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Portland Jobs with Justice celebrates 20th anniversary
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
Portland Jobs with Justice — tireless protest
dynamo, exemplar of solidarity, incubator of la-
bor activism — turns 20 this year.
On May 14, supporters filled a Portland
Hilton ballroom to celebrate and remember.
“We started it because of the attacks we were
under,” declared Larry Cohen, Communications
Workers of America (CWA) president. “We’re
still under attack.”
Cohen was national CWA’s organizing direc-
tor when he conceived of Jobs with Justice
(JwJ) in the late 1980s. Convinced that organ-
ized labor couldn’t win all by itself, he wanted
union activists to form local coalitions to bring
together labor and the wider community in a
common fight for economic and social justice.
The organization — JwJ — would be based on a
simple pledge for people to sign, which states:
“During the next year, ‘I’ll be there’ at least five
times for someone else’s fight, as well as my
own.”
At a June 1988 Oregon AFL-CIO-sponsored
rally in downtown Portland, 300 people signed
the first Portland JwJ pledge cards. In 1991, a
small group of activists, with Cohen’s encour-
agement, took the next step and formed a local
chapter. Representatives of 15 organizations at-
tended an April 1991 founding meeting. For the
group’s first action — June 1991 — demonstra-
tors wrapped Blue Cross’ downtown Portland
office building with red tape.
The group met monthly after that, says Port-
land JwJ co-founder Margaret Butler — a tele-
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phone operator who became the organizing co-
chair at CWA Local 7901. Representatives from
participating unions would discuss their fights
with employers, and JwJ would plan noisy and
creative protests, calling up pledge signers to
make good on their commitments.
“We in the labor movement had been getting
our butts kicked for a long time,” Butler recalls.
“We needed to rebuild basic solidarity at the
grass roots.”
“Jobs With Justice would take on certain as-
pects of a campaign that union leaders wouldn’t
or for legal reasons couldn’t,” says co-founder
Jamie Partridge, an activist with National Asso-
ciation of Letter Carriers Branch 82.
Sometimes, activists would be arrested in
civil disobedience, sitting in, for example, at the
National Labor Relations Board — to highlight
the need for labor law reform. More often, JwJ
would surprise malefactors with a sudden occu-
pation, leaving when police asked them to. After
the owner of Tony Roma’s opposed an increase
in the minimum wage, demonstrators briefly
took over his restaurant, chanted, and handed
out cake and leaflets to customers.
“The idea is to take actions that will be out-
side the comfort zone of the decision-makers,
but within the comfort zone of demonstrators,”
Partridge explains, “disrupting business as usual
and sending the message that if they don’t do
what’s right, they would face continued disrup-
tions.”
Over the years, JwJ demonstrators would oc-
cupy Niketown, Powell’s Books, WalMart,
Providence hospital, Wells Fargo bank, and the
offices of senators and congressmen who voted
for job-killing trade treaties.
More often, they would show up in great
number, often repeatedly, to give courage and
moral support to workers in the middle of a la-
bor dispute — at Oregon Steel Mills, Williams
Controls, Fred Meyer, Safeway, OHSU, Cum-
mins Northwest, Parry Center, Oak Harbor
Freight Lines, Legacy Emanuel Hospital, the
Portland Hilton … the full list would go on for
pages. JwJ pledgers promise to come out five
times a year. Within a few years, Portland JwJ
was so active it could at times have five actions
in a single month.
Five years in, the group hired Butler part-
time as its first paid staffperson, and set up an
office in space provided by Oregon AFSCME.
Today, Portland JwJ has four paid staff. It also
has 4,300 pledgers, a 2,000-person e-mail list, a
1,000-strong phone tree, and a 200-person hot-
list of the most active members. That network
allows the group to scale up or down mobiliza-
tions as needed. Unions seeking a large turnout
can request a “full mobilization” and have vol-
unteers call through the list.
But it would be a mistake to think of Portland
JwJ only as a rapid-response picketer battalion,
because the group also works proactively
through long-term projects and committees.
Its annual faith-labor breakfast helps build re-
lationships between labor union leaders and lo-
cal clergy. Its global justice committee seeks to
hold politicians accountable for the effects of
trade policy. Its immigrant rights committee
protests raids and deportations. Its health care
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
committee pushes for a single-payer health care
system. A recently formed economic crisis com-
mittee hopes to use the current downturn as a
catalyst for reform.
JwJ’s Workers Rights Board, begun in 1999,
is a roster of community leaders — politicians,
church leaders, academics and others who are
willing to take a public stand in favor of workers
rights. Depending on the needs of a campaign,
the Workers Rights Board may convene a panel,
hold a public hearing, and issue recommenda-
tions. The hearings give workers a chance to tell
their stories to community leaders.
Though Portland JwJ doesn’t get involved in
candidate electoral campaigns, time and again it
has mobilized turnout and testimony at local
elected bodies. It was Portland JwJ that led the
passage of living wage ordinances at the city
and county, which set minimum wage and bene-
fit levels for contracted workers.
JwJ exists to support others’ struggles, so its
victories are those of the workers it helps. But
it’s clearly a part of those workers’ wins, boost-
ing spirits with chants, pickets, and inflatable
rats, and strategic advice and good will.
“Out on the picket line or at the rallies,” But-
ler says, “it makes a big difference for workers
to see that they aren’t by themselves.”
“We want jobs,” concluded Cohen, the CWA
president, at the celebration. “But it’s not just
jobs that we want. Slaves had jobs. We want
jobs with justice.”
To sign the pledge, and join Portland Jobs
With Justice, call 503-236-5573 or visit
jwjpdx.org.
MAY 20, 2011