Inside
MEETING
NOTICES
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Page 4
Volume 115
Number 6
March 21, 2014
Portland
City of Portland ordered to
proceed with union election
City obstructed and
delayed for a year, but
now park rangers get
to join DCTU
DCTU STRIKE VOTE — At the March 18 launch of a week-long vote,
AFSCME Local 189 President Mark Gipson voted to reject the City of
Portland’s “final” contract offer and authorize a strike. Fellow District
Council of Trades Unions members in Laborers Local 483 approved a strike
authorization by a 95 percent margin March 14. City workers say they are
tired of being asked to make concessions. The City is pushing to eliminate
protections against contracting out, while offering a first-year wage increase
equal to half the rate of inflation.
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
Portland’s park rangers, who patrol
the City’s approximately 200 parks, are
a tight-knit crew. They wear the same
uniforms, work under the same man-
ager, get the same state security officer
training, and do the same outdoor work.
Most earn $11 to $13 an hour, receive
no benefits, and get laid off after 1,400
hours for budget reasons. They want to
join Laborers Local 483, which repre-
sents other Parks Bureau employees,
and they want to be covered under the
City of Portland contract with the
seven-union coalition known as District
Council of Trade Unions (DCTU).
In 2012, when mayoral candidate
Charlie Hales was out looking for labor
endorsements, he declared his support
for the right of workers to unionize. But
in 2013, when Mayor Hales was asked
point blank by the 15 park rangers to
recognize their union, he declined —
though he had the authority to grant
their request. The official line was that
he’d prefer they certify union support
through a “secret ballot” election su-
pervised by the state Employment Re-
lations Board (ERB).
So on April 17, 2013, the park
rangers filed with ERB to do that. The
City attorney’s office, which is under
Hales’ direction, answered their petition
with six pages of legal objections to
their definition of the proposed bar-
gaining unit.
That’s actually what anti-union em-
ployers do in the private sector. “Union
avoidance” consultants advise employ-
ers never to voluntarily recognize a
union; instead, they make the union re-
quest a government-administered elec-
tion, and then they file technical legal
objections to delay the election.
The City objected that the park
rangers aren’t a “logical, cohesive”
group to add to the DCTU. See if you
can follow the mishmash of supporting
arguments put forth by Deputy City At-
torney Matthew Farley. They shouldn’t
be in the same unit, because they have
different classifications: Only three
park rangers are classified by the City
as park rangers; 11 others are “commu-
nity service aids” [sic], and one is a
“community outreach and information
assistant” because he also designs
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Portland State University professors authorize strike
AAUP says they’re ready
to walk out to promote
greater stability and
defend faculty role in
governance
College professors at Portland State
University (PSU) voted overwhelm-
ingly March 11-12 to authorize a
strike, and could walk off the job as
early as April 4 if no further progress is
made in negotiations over a new con-
tract.
The PSU chapter of American As-
sociation of University Professors
(PSU-AAUP) represents about 950
full-time faculty at the school, which
has about 30,000 students. It’s the first
time PSU-AAUP has ever authorized
a strike, and if they do walk out, it
would be the first-ever strike by state
university professors in Oregon.
AAUP spokesperson David Osborn
said the strike authorization was sup-
ported by 94 percent of those voting,
and turnout was an overwhelming “su-
per-super-majority”— though he
wouldn’t say the exact number.
PSU-AAUP President Mary King,
a professor of economics, said mem-
bers aren’t willing to accept conces-
sions demanded by the university ad-
ministration, particularly when the
union went into bargaining seeking im-
provements.
King said agreement is being hin-
dered by three bargaining stances taken
by the university administration:
1) Its rejection of a cost-neutral pro-
posal for greater job security. About 600
PSU-AAUP members are tenure-track
or tenured, meaning they can’t be re-
moved except for gross misconduct or
dereliction of duty. But about 400 others
are on one- or two-year contracts, and
their number is increasing. King said
every December, about two-thirds of
them receive a letter informing them
their contract has been “non-renewed,”
meaning there’s no guarantee they’ll be
hired back to teach classes the next aca-
demic year. Most end up later being re-
newed, but the feeling of never being a
permanent employee creates an intoler-
able amount of stress, King said, and
makes it hard for the university to keep
talented faculty when they get offers
elsewhere. “The rest of us cannot build
a program around people the university
won’t commit to. Students can’t be sure
they will get letters of recommendation
or advising, or take classes from them
in the future.”
King said she knows one instructor
who’s been on one-year contracts for
25 years.
“I was chair of my department for
six years,” King said, “and I used to
implore the dean to let me give multi-
year contracts to people who I knew
About 500 Portland State University students stood with their teachers Feb.
27, many of them walking out of class to join a picket and rally for a fair
contract for members of American Association of University Professors.
were well qualified, doing a good job
in the classroom and were absolutely
going to be needed the following year
to help us keep them. And I was told,
‘no, this is the policy. Everyone has to
be non-renewed. We need the flexibil-
ity.’”
King said PSU-AAUP wants what
University of Oregon professors won
last year in their first-ever union con-
tract — a guarantee of multi-year con-
tracts after serving four one-year con-
tracts.
2) Its insistence on diminishing
PSU-AAUP’s role in university gover-
nance. At PSU and at most universities,
rules on faculty evaluation, promotion,
merit pay, tenure, and post-tenure re-
view are created and established by an
elected faculty senate, using model lan-
guage developed by the AAUP nation-
ally. Since 1979, the PSU-AAUP con-
tract has had a clause saying that if the
PSU administration wants to overrule
the faculty senate and change those
policies, it has to get the agreement of
AAUP. Now the PSU administration is
proposing to eliminate that clause.
3) Its wage offer, which wouldn’t
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