National Labor News
New round of fast food strikes
Fast food workers staged one-day strikes in more than 100 U.S. cities
Sept. 4, the seventh such walkout in nearly two years. The latest action was
planned at the first-ever fast food worker convention, which took place July
26 in Chicago, attended by 1,300 fast food workers. This round of strikes
featured non-violent civil disobedience, which resulted in about 50 arrests
each in Detroit and Chicago, and 21 arrests outside a McDonalds in New
York City’s Times Square. The movement is being sparked and supported by
a big behind-the-scenes commitment from Service Employees International
Union (SEIU), the nation’s largest service-sector union, which has spent
more than $10 million on the cause. The strikers’ chief demands: $15 an
hour, and a union.
California passes sick leave law
California this month became the first U.S. state to mandate paid sick
leave for nearly all workers. The law, which takes effect next July, requires
employers to offer at least three days a year of paid sick leave to all employ-
ees who work more than 30 days in a year in California, including part-time
and temporary employees. State-paid home care workers, and workers cov-
ered by a collective bargaining agreement, are exempt. A sick leave law in
Connecticut applies only to service-sector businesses with over 50 employ-
ees. Oregon proponents plan to push for a paid sick leave law in the 2015 leg-
islative session.
No fair: Varsity teams from rich
schools outperform poor schools
So much for the level playing field. An analyst for the non-profit group
Class Action took the win-loss records for all high schools in eastern Mas-
sachusetts and matched them up with the median incomes of the communi-
ties the high schools serve. Guess what? The top 10 schools by income win
over 60 percent of their games, and the bottom 10 lose over 60 percent. In
fact, not a single school in the bottom 20 percent of median income had an
overall winning record.
Recently merged Carpenters Local
156 splits into two new locals
Carpenters Local 156 — which was
formed in January 2011 out of the
merger of six general carpenter locals
in Oregon and Southwest Washington
— was split up into two new locals ef-
fective Sept. 1.
Newly chartered Carpenters Local
1503 (named for one of Northwest
Oregon’s two telephone area codes)
will represent about 2,400 general car-
penter members in the Portland metro-
politan area and Southwest Washing-
ton. It will keep the Oregon City
offices of the former Local 156, which
are shared with Local 146, the
statewide drywall hangers local.
All union general carpenters in the
rest of Oregon — about 1,200 mem-
bers — will belong to newly chartered
Carpenters Local 271, with offices in
Eugene.
Ben Basom, spokesperson for the
Pacific Northwest Regional Council of
Carpenters, said the split will help
solve the challenge of a far-flung mem-
bership: It was tough for members in
Medford, for example, to attend Tues-
day evening union meetings at the lo-
cal headquarters in Oregon City.
To head Local 1503, United Broth-
erhood of Carpenters General Presi-
dent Doug McCarron appointed all
those who’d recently won union offi-
cer elections in Local 156. Those are:
President Shaun Cushman, Vice Presi-
dent Cliff Puckett; Financial Secretary
Krista Farmer; Recording Secretary
Ben Basom; Treasurer Don Ball; Con-
ductor Pete Savage; Warden Christy
Kern; and Trustees Bill Lewis, Larry
Heckathorne, and Joe Figueroa.
Officers of Local 271 will be: Pres-
ident James Jones, Vice President
Tyson Stuber, Financial Secretary Jeff
Harms, Recording Secretary Jennifer
Van Datta, Treasurer Ken Daletas,
Conductor Boyd Martin, Warden Tim
Keck, and Trustees Jim Wilson, David
Mork, and Cory Rogers.
Both locals work under the terms of
region-wide master agreements with
Associated General Contractors
(AGC) and the General and Concrete
Contractors Association (GCCA).
United Brotherhood of Carpenters
is not affiliated with the AFL-CIO, but
has a partnership with AFL-CIO-affil-
iated International Union of Operating
Engineers known as the National Con-
struction Alliance II.
Bend letter carrier Filson receives
‘Hero of the Year’ award from union
WASHINGTON, D.C. (PAI) — A
Bend, Oregon, letter carrier was
among five “Heroes of the Year” hon-
ored Sept. 10 by the National Associa-
tion of Letter Carriers’ (NALC).
Steve Filson, a member of NALC
Branch 1937 in Bend, saved fellow
unionist Jim Lascurin in 2012 after
Lascurin collapsed in a Bend parking
garage with a rare form of heart fail-
ure. Physicians later said that had Fil-
son, a former Navy medic, not acted
immediately by giving Lascurin CPR,
Lascurin would have died. That type of
heart failure has only a 5 percent sur-
vival rate.
For his action, Filson was named
the Western Region Hero of the Year
by the international union.
Jermaine Shirley of Branch 379 in
the Bronx was named National Hero
of the Year. Last December Shirley
helped save several people from a fire
in his own apartment building. He was
just setting out for work when he
smelled smoke. He alerted residents at
all six apartments, called 9-1-1, and
helped several residents, including an
11-year-old child, to safety.
All of the honorees are examples of
“courage, compassion and dedication
or all three,” said Letter Carriers Pres-
ident Fredric Rolando. “They do these
things because they’re in the neighbor-
hoods six or seven days a week and
they know when something’s wrong.”
National AFL-CIO Secretary-
Treasurer Liz Shuler of Portland, Ore-
gon, attended the ceremony held in
Washington, D.C.
ALEC may push local-level
‘right-to-work’ ordinances
It’s not clear it would stand up in court, but the secretive corporate lobby
group ALEC may be planning to push city- and county-level versions of the
laws that are best known by their inaccurate label “right to work.” The laws
— which exist in 24 states — bar any union contract from requiring workers
to pay the cost of union representation. Trouble is, the public buys it: In an
Aug. 7-10 Gallup poll 71 percent of Americans said they’d vote for it, even
though the same poll found that 53 percent approve of unions. So in the state
of Washington, the anti-union group Freedom Foundation is sponsoring lo-
cal ballot measures establishing right-to-work for local public employees.
This November, residents of the cities of Blaine, Chelan, Sequim and Shel-
ton may vote on the ordinances, if they survive legal challenges arguing that
they violate state law. And in Oregon, union foes say they will pursue a 2016
ballot initiating instituting right-to-work for public employees.
Sign of the times: Senior citizens
struggling to repay college loans
You can discharge consumer debt with a bankruptcy, and lose mortgage
debt (and your house) with a foreclosure, but under federal law, student loans
are the debt that never goes away. On Sept. 10, the U.S. Senate Special Com-
mittee on Aging held a hearing on the student loan debt of retirees. A U.S.
Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found about 706,000 house-
holds headed by senior citizens carry student loan debt, totaling $18.2 billion,
and apparently seniors are defaulting on student debt at a higher rate than the
general population. As of 2013, the government was garnishing the Social
Security benefits of 155,000 individuals in default on their student loans —
a fivefold increase from 2002.
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NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
SEPTEMBER 19, 2014