...YEAR IN REVIEW: Top labor stories of 2011
(From Page 1)
business-as-usual.
In Portland, while the occupation of
two downtown squares drew carping
about mess and for attracting the home-
less, union support for the camp and
ideas it represented never publicly wa-
vered. The downtown camp was evicted
by police Nov. 13 after 37 days of oc-
cupation, but the idea of occupation
moved on to banks, a bridge, and ports.
An Occupy revival seems likely in
2012.
In Wisconsin, protest energy suc-
ceeded in recalling two of six targeted
Republican state senators who voted for
the anti-union bill, which took effect
anyway. But voters in Ohio struck down
— by better than a three-to-two margin
— that state’s version of a law stripping
public employee bargaining rights.
For the trade union movement,
there were other developments of na-
tional note in 2011.
• In April, a group of 43,000 trans-
portation security officers at 450 air-
ports voted to unionize, and in June se-
lected American Federation of
Government Employees over an inde-
pendent union.
• Also in April, National Labor Rela-
tions Board dared to enforce federal la-
bor law in a case involving Boeing, and
all hell broke loose in Congress among
Republicans. Evidence from top Boe-
ing leaders was that the company had
located its 787 Dreamliner final assem-
bly in South Carolina expressly because
union members had struck at its other
locations; that’s against the law, and the
NLRB brought Boeing before a federal
judge. House Republicans called for re-
peal of the law and tried to subpoena the
agency’s legal strategies. But in De-
cember, Boeing and the Machinists
union buried the hatchet with a four-
year contract extension that includes a
pledge to locate some future assembly
work at existing union facilities.
• In August, 45,000 workers at Veri-
zon’s East Coast land line operations
went on strike for two weeks, returning
to work when Verizon pledged to re-
sume bargaining with Communications
Workers of America. Five months later,
the workers are still without a union
contract.
In the Portland area, the economy
wasn’t bleak for all workers: Many
building trades union members got back
to work in 2011 — building a $4 billion
chip plant for Intel, a $344 million hos-
pital for Kaiser Permanente, and per-
forming a $144 million renovation of
the Edith Green Wendell Wyatt Fed-
eral Building. In October, Daimler
Trucks North America began adding
several hundred workers at its Portland
truck plant.
Other local stories of note:
• Starting in January, members of
Amalgamated Transit Union Local 757
began picketing outside all meetings of
TriMet’s board of directors after the
transit agency halted cost-of-living
wage increases and started taking
money out of workers’ paychecks to
cover a portion of their health insurance
costs. The union contract expired Nov.
30, 2009, and the sides were awaiting
an arbitrator’s ruling on several unfair
labor practice complaints when TriMet
unilaterally implemented the changes.
The sides are still waiting for the state
arbitrator’s decision.
• A fired pro-union teacher at private
Portland French School won rein-
statement in a case with the National
Labor Relations Board, only to see all
40 employees lose their jobs when the
partially unionized school shut down in
May. The non-profit school had a his-
tory of bad financial practices, but may
have been pushed over the edge by the
$170,000 in legal bills to oppose a cam-
paign to join American Federation of
Teachers.
• It was a bad year for long-time
union foe Bill Sizemore. In March, a
judge tossed out his lawsuit against sev-
eral unions and union-supported groups
for calling him a racketeer. “The court
finds that it could be reasonably inferred
that Bill Sizemore was a ‘convicted
racketeer,’ the judge wrote in his deci-
sion. Then in August, Sizemore spent
18 days in jail for not filing tax returns
— presumably to shield income from
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JANUARY 6, 2012
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
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