Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 18, 2011)
NWLP-02-18-11:NWLP Inside 2/15/11 9:54 AM Page 1 MEETING NOTICES See Page 4 Volume 112 Number 4 Feb. 18, 2011 Portland, Oregon Union pension fund invests $22M in Coquille hospital Project will be financed by the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust and built by union workers Legislative conference for union members State Sen. Betsy Johnson, (D-Scappoose), (center wearing scarf) talks with union members during lunch at the Oregon AFL-CIO Legislative Conference Feb. 5 at the Sheet Metal Workers Local 16 hall in Northeast Portland. The conference, which drew nearly 100 union members, reviewed labor’s legislative priorities, shared ideas on how unions can work together across sectors to create change, and provided activists access to labor- friendly lawmakers and elected officials. Speakers included Attorney General John Kroger, State Treasurer Ted Wheeler, Secretary of State Kate Brown, and Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian. COQUILLE — Union pension funds will be used to help build a new $30 million hospital in Coquille. The AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust (HIT) is investing $22 million to construct a 60,000-square-foot, three- story building adjacent to Coquille Val- ley Hospital. The new facility has been designated a “critical access hospital” because of the need for medical care in the timber and farming community lo- cated 81 miles southwest of Eugene. The new hospital will be roughly double the size of the existing structure. It will have 18 beds with private rooms and house primary medical depart- ments, including surgery, obstetrics, therapy, laboratory, a pharmacy, an emergency room, and room for expan- sion of out patient programs. A 9,000- square-foot covered parking structure also is in the blueprint. The construction project will be 100 percent union-built under a project la- bor agreement between the Lane, Coos, Curry, Douglas Building Trades Coun- cil and The Neenan Company, a Col- orado-based design/build firm. It is ex- pected to create approximately 225 construction jobs. The project couldn’t come at a better time, as unemployment in the union construction trades in the region sits at nearly 40 percent, according to Pat Smith, secretary-treasurer of the Build- ing Trades Council. “Our members appreciate that the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust will invest in this project and provide (Turn to Page 3) King’s dream of economic justice is yet to be realized Decades after his death, nearly every American political movement would like to claim Martin Luther King Jr. as its own. The labor movement may do so with some credibility. Among members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Baptist minister is a kind of patron saint: He was martyred by an as- sassin’s bullet in Memphis, where he had campaigned in sup- port of a strike by black sanitation workers. In fact, King had a long relationship with organized labor. He sought union support for civil rights campaigns, chal- lenged labor to fight discrimination in its ranks, and came out time after time to defend striking union members. Michael Honey, a professor of labor and ethnic studies and American history at University of Washington, Tacoma, has written three books on King’s relationship to labor and the cause of economic justice. The latest, published January 2011, is “All Labor Has Dignity,” an edited collection of King’s speeches about economic justice. The book got its start when Honey found half a dozen never-before-published “labor speeches” in a file at King Center in Atlanta. King has for too long been pigeonholed as a civil rights leader, Honey says, when in truth the mature King might be better understood as a human rights leader. In a 1967 speech to the Teamsters, King described the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act as the first phase of the free- dom struggle, in which blacks won what should have been theirs to begin with as American citizens. “He never saw that as an end,” Honey said. “He saw it as a beginning.” It’s clear reading “All Labor Has Dignity” that King’s agenda for economic justice remains unfinished. The following excerpt is from King’s speech to the Fourth Constitutional Convention of the AFL-CIO, meeting in Mi- ami Beach, Florida, Dec. 11, 1961. “Less than a century ago the laborer had no rights, little or no respect, and led a life which was socially submerged and barren. He was hired and fired by economic despots whose power over him decreed his life or death.… Victor Hugo, literary genius of that day, commented bit- terly that there was always more misery in the lower classes than there was humanity in the upper classes. The inspiring answer to this intolerable and dehumanizing existence was economic organization through trade unions. The worker be- came determined not to wait for charitable impulses to grow in his employer. He constructed the means by which a fairer shar- ing of the fruits of his toil had to be given to him or the wheels of industry, which he alone turned, would halt and wealth for (Turn to Page 8)
