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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 16, 2011)
...Prison bread (From Page 1) pact the private sector. Prison-made baked goods have been displacing goods made by law-abiding workers on the outside, such as the unionized workers at Franz Bakery, which has op- erations in Oregon and Washington. That rankles Terry Lansing, secre- tary-treasurer of 1,160-member Bakers Local 114. Lansing says in the compe- tition for school district business, Cor- rectional Industries is undercutting family-owned Franz, a union employer since 1910. Inmates at the Airway Heights bak- ery don’t pay taxes. They can’t union- ize. And they’re paid 55 cents to $1.75 an hour for their work. [The state takes up to 90 percent of that for crime victim restitution, legal obligations, costs of in- carceration, and savings for when they’re released.] At Franz, by contrast, workers earn $19 to $24 an hour, with fully-paid medical and pension benefits, a guar- anteed work week, and overtime pay after seven hours in a day. “These are jobs we want to pre- serve,” Lansing said. “[Our members] are taxpayers, and our taxes support the school districts.” In a 2010 interview with the Labor Press, Franz Spokane-area general manager Tim Harper wouldn’t disclose the dollar amount or volume of busi- PAGE 2 ness lost, but said it’s significant. “We definitely had to make cutbacks because of it,” Harper said. Harper said 2009 was the first school year that Franz didn’t have the contract for Central Valley School Dis- trict in Spokane. Employees at the Franz bakery in Spokane had children in the district, and were outraged about the switch to prison-made bread, Harper said. They spoke out at PTA meetings but got nowhere. Franz competes with the prison bak- ery for school district contracts, but the company has been reluctant to go pub- lic criticizing the prison bakery. One Who’s eating prison- made baked goods? The following school districts serve baked goods produced at Airway Heights Correctional Fa- cility: Auburn School District Highline School District Federal Way School District South Kitsap School District Blaine School District Spokane School District #81 Mead School District Central Valley School District Mt. View School District reason is that Food Services of Amer- ica, which distributes the prison-made bread to schools, is an important Franz customer. Also, Franz doesn’t want to publicly criticize the school districts for buying prison bread, since the company hopes to win back their business. But Lansing, at the Bakers union, is free to speak his mind. He has one question for the districts: “Do the par- ents know you’re feeding their kids prison bread?” For over a year, Lansing has cam- paigned against serving prison-made baked goods in schools. “I am positive that most parents would not allow a time-serving convict into their kitchen to prepare their child’s meals, yet I believe that is what your School District is doing,” Lansing wrote in a letter to the Clatskanie School District. In letters to the districts, Lansing raises concerns about safety and the ethics of forced labor. Wiles, at Correctional Industries, has answers to some of those charges. The labor is not forced, she says. In- mates must take part in some kind of rehabilitative program, but they don’t have to work specifically at Correc- tional Industries. They can take classes or take part in treatment instead. In- mates can receive prison discipline for refusing some prison jobs, like clean- ing, but they can’t be disciplined for re- fusing to work in the bakery or other Correctional Industries enterprises. (Turn to Page 7) NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS ATU #757 voices race concerns at TriMet A report commissioned by the union finds minority employees more likely to be disciplined. Amalgamated Transit Union Local (ATU) 757 is publicly calling out its biggest employer, TriMet, over how the transit agency treats minority em- ployees. About a year and a half ago, the union contracted with Stephen John- son, a sociologist and statistician, to an- alyze TriMet disciplinary data to see if there was evidence of disparate treat- ment. Johnson and fellow researcher Christine McCaslin looked at TriMet data from 2000 to 2009. They found that minority employees made up about 17 percent of the TriMet workforce, but accounted for 24 percent of the disci- plinary actions over that time. In nine of the 10 years, minority employees were more likely to be disciplined than their numbers would have suggested. “We don’t know why,” Local 757 attorney Susan Stoner told the Labor Press. “We just noticed there seemed to be a disproportionate amount of dis- cipline of minority employees.” That led Local 757 to commission the re- port, Stoner said. According to Johnson’s report, over the 10 year-period, of the 226 employ- ees terminated for cause, 62 were mi- norities; and of the 1,585 who received some form of discipline, 381 were mi- norities. In the termination cases, the most common reasons cited were poor job attendance and time lost at work. The report acknowledges that discrim- ination is notoriously difficult to docu- ment. But it concluded that some form of further investigation might be war- ranted. Earlier this year, Local 757 made the report available to several lawyers representing clients in discrimination lawsuits against TriMet. TriMet was given a copy in late spring. Now the union is publishing it on its web site, atu757.org. TriMet spokesperson Mary Fetsch said she hadn’t seen the report, but said the agency would welcome a dialogue with the union about it. Fetsch also disputed the notion that TriMet would treat employees differ- ently based on race. “We’re an equal opportunity em- ployer, and we make no race-based distinctions in employment decisions,” Fetsch told the Labor Press. SEPTEMBER 16, 2011
