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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 4, 2013)
Inside Meeting Notices See Page 4 Volume 114 Number 1 January 4, 2013 Portland, Oregon At Clackamas Town Center AFSCME 9-1-1 dispatchers first to respond to mall shooting receives 200 to 300 calls per day; they fielded over 100 By DON LOVING calls in the first 10 minutes after the shooting. For the day Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2012, is a day that Jeff Campbell they totaled 546 “emergency” calls, another 600 that were and his co-workers at the Clackamas County Depart- classified as “non-emergency” plus 72 classified as “fire” ment of Communications Center will never forget. The calls, many of those also attributable to the Town Center center, colloquially known as C-COM, was thrust into situation. the national spotlight when Jacob Tyler Roberts opened “Of course, while this was going on, we were still re- fire inside the Clackamas Town Center shopping mall, ceiving other, ‘regular’ 9-1-1 calls,” said Campbell. “We killing two people and seriously injuring another, be- had to dispatch those as well. I’m proud of all of us here fore taking his own life. at C-COM. I believe we handled the situation profession- The first call came in at 3:29 p.m. ally, and we handled it well.” “It’s not all that unusual for someone to call in to say Campbell says dispatchers have had some limited “tac- they heard a shot fired, or at least thought they heard a tical dispatch training” geared toward an event of the mag- gunshot somewhere,” says Campbell, a veteran C-COM nitude of the Town Center shooting, but for the most part, 9-1-1 dispatcher and longtime member of Oregon AF- he and his colleagues relied on their regular training. SCME Local 350. “But then immediately there was a “It’s pretty much the same thing, just on a bigger second call, and a third. You can see calls build on the level,” he said. “Again, the union deserves credit on that screen for the same event, so it didn’t take long for all of point. (Union leaders) were dogged over the years in de- us on the floor to know what was happening: there was manding training. Our contract includes required train- an ‘active shooter’ at the Clackamas Town Center.” ings, and we even have a training coordinator in our bar- For 10 minutes, calls came fast and furious … from people running out of the mall, from people in the mall, Jeff Campbell, a member of AFSCME Local 350 at his Clackamas County 9-1-1 gaining unit. We have a good relationship with management on the training issue today, but that’s due to people in stores, people in hiding, and then, quickly, dispatch desk. the union’s insistence on the topic in previous years.” from people tending to victims. Campbell, who’s been a 9-1-1 dispatcher for about 17 years, has “We were quickly triaging calls,” said Campbell. “We asked, did,” says Campbell. “That fact is undeniable. It was fortunate the ‘Did you see anything, or did you just hear the gunshots?’ ‘Are you event happened near a shift change, so we even had some extra peo- been in his share of prickly situations. He says Clackamas County hiding?’ ‘Are you barricaded?” ‘Do you believe you’re safe?’ If they ple on hand. But we’ve fought tooth and nail over staffing here at dispatchers receive a “wide gamut” of call types, including their felt safe, we encouraged them to stay put and wait for emergency our center (for years). Adequate staffing levels at any 9-1-1 center share of Mt. Hood-related search and rescue operations. are a perpetual issue, but we’re in pretty good shape here because of “But this event goes right to the top,” he said. “It’s the situation personnel.” you never want to have to deal with. But we did, and again, we did It’s the kind of situation no one wants to be a part of, but Camp- our union.” As the event unfolded, Campbell says it took about an hour be- bell says he and his colleagues were prepared for the task. fore dispatchers could figuratively take a breath. C-COM typically (Turn to Page 2) “It’s a credit to our union that we were able to respond as we 2012 — A YEAR OF SUCCESSES, SETBACKS FOR LABOR 2012 was a year mixing successes and setbacks for organized labor, both nationally and locally. President Barack Obama was re- elected with union backing, but imme- diately after the votes were in, union leaders felt a need to mobilize to push him, and Congressional Democrats, not to mess with Social Security or Medicare as part of a “fiscal cliff” com- promise. Labor failed in its effort to recall Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker — who made war on pub- lic employee union rights in 2011. But three months after Walker beat back re- call with 53 percent of the vote, a state judge struck down parts of the law. And in December, a lame duck Leg- islature passed a law, with little public notice, making Michigan the 24th “right-to-work” state, or as one pro- union legislator put it, “a right-to-free- load” state. Right-to-work laws make union dues strictly optional, even though unions are bound by law to rep- resent all workers in a workplace. In Chicago, a weeklong strike by 26,000 public school teachers in Sep- tember dealt a partial blow to a corpo- rate reform agenda for schools. Later, voters in Idaho and South Dakota re- jected anti-teacher reforms. But at bankrupt Hostess Brands, management responded to a weeklong protest strike in November by members of the Bakers Union by closing the 85- year-old company for good, putting the company’s assets up for sale and lay- ing off close to 18,000 workers. In Oregon, unions lost some hard- fought campaigns, and won others: • Dosha Salon Spa, an Aveda- branded salon chain that unionized in 2011, fired several union supporters in 2012, and campaigned to decertify the union; predicting certain loss, Commu- nications Workers of America (CWA) Local 7901 called it quits after failing to secure a first-time union contract. • At TriMet, an arbitrator picked management’s offer over the union’s, leading the transit agency to demand workers pay up to $7,080 for retroac- tive health insurance premiums. But Amalgamated Transit Union Local 757 challenged that in court, and won sev- eral partial legal victories in a set of cases that are still pending. • At Cascade Steel Rolling Mills in McMinnville, about 300 members of United Steel Workers Local 8378 got annual raises of up to 2.5 percent after a 12-day strike, but also paid more for health coverage. New union members: • In March, 1,912 University of Ore- gon faculty unionized with American Association of University Professors. • In July, 500 Portland security offi- cers joined Service Employees Local 49 at four companies that agreed to “card check” union recognition: Secu- ritas, ABM, G4S, and AlliedBarton. • In November, TriMet Lift workers at a long nonunion unit of contractor First Transit voted 111-31 to join ATU Local 757. But at BrucePac, a Willamette Val- ley cooked meat and poultry processor with 284 workers, a three-year-long campaign to join the Laborers Union went down by more than 3-to-1 in a July union election. And in November, a group of 600 support staff at St. Charles Medical Center in Bend voted 334 to 212 to go nonunion Nov. 1. Workers voted nar- rowly in January 2011 to join Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 49, but never got a union contract in the course of more than 40 formal negotiating sessions. Portland City Council made some policy changes that will benefit work- ing people: • In September, it approved a model “community benefits agreement” that commits to build city projects with union labor, and to use minority work- ers and contractors. • And in November, it voted to issue 50 taxi permits to Union Cab — a newly-formed driver-owned co-op that is affiliated with Communications Workers of America Local 7901. The recession seemed to end for many local building trades workers as work boomed at Intel’s giant new man- ufacturing facility and in projects build- ing a “cloud” of computer data centers in the high desert of Central Oregon. In July, Coquille Valley Hospital (Turn to Page 2)
