SERVING ORGANIZED LABOR IN OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON SINCE 1900
NORTHWEST
LABOR
PRESS
VOLUME 116, NUMBER 4
INSIDE
In memoriam
Union meetings
Free classifieds
Economics 101
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4
6
7
PORTLAND, OREGON
FEBRUARY 20, 2015
PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH
John Kitzhaber resigns
First Unitarian recognizes a union amid ‘media frenzy’
Church leaders balk at first, but
pressure from the congregation
prompts a change of heart
By Don McIntosh
Associate editor
Senior minister Bill Sinkford was
more than a little surprised Nov.
18, when 11 of his employees at
First Unitarian Church of Portland
entered his office to present signa-
tures demanding union recogni-
tion.
First Unitarian is one of Port-
land’s most progressive churches,
with an activist congregation and
a profusion of committees on so-
cial, economic, and environmen-
tal justice. Its parent organization,
the Unitarian Universalist Associ-
ation of Congregations, teaches
that evil originates with “unjust
social and economic conditions.”
But when church employees
announced their plan to tackle un-
just economic conditions by sign-
ing up with Communications
Workers of America (CWA) Lo-
cal 7901, they got a chilly re-
sponse from Sinkford and two
other church executives: Minister
Tom Disrud and Administrator
Kathryn Estey.
Jason Chapman, Nicole Bowmer, Josh Mong and Kate Fagerholm fell in love
with their jobs at First Unitarian Church of Portland, but were shaken last No-
vember when their efforts to unionize were opposed. Fagerholm left her job
at the church as of Feb. 6. Church leaders did an about face the next day, and
agreed to recognize the union.
The day after the delegation
went to Sinkford’s office, then-
Local 7901 president Madelyn
Elder got a phone call from Cor-
bett Gordon — a member of the
First Unitarian congregation
who’s also a management-side at-
torney at Tonkon Torp law firm.
Gordon told Elder that U.S. labor
law doesn’t require churches to
bargain with unions, and First
Unitarian wouldn’t be recogniz-
ing Local 7901.
But that response missed the
point, says labor attorney Cathy
Highet, who advised the Unitarian
workers. “The whole point of this
exemption is to allow churches to
organize their labor relations in
accord with church doctrine,”
Highet told the Labor Press. Just
because churches don’t have to
recognize a union doesn’t mean
they can’t. Clerical employees at
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John Kitzhaber’s Feb. 13 resigna-
tion as Oregon governor generated
expressions of sympathy from top
labor leaders, who have looked on
him as an ally.
The resignation followed a de-
cision by the state attorney general
to open a criminal investigation
into whether paid advocacy work
by Kitzhaber's fiancée Cylvia
Hayes crossed legal lines.
“I am confident that I have not
broken any laws nor taken any ac-
tions that were dishonest or dis-
honorable in their intent or out-
come,” Kitzhaber said at the press
conference announcing his resig-
nation. But Kitzhaber said he was
troubled that a person can be
“charged, tried, convicted and sen-
tenced by the media with no due
process and no independent veri-
fication of the allegations in-
volved.” An “escalating media
frenzy” had “reached the point of
no return,” Kitzhaber said, and he
became a liability to the cause.
Kitzhaber included efforts to
defend workers’ union rights
among his proudest achievements:
“We have stood by our working
men and women steadfastly sup-
porting collective bargaining and
the right to form a union,” he said.
“If you look at what he’s ac-
complished in the last 12 years, it’s
pretty phenomenal,” said Oregon
AFL-CIO President Tom Cham-
berlain (referring to the three full
terms Kitzhaber served as gover-
nor). “When the Republican far
right took over the Legislature, he
was ‘Dr. No.’ He stopped this state
from being Wisconsin-lite. He
took a hostile Senate and House
and did everything he could to
push a progressive agenda. The
bottom line is: More people have
health care, and better health care,
because of John Kitzhaber.”
Kitzhaber was an emergency
room doctor when he entered the
Oregon House in 1978. He served
a two-year term in the House and
three four-year terms in the Ore-
gon Senate. As Senate president,
he led passage of the legislation
that created the Oregon Health
Plan — which stretches federal
Medicaid dollars to cover more
low-income Oregonians than the
minimum required by federal
guidelines.
Then, as Oregon governor from
Turn to Page 3
Portland airport: a highly desirable workplace, for managers
After unions advocate for low-
wage workers, the Port hires a
consultant at $197 an hour to
develop a ‘social equity’ policy
By Don McIntosh
Associate editor
What do you get when you ask
high-paid managers to draft a
proposal to improve life for low-
wage workers? A whole lot of
nothing.
For nearly a year, UNITE
HERE and Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) have
pressed the Port of Portland to
do something to improve wages
and job security for hundreds of
low-wage workers at Portland
International Airport (PDX) —
baggage handlers, wheelchair
assistants, fuelers, cabin clean-
ers, and concessions workers.
What Port executives came
up with — after months of
“stakeholder” meetings — was
five pages of management-
speak, in which the public
agency promises next to noth-
ing. The document, presented to
the Port of Portland Board of
Commissioners Feb. 11, is full
of sentences like these: “Integral
to ensuring that airport workers,
whether employees of the Port
of Portland or the many contrac-
tors and concessionaire workers
at PDX, are safe, healthy and
able to sustain high quality work
is the vigilant attention to rights
and benefits afforded them. To
this end the Port will monitor
and enhance existing programs
as well as chart paths to new
benefits not currently in place.”
Say what? You can take a
look at the document yourself at
ow.ly/JdesJ. We did our best to
boil down the verbiage, and
found just two tangible im-
provements:
• The Port will make it easier for
employers to offer subsidized
bus passes to workers.
• The Port might make a computer
available for workers to search
for new jobs.
The other bullet points in the
1,600-word document range
from vague to meaningless: The
Port will “continue” to do a va-
riety of things it’s already doing;
it will “partner with state agen-
cies” to tell workers how to sign
up for Obamacare; it will “join
with” the City of Portland and
the Oregon Bureau of Labor and
Industries to tell airport employ-
ers about sick leave; it will make
lease-holders submit written
plans on how to avoid “disrup-
tive labor strife;” it will require
contractors to detail the “mini-
mum level of working condi-
tions” they themselves set for
employees; and on and on.
There are even bullet points
touting past achievements —
like last November’s airport job
fair for pink-slipped concessions
workers. The one promising
item would come in 2016, when
the Port would include “wages
and benefits, quality of safety
training, and career develop-
ment programs” in its criteria
for evaluating and scoring con-
cessions proposals.
The document was written by
a cross-departmental group of
14 senior managers from human
resources, legal, operations,
public affairs, and finance.
Nowhere does the manage-
ment-written draft admit there’s
a problem with low wages at the
airport. In fact, it lauds PDX as
“a highly desirable workplace,”
and “an excellent working envi-
ronment in terms of safety, secu-
rity and opportunities for ad-
vancement and mutual success.”
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