
millionaires and big corporations, and an energy bill written by and for big
oil companies who are now raking in record profits while gas and food prices
skyrocket. “Gordon Smith voted with Bush 81 percent of the time,” Blust said.
Americans United for Change was founded in 2005 to help stop Bush’s plan
to privatize Social Security. Oregon Action and several community leaders
hosted the tour bus stop in Portland.
AUGUST 1, 2008
The United Steelworkers signed a
pact July 1 with Britain’s largest
union, Unite, creating a global union
that will have 3.2 million members in
four countries.
The new global union is called
Workers Uniting. It will engage in
joint bargaining and organizing across
the Atlantic Ocean with such multi-
national employers as ArcelorMittal
— the world’s largest steel firm, Shell,
British Petroleum and Alcoa.
Unite General Secretary Derek
Simpson and Steelworkers President
Leo Gerard made it clear the new
union would be aggressive against
multi-national firms that try to cut
workers’ wages and conditions.
“Globalization is a man-made disas-
ter,” Simpson said.
“This union is crucial for challeng-
ing the growing power of global capi-
tal,” Gerard said. “Globalization has
given financiers license to exploit
workers in developing countries at the
expense of our members in the devel-
oped world. Only global solidarity
among workers can overcome this
sort of global exploitation wherever it
occurs.”
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
Under terms of the agreement, the
Steelworkers and Unite will keep their
headquarters in Pittsburgh and in Lon-
don, respectively.
Much of the new union’s business
will be carried out by teleconferenc-
ing. And the merger itself will not be
fully consummated until union attor-
neys on both sides of the Atlantic pore
over the agreement and adjust provi-
sions to conform to the labor laws of
the four nations involved.
The Oregon AFL-CIO is trying to
find ways to help affiliated unions or-
ganize nonunion workplaces.
In April, the state labor federation
brought Graham Trainor on staff to
coordinate the effort, which was man-
dated by a September 2007 conven-
tion resolution. Prior to that, Trainor
headed up the Oregon chapter of the
AFL-CIO’s community affiliate,
Working America. His new position is
funded by a grant from the national
AFL-CIO.
The effort — dubbed the Unity
Team — brings together unions that
are interested in organizing, so that
they can share resources.
In June, about two dozen union de-
cision-makers met to talk about ways
to collaborate. The group voted to un-
dertake six projects of varying sizes.
Those include helping recruit a ‘salt’
for one campaign, lending organizers
to help visit workers in their homes on
several campaigns, and turning out
members for a rally to highlight unfair
labor practices of a large corporation
that is being targeted by an affiliate.
Other ideas were floated. If a union
tries to organize in a remote part of
the state where it has no office, other
unions could make meeting or office
space available. The Working Amer-
ica member list — citizens signed up
by paid canvassers as supporters of la-
bor movement goals — could be lent
out as needed. And the AFL-CIO
would help smaller affiliates train
their organizers.
The decision-makers will continue
to meet quarterly.
Trainor is also helping to resurrect
the Oregon AFL-CIO Organizing
Committee, a kind of roundtable for
professional organizers to share ideas
and strategy. They’ll meet six times a
year, the second Tuesday of every
other month. Sept. 9 is the next meet-
ing. And the third Wednesday of each
month, union organizers will meet for
a happy hour event. “We want to build
a federation-wide culture of organiz-
ing,” Trainor said.
Zachary
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