...Fired by the Fund
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have a hearing before a judge so far, but
many other union supporters have been
fired since the union campaign began,
including the worker who first called
the union, all eight of the workers who
presented the original union petition to
a manager, all four workers who vol-
unteered on the union’s initial bargain-
ing team, and several who replaced
them, for a total of at least 13 support-
ers fired — in a call center that employs
about 25 workers.
In nearly every case, the union filed
charges with the NLRB. But the
agency has dismissed most of them.
CWA has had a tough time proving that
defeating the union was a motive in the
firings, because the Fund fires workers
at a prodigious rate for all kinds of rea-
sons.
If that surprises you, you wouldn’t
be the first. Neel, 36 and a father of
three, was an idealist when he began
working at the Fund. He believed in his
work — dialing from the Portland call
Oregon AFL-CIO
to convene in
Bend Sept. 27-29
BEND — Union leaders and ac-
tivists, mark your calendars for Sept.
27-29 and the 53rd biennial Oregon
AFL-CIO Convention. The convention
will be held at The Riverhouse Hotel
and Convention Center: 3075 N Busi-
ness 97, Bend.
Registration opens Friday, Sept. 27.
That evening a welcome party will be
held. Convention business gets under
way Saturday morning, Sept. 28.
The popular Union Label Show is
scheduled Saturday evening.
For more information, call the Ore-
gon AFL-CIO at 503-224-3169, or
from Salem call 503-585-6320.
center to raise money for groups like
Illinois PIRG, PennEnvironment, and
the National Environmental Law Cen-
ter. And he was good at his job, ex-
ceeding fundraising quotas, and rising
to the Fund’s top pay rate of $14.50 an
hour.
So when co-workers talked about
unionizing, Neel thought that given the
progressive values the Fund espouses,
managers wouldn’t object very much if
workers voted to unionize.
“Everyone deserves a fair shot at a
good job and a secure future.” Or so
goes the phone rap for Fair Share, one
of the Fund-affiliated groups Neel
raised money for.
But not workers at the Fund. Fund
phone callers pay can drop several dol-
lars an hour in a single pay period if
they fall below fundraising targets. And
if they fail to meet a separate bench-
mark two weeks in a row, they are
fired, no matter how many years
they’ve worked there.
In 18 months of negotiations over a
first-ever union contract for its two
dozen Portland call center employees,
the Fund held fast to those policies,
agreeing only to minor concessions —
limiting pay cuts to $2 an hour per pay
period, and giving workers a third
missed-quota week, once a year, before
termination. But the Fund insisted that
the call center remain an “at will”
workplace . For over a year, the Fund
also insisted, as is the law in “right-to-
work” states, that its call center be an
“open shop,” in which union dues
would be strictly voluntary. In June, the
Fund appeared to relent, agreeing that
workers who don’t want to join the
union would still have to pay the
union’s costs to represent them. But as
spelled out by the Fund, the union
would have to collect the fees, and
workers would face no workplace con-
sequence for failing to pay.
Call center workers voted to reject
all these terms, and a new round of bar-
gaining is scheduled to begin Aug. 28.
Special Recognition
to Workers Everywhere
happy labor day!
orEgon statE Building and
ConstruCtion tradEs CounCil
John Mohlis
Executive secretary
503-788-7153
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www.facebook.com/oregonbuildingtrades
PAGE 12
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
AUGUST 16, 2013