MAY 6, 2011:NWLP
Inside
5/3/11
9:54 AM
Page 1
MEETING NOTICES
See
Page 6
Volume 112
Number 9
May 6, 2011
Portland, Oregon
Koch brothers have
presence in Oregon
Mahlon Mitchell (far left in uniform), president of the Wisconsin Firefighters Association, leads 2,500 people (below)
on a march through downtown Portland April 16, part of the Portland Rising rally for jobs.
2,500 rally in Portland for
jobs and the middle class
Tired of being blamed for the eco-
nomic crisis, a crowd of 2,500 union
members, faith groups, and community
allies gathered at Pioneer Courthouse
Square April 16 before parading
through the streets of downtown Port-
land with a call for fairness, more jobs,
and saving social safety net programs.
“Now this is what democracy looks
like,” said featured speaker Mahlon
Mitchell, president of the Wisconsin
Professional Firefighters Association.
Since his election in January as the
first black president of the Firefighters
Association in Wisconsin, Mitchell, 33,
has been on the front lines fighting the
Republican-controlled Wisconsin Leg-
islature’s attacks on public employee
collective bargaining rights.
At least a dozen other state legisla-
tures led by Republican governors have
followed suit — all under the guise of
saving taxpayer money.
“This isn’t about money,” Mitchell
said. “This is about an attack on the
middle class, and this is about an attack
on workers’ rights. We cannot just sit
idly by and let that happen.”
Rally supporters believe a massive
public works program could be funded
and social safety net programs bolstered
if only Congress would require major
corporations and the very rich to pay
their fair share of taxes. Currently the
financial industry and large corpora-
tions are not paying their fair share. For
(Turn to Page 9)
Participants dressed like U.S.
Supreme Court justices to protest
pro-corporate judicial decisions.
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
At a Georgia-Pacific paper mill in
Wauna, Oregon, and three company
warehouses in Portland, 900 members
of United Steelworkers (USW) and In-
land Boatmen’s Union (IBU) are poised
to go on strike.
On the surface, the disputes are about
health care and pension issues. But the
disagreements may also be stemming
from ideas from higher up than Georgia-
Pacific’s own management. GP was
bought in 2005 by Koch Industries, the
privately-held conglomerate owned by
billionaire brothers Charles and David
Koch (pronounced “coke”). Charles
Koch lays out his business theories in
“The Science of Success: How Market-
Based Management Built the World’s
Largest Private Company.” Local union
leaders say the book has become the
bible for GP managers.
The two brothers espouse a hard-line
anti-government, anti-regulation philos-
ophy, and over the years have supported
those ideas with over $100 million in
donations to conservative think tanks,
Tea Party groups, and Republican can-
didates. They’ve also broken new
ground in proselytizing employees,
sending packets last year to all local
Georgia-Pacific workers urging them to
vote for Republican candidates like
Dino Rossi and Jaime Herrera Beutler
in Southwest Washington and Chris
Dudley in Oregon. Sixteen of the 19
Washington candidates Koch Industries
endorsed were Republicans; the other
three were members of the conservative
Democratic “road kill caucus.”
USW representative Gaylan Prescott
said in his nearly 30 years in the labor
movement he’s never seen that level of
direct political involvement by an em-
ployer.
“They’re just right in your face
telling you who to vote for, telling you if
these people don’t get elected, it’s going
to have negative effects on their business
and consequently your job.”
USW represents 790 workers at the
(Turn to Page 10)
Bob Tiernan will oversee
bargaining at Dosha Salon
Newly unionized Dosha Salon and
Spa has hired former Oregon Republi-
can Party chair Bob Tiernan to handle
upcoming contract bargaining with its
own workers.
The full-service salon appears to
have gotten off to a poor start as a union
employer. Just weeks after workers
voted to join Communications Workers
of America Local 7901, the union filed
a charge with the National Labor Rela-
tions Board (NLRB) accusing Dosha of
several labor law violations.
Tiernan, a former state rep from
Lake Oswego, chaired the Oregon Re-
publican Party for two years ending
January 2011, but is best known as
sponsor of Oregon’s mandatory mini-
mum sentencing law and 1994 Ballot
Measure 8, which made public work-
ers deduct 6 percent of their salary for
pensions until it was struck down by
the Oregon Supreme Court.
Tiernan has also been a labor rela-
tions consultant. He represented Pay-
less in the 1990s. As chief operating of-
ficer at the Grocery Outlet discount
chain, he negotiated industry-standard
contracts with United Food and Com-
mercial Workers at three unionized
stores. Last year, he ran a campaign to
dump the union at a Berkeley Bowl su-
permarket in Berkeley, California;
management lawbreaking there was so
egregious that the NLRB brokered a re-
run of the election, and in March,
workers voted to go nonunion.
At Dosha, which employs 155
workers, workers voted March 30 to
unionize. Since then, the company has
broken federal law, according to
charges filed April 21 by the union. In
addition to unilaterally changing how
vacations are scheduled without bar-
gaining over it, management has disre-
garded the workers’ choice to unionize
by directly meeting with workers on
the company’s own terms to discuss
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