NWLP-02-18-11:NWLP
Inside
2/15/11
9:54 AM
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MEETING NOTICES
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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
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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
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