...Portland park rangers unionize
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fliers. Also, Local 483 left two former
park rangers out of its proposed unit —
an office worker and a dog enforcement
program coordinator. Also, park ranger
isn’t listed specifically in the DCTU
contract, and is a different job than the
other jobs in the DCTU; therefore
rangers don’t belong in the DCTU.
Also, the rangers were assigned to write
parking tickets in Washington Park and
Hoyt Arboretum; that work is done by
parking patrol workers represented by
fellow DCTU union AFSCME Local
189, so maybe the park rangers have
more in common with those workers.
Also, most of the rangers don’t have
health insurance, seniority rights, disci-
plinary grievance rights, or any paid
leave. Therefore they have nothing in
common with DCTU members, who
do have those things. Therefore they
don’t belong in the DCTU. Also, La-
borers Local 483 represents manual la-
borers, and it would be wrong to “lump
policing/security personnel with man-
ual laborers.” Except later on, Farley ar-
gued that the 11 “community service
aids” are temporary seasonal employ-
ees, and therefore should maybe be un-
der a separate Local 483 contract cov-
ering “seasonal maintenance workers”
who, it turns out, are manual laborers.
Boil it all down, and the City of
Portland attorney is arguing that these
15 coworkers (and maybe two others)
ought to be in three separate bargaining
units, not one; and they ought to be rep-
resented by AFSCME Local 189, not
Laborers Local 483; and they ought to
be not in the DCTU unit but in stand-
alone units, where they could negotiate
three separate union contracts with the
City.
But Oregon’s public sector labor law
doesn’t work that way.
ORS 243.650 says public employ-
ees “have the right to form, join and
participate in the activities of labor or-
ganizations of their own choosing for
the purpose of representation.”
Wendy Greenwald, an administra-
tive law judge for the Employment Re-
lations Board, held a two-day hearing
on the City’s objections May 28-29,
and issued her ruling Nov. 20, dismiss-
ing the City’s case and ordering it to get
on with the election and draw up a voter
list within 10 days.
But then the City appealed the
judge’s decision to the three-member
Employment Relations Board, which
functions as the “supreme court” of
Oregon public sector labor law. The
Board heard arguments from both sides
Jan. 9, and on March 6, it too dismissed
the City’s objections, and ordered the
election to move forward.
Rangers were jubilant at a March 10
meeting to discuss next steps. They
can’t wait to be in the union.
But their experience poses a ques-
tion for the rest of labor to ponder: How
is it that the mayor and the other four
members of City Council all represent
themselves as friends of organized la-
bor, and yet City attorneys just spent
public resources for over a year to ob-
struct and delay the attempt of 15 park
rangers to join a union?
The Labor Press asked the mayor’s
spokesperson Dana Haynes why the
City fought the park rangers attempt to
unionize, and how much it spent to do
so. Haynes said he asked the lawyers in
the City attorney’s office and learned
that the City was “caught in the mid-
dle” between AFSCME and Local 483.
Leaders of both unions were of-
fended to hear that reply.
“That’s total bullshit,” said Local
483 Business Manager Erica Askin,
who helped the park rangers organize
and represented them in the ERB pro-
ceedings. “They’re doing a divide-and-
conquer type thing.”
According to the rangers, the real
story is this: After Parks manager Art
Hendricks learned they’d talked with
the Laborers, he suggested they talk to
AFSCME. Rangers met with represen-
tatives of both, and in the end opted to
go with Local 483, which represents
other workers in the Parks Bureau,
from arborists and turf maintenance
workers to lifeguards and rec center
staffers.
AFSCME Local 189 President
Mark Gipson says he’d love for his
union to represent the park rangers, but
always respected it was their choice to
make, and went out of his way not to
interfere. Judge Greenwald said as
much in her ruling: “AFSCME neither
petitioned to represent the park rangers,
nor sought to intervene in the petition
filed by [the Laborers.]”
What AFSCME did do was file a
grievance when the City assigned
rangers to write parking tickets in City
parks. The grievance said that should
be the work of AFSCME-represented
parking patrol officers. The rangers
agreed with that. Nine of them signed
an open letter supporting AFSCME’s
grievance, which is still pending.
“Anything they say about this differ-
ence between AFSCME and Laborers
is bullshit,” Gipson said. Gipson ex-
plains that the grievance — which he
wrote and filed — is about a very basic
union contract feature, the part where
the employer recognizes the union as
the representative of all workers in a
classification, responsible for negotiat-
ing and enforcing provisions spelling
Park rangers were in high spirits March 10. It was their first meeting after
the State of Oregon dismissed legal objections the City of Portland had filed
opposing their effort to join Laborers Local 483. Now they’ll get to have a
union election, after a year of delay.
out wages and conditions. When an
employer starts assigning other work-
ers to do the same work, and at a much
lower wage rate, that violates the con-
tract.
City Attorney Farley argued that be-
cause one suggested remedy to the AF-
SCME grievance would be for park
rangers to become AFSCME members,
that meant AFSCME was seeking to
represent them. But Gipson says it was
the city which suggested that remedy,
not AFSCME.
“There was a little ‘nod, nod,’ and
‘wink, wink’ of ‘How about if you guys
represented these workers?’ They
wanted to break our contract and get
themselves in the business of organiz-
ing, which they have no right to do,”
Gipson said.
So the City wasn’t “caught in the
middle” between two contending
unions. On the contrary it appears to
have tried to instigate conflict between
them.
As for how many tax dollars were
spent opposing the park rangers’ at-
tempt to join Local 483, Haynes said it
was only attorney and other staff time,
and they were not eligible for overtime,
and were going to be paid whether they
worked on the rangers case or some-
thing else. Farley collects a $114,175
annual salary. At least one paralegal
also worked on the case, which would
Union & Community Members,
Families and Kids Welcome
&
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Games!
Community Labor Solidarity Gathering:
Saturday,
April 12
Noon-5 pm
MARCH 21, 2014
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
Kelly Elementary School
9030 SE Cooper St., Portland
Food Drive: Bring Non-Perishable Food
have involved interviews, preparing and
filing the objection, preparing for and
taking part in a two-day hearing with
several dozen evidentiary exhibits, put-
ting together post-hearing briefs, filing
an eight-page appeal of the judge’s de-
cision, preparing and delivering oral ar-
guments to ERB — in short, a substan-
tial amount of legal work. And
someone in the mayor’s office or the
City attorney’s office thought that was
an appropriate use of public resources.
Now that ERB dismissed the City’s
objections, Haynes said the City “wel-
comes the Employment Relations
Board’s direction.”
“I think it’s clear,” Askin said. “They
were doing everything they could to
deny the park rangers their collective
bargaining rights.”
Major League
Soccer locks out
union referees
The Portland Timbers and Seattle
Sounders opened the 2014 Major
League Soccer (MLS) season with
scab referees.
The Professional Referee Organiza-
tion (PRO), the company created by
MLS owners to employ its referees,
locked out members of the Professional
Soccer Referees Association (PSRA) at
the start of the season March 8 because
the collective bargaining agreement
was not completed. The league is using
replacement officials.
PSRA voted 64–1 for strike author-
ization. The union has filed two unfair
labor practice complaints with the
NLRB, accusing the PRO and MLS of
bad-faith bargaining and making
threats against its members. PRO filed
an unfair labor practice complaint al-
leging the union tried to intimidate re-
placement referees who officiated
games opening weekend.
At press time, the sides were meet-
ing with the Federal Mediation and
Conciliation Service. Negotiations
were confidential and FMCS asked
that the sides not talk to the media.
FMCS helped negotiate the 2010
agreement between the MLS and the
MLS Players Union.
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