NWLP-03-18-11:NWLP
Inside
3/15/11
10:16 AM
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MEETING NOTICES
See
Page 6
Volume 112
Number 6
March 18, 2011
Portland, Oregon
Hundreds rally in Salem
for jobs and solidarity
Leroy Marney of Laborers Local 121 passes his hard hat at a “jobs rally” in Salem March 7 to collect money for
entrenched public employees in Wisconsin who are fighting to save their collective bargaining rights. An estimated 750
union members, unemployed workers, and supporters of workers’ rights rallied at the front steps of the state Capitol
for jobs and to show solidarity with workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the Midwest. In about five minutes, $2,038.47
was raised.
SALEM — Oregon Gov. John
Kitzhaber reaffirmed his commitment
to workers’ rights and family-wage job
creation at a March 7 “Jobs Rally”
sponsored by the Oregon AFL-CIO.
“I want to start by making some-
thing perfectly clear: The state of Ore-
gon will not go down the road Wiscon-
sin has chosen,” Kitzhaber told a
crowd of about 750 on the Capitol
steps. “You have a governor who be-
lieves in the right of working people to
organize and form a union. You have a
governor who believes in the union
movement and believes in collective
bargaining.”
Union members from more than
two dozen locals, unemployed work-
ers, and supporters of workers’ rights,
including various small business own-
ers, took part in the noon rally calling
for more jobs for Oregonians and to
show solidarity with entrenched public
employees in Wisconsin and elsewhere
in the Midwest, where Republican law-
makers are trying to strip them of their
collective bargaining rights. At one
point during the rally, hats were passed
to take a collection for the Wisconsin
Wisconsin governor’s union-busting tactics ignite
national backlash; polling supports bargaining rights
The Wisconsin uprising continued
into its fifth week as this issue went to
press March 15. It began Feb. 11 when
Wisconsin’s new Republican governor,
Scott Walker, proposed a law to strip
175,000 Wisconsin public employees of
virtually all meaningful collective bar-
gaining rights, force them to pay more
for health care and pensions, and hold
annual elections in union workplaces to
see if workers want to go nonunion.
As detailed in the March 4 issue of
the Labor Press (available online at
www.nwlaborpress.org), the reaction
was spectacular: teacher sick-outs
briefly shut school districts across Wis-
consin; 14 state senate Democrats fled
to Illinois to deny the Republican ma-
jority the quorum they needed to take
action on the bill; thousands of union
supporters maintained a weeks-long 24-
hour-vigil inside the state Capitol build-
ing in Madison; and protests outside the
Capitol grew day by day, topping
70,000 Feb. 26.
Within two weeks, protests had
spread to 66 cities and every state capi-
tol in the nation. It wasn’t the specifics
of Walker’s bill that inspired such
broadly shared and deeply felt solidar-
ity. It was the example of the Wiscon-
sin community that rose up to oppose
it. Their fightback returned collective
bargaining to the collective conscious-
ness for the first time in years.
By the end of February, 73 percent
of Americans in a nationwide NBC
News/Wall Street Journal poll said
they’d seen, read, or heard news cover-
age about the protests; 77 percent said
public employees should have the same
collective-bargaining rights as private
sector workers; and 62 percent said it’s
unacceptable to eliminate employees’
collective-bargaining rights as way to
deal with state budget deficits, while
just 33 percent said it’s acceptable. A
separate NYT/CBS poll released a day
later found the same thing: Americans
oppose weakening public employee
bargaining rights by a margin of nearly
two to one (60 percent to 33 percent.)
But Walker has yet to back down.
His appointee in the state Depart-
ment of Administration ordered the
Capitol building closed to end the 24-
hour-a-day occupation by protesters,
and threatened to begin arresting them
Feb. 26. But Capitol police gave them
until Feb. 27 to leave. Local priests, min-
isters and rabbis joined them, prepared
to be arrested, but no arrests were made,
and protesters remained. Starting Feb.
28, Capitol police locked down the
building, preventing new protesters from
entering. AFSCME Council 24 went to
court March 1 to stop the limits on pub-
lic access to the state Capitol. On March
3, a Dane County Circuit Court judge
ordered the Wisconsin Capitol cleared
of protesters that evening and following
evenings, but also ordered that the Capi-
tol be open to the public during normal
business hours.
If ever-growing protest demonstra-
tions marked the uprising’s first stage,
the second stage began March 2 when
the Wisconsin Democratic Party an-
nounced a plan to recall Republican
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workers’ struggle. In about five min-
utes, $2,038.47 was raised.
Sean McGarvey, secretary-treasurer
of the national AFL-CIO’s Building
and Construction Trades Department,
said organized labor refuses to roll back
on such a fundamental right such as
collective bargaining.
“Our brothers and sisters don’t ask
for any more or any less than what’s
provided to every other entity that does
business with the state, the city, the
county, the town; and that’s a docu-
ment that spells out what’s expected
and what’s given in exchange of the
work that’s provided — and that’s a
collective bargaining agreement,” he
said.
“We’re also here about jobs, both in
the private and public sectors,” said
Tom Chamberlain, president of the
Oregon AFL-CIO.
Chamberlain said good middle-
class jobs are needed in the private sec-
tor to fuel the economy, and good mid-
dle-class jobs are vital in the public
sector in order to teach children, pro-
tect citizens from harm, and to take
care of the less fortunate.
“That’s what this is about — good,
middle-class jobs that benefit both the
private and public sectors. We need
both,” he said.
Kitzhaber said he is working with
both labor and business “to bring more
industrial land into production and
make sure the industrial land that we
have is used to produce good, long-
term, family wage jobs.”
He also outlined the need to funda-
mentally change Oregon’s health care
delivery system to improve public
health; improve the quality of care; and
reduce the cost of care. To address
those concerns, he said he will propose
legislation to transform health care de-
livery through integration of services;
incentives for prevention; and commu-
nity-based management of chronic
conditions.
“Health care can no longer be al-
lowed to grow at double digit rates. If it
does, it will continue to rob resources
from workers wages, from school
funding, and from our common social
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