June 17, 2011_NWLP 6/14/11 10:10 AM Page 5
NLRB says the rat is legal Steelworkers #1097 ratifies pact at G-P
WASHINGTON, D.C. (PAI) —The labor movement’s giant inflatable rat
balloon is legal — even at demonstrations in
front of secondary employers, the
National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB) ruled last month.
In a case involving Sheet Metal
Workers Local 15 and Bran-
don Regional Medical
Center — which years ago
hired nonunion temps at
below area standard wages to
build an addition — the Board voted
3-1 that use of the rat on a flatbed truck
parked in public more than 100 feet
from the hospital entrance was legal, as
was leafleting passing patients.
When the case first came up in
2006, the Board ruled that other parts
of the union’s demonstration (a mock
funeral with coffin and skeleton) was
illegal. The union appealed the decision to
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Cir-
cuit, which in 2007 reversed the NLRB’s decision, determining the union’s mock
funeral was not picketing or otherwise coercive. The court sent the case back to
the NLRB to finish the job.
“The determinative question as to whether union activity at a secondary site
violates (labor law) is whether it constitutes intimidation or persuasion,” said the
Board. “Union protest activity that is merely persuasive is lawful even when the
object of the activity is to induce the secondary to cease doing business with a
primary employer.” In this case, the primary employer was the contractor that
brought in the temp workers to help build the hospital addition.
“Protest whose impact on a secondary employer owes more to intimidation
than persuasion” is not lawful, the Board warned.
The rat, it said, is not intimidating.
JUNE 17, 2011
CLATSKANIE — At Georgia-Pa-
cific’s paper mill in Wauna, Oregon,
members of United Steelworkers Lo-
cal 1097 ratified the company’s final
contract proposal dated May 24.
Local 1097 members had voted
down an earlier company contract offer
in January and in April authorized a
strike.
The new agreement provides
across-the-board increases totaling 6
percent over four years for the plant’s
roughly 800 members, but that is likely
to be offset by increases in employee
health care contributions.
Raises in the contract include a 2
percent wage increase retroactive to
April 2010; 1 percent in October 2011;
2 percent in October 2012, and 1 per-
cent in August 2013. Wages depend on
work classification; in the previous con-
tract they ranged from $17.49 for labor-
ers to $34.44 for some machine tenders.
The mill makes tissue, paper towels
and toilet paper.
Members pay 25 percent of their
health insurance premium. The new
agreement also contains a Georgia-Pa-
cific proposal that members opposed
during bargaining: Starting January
2012, the employee portion of the
health insurance premium will be cal-
culated on a per-dependent basis,
meaning that workers with larger fam-
ilies will pay more. Members also
agreed that Georgia-Pacific will drop
Kaiser Permanente and switch to a
health plan managed by United
Healthcare, a for-profit insurer.
Some other changes:
• Georgia-Pacific will increase
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
monthly pension contributions and re-
move a pension cap that limited pay-
ments to long-serving workers.
• Effective Sept. 1, no smoking will
be allowed anywhere on company
property, including parking lots.
• New language in the no-strike
clause (a pledge of no strikes while the
contract remains in effect) spells out
specifically that it includes “sympathy
strikes,” in which one group of work-
ers honors the strike of another group.
The new agreement will run
through March 31, 2014.
Georgia-Pacific is owned by Koch
Industries.
IN MEMORIAM
J OE T HOMPSON , a retired officer of
the defunct Aluminum, Brick and
Glass Workers
International
Union, passed
away June 6 at
the age of 81.
Thompson re-
tired as a vice
president of the
Aluminum
Workers in 1986
following the
union’s merger with United Steel-
workers of America.
After retirement he was instrumen-
tal in founding the Labor Roundtable
of Southwest Washington and was its
chairman for nearly a decade.
Joseph Eugene Thompson was born
on May 16, 1930, in East St. Louis,
Illinois. After graduating high school,
he enlisted in the Air Force. Following
two years of active duty he entered the
Air Force Reserve and went to work in
the Aluminum Company of America
(Alcoa) plant in East St. Louis. Shortly
after that he was called back to active
duty, serving as an airplane mechanic
in the Korean War.
Thompson became active in Alu-
minum Workers Local 100 as a shop
steward at the Alcoa plant. In 1956, he
moved to Gramercy, Louisiana, to
work in a Kaiser Aluminum plant. His
next move took him to Duffy, Ohio,
where he worked at an Olin Mathieson
Aluminum plant and helped organize
it. In March of l959 he went to Terre
Haute, Indiana, to organize an Ana-
conda Aluminum Co. plant. There, he
served for five and a half years as pres-
ident of Local 103.
Thompson was elected an interna-
tional vice president of the Aluminum
Workers in 1969.
In 1976 he was transferred to Den-
ver, Colorado, and from there was
transferred to Vancouver, Wash.
He is survived by his wife of 51
years, Carol Etta; a daughter, Elana
Torres, and a granddaughter, Aspen.
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