Inside
Meeting
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Page 6
Volume 114
Number 9
May 3, 2013
Portland, Oregon
City park rangers tell Mayor Hales they want a union
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
They’re “good will ambassadors”
for the City of Portland. Wearing a uni-
form and a badge and working in pairs,
they keep parks safe and clean, and
serve as the front line of outreach to the
homeless. Yet most of the City’s park
rangers make $11 an hour, have no ben-
efits, and get laid off after nine months.
Could they please have a union now?
That was the message a group of park
rangers presented in a March 29 meet-
ing with Mayor Charlie Hales.
“It was nice for him to take the time
to meet with us,” says ranger Sam
Sachs. “Unfortunately, they didn’t agree
to recognize the union.”
Every one of the City’s 15 rangers
signed a card saying they want to join
Laborers Local 483, says Local 483 or-
ganizer Erica Askin, and nothing re-
stricts the City from granting union
recognition at that point.
“We certainly favor the workers’
ability to join a union,” said Hales’
spokesperson Dana Haynes, “and we
look forward to the park rangers being
part of the Laborers union.” However,
Haynes explained, the mayor believes
workers should unionize through a se-
cret ballot election, not “card check.” A
2007 amendment to Oregon’s Public
Employee Collective Bargaining Act
gave public employees the right to
unionize through card check, but pub-
lic employers can still refuse that
method and insist on an election in
cases where workers are seeking to join
an existing union.
For the rangers, it makes a differ-
ence: Having the state Employment Re-
lations Board schedule a union election
delays the process by a month or two.
And that’s a problem for the 11 of the
15 rangers who are classified as “sea-
sonal” employees, most of whom will
be long gone by the end of the year.
City rules require that the seasonals be
laid off after 1,400 hours, the equivalent
of eight months at 40 hours a week.
Making seasonal jobs permanent
would be the Number One goal once
they get a union.
“We’re a unified group, the season-
als and the full-timers,” says Sachs. “All
of us who are permanent were seasonal
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Uniformed city park rangers argued that they’ve earned the right to permanent employment, and union
representation, at a March 29 meeting with Portland Mayor Charlie Hales. By all accounts, Hales was cordial and a
good listener, but in the end, rangers got the message: The City won’t voluntarily recognize their union; they’ll have
to show a majority through a state-supervised election.
TriMet: Labor Press can observe bargaining, but bloggers out
Local 757 president adds former
rival Heintzman to bargaining
team in show of unity
At an April 27 meeting to discuss bargaining
ground rules, TriMet management cleared up
which media it wanted to exclude from observing
labor negotiations: gadfly bloggers, and the North-
west Labor Press.
Alert Labor Press readers will remember that
TriMet and Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU)
Local 757 are in court over whether the public can
be excluded from their union contract negotiations.
Customarily, such talks are closed to non-partici-
pants by mutual agreement, but as Local 757
pointed out, state law says that public sector col-
lective bargaining is by default open to the public
unless both parties agree to close it. This time, Lo-
cal 757 wants them open to the public, whereas
TriMet has proposed the talks be observed only by
certain media.
Bargaining was supposed to begin last Novem-
ber, but Local 757 initially declined to meet until
the public access issue was resolved. Both sides
pushed for an expedited court decision. But when
the judge determined in early April that the case
would not be decided speedily, the union decided
it was better to start bargaining while still waiting
for the court decision.
TriMet had proposed at the outset that access
be limited to “unaffiliated” media, a choice of lan-
guage that the union interpreted as an attempt to
exclude the Northwest Labor Press. TriMet later
revised that language, proposing instead to allow
the “mainstream media” to attend — seemingly a
swipe at critics on the left and right, to say nothing
of bloggers and other “new media.” In effect, a tax-
supported local government entity, its board ap-
pointed by the governor of Oregon, is proposing
to pick and choose which press to grant access to,
while keeping the general public out.
Local 757 asked TriMet to identify which me-
dia it considered mainstream. TriMet declined to
do that, and the union suggested its own list of 16
print and online media outlets, including the La-
bor Press, plus television news generally.
“We have no particular interest in limiting at-
tendance only to specifically named media organ-
izations,” replied labor relations director Randy
Stedman in an April 18 letter to the union, “but in-
stead prefer to have a mutually agreed ground rule
that defines the media for purposes of attending
and reporting on the proceedings. Any press or-
ganization meeting the definition agreed to should
be able to attend.” Details, Stedman wrote, would
be revealed at the closed-to-the-press ground-rule-
setting session April 27, held at a secure location
owned by TriMet in the vicinity of Lloyd Center.
Ron Heintzman returns
Just as the meeting began, Local 757 President
Bruce Hansen made a surprise announcement: He
would be adding former Local 757 president and
ATU International Union president Ron Heintz-
man — his rival in last year’s union election — to
the bargaining team. “We are a union family,”
Hansen explained in a written statement, “and
when a family is threatened, differences in opin-
ion need to be put aside, and we all need to work
together to protect the family. In this case, TriMet
has already signaled its intent to devastate its em-
ployees both financially and in the quality of their
working conditions.… Ron Heintzman has bar-
gained every TriMet contract since 1988. Man-
agement is trying to destroy all those gains.”
At the meeting, true to promise, TriMet detailed
its suggested press ground rule: “representatives
of the news media,” the public transit district pro-
posed, would be defined as “a news-gathering rep-
resentative of a commercial enterprise that ordi-
narily reports mainstream news in traditional print,
FCC-licensed broadcast, or subscription electronic
magazine format.”
Stedman told the union bargaining team that
neither the Labor Press nor the Portland Business
Journal would meet that definition because they’re
specialized, not “mainstream.” However, TriMet
would make an exception, he said, and let the La-
bor Press and Business Journal attend. That would
be contingent, in the union’s understanding, on
certain bloggers being excluded.
“Which bloggers?” the union wanted to know,
listing three by name that had been quite critical
of TriMet. Stedman, furious and using the “F”
word, declared the meeting over.
That meant that no negotiation sessions were
scheduled, something Local 757 had expected to
happen during the ground rule setting meeting.
Stedman emailed Hansen the next day saying
TriMet is still ready to bargain, and that he still
hopes they can reach agreement “to open other-
wise closed negotiations to the mainstream press.”
“Once we have the union's proposals and a rea-
sonable opportunity to review them, we are willing
to schedule substantive negotiations,” Stedman
wrote.
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