NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | March 6, 2015 | PAGE 3
Labor attorney Susan Stoner retires ...Fast track fight begins
after decades defending bus drivers
From Page 1
Amalgamated Transit Union
(ATU) Local 757 general coun-
sel Susan Stoner retired effective
Feb. 28.
Over the 24 years she was an
in-house attorney, she was an
important figure behind the
scenes in the life of the union.
Stoner’s legal work helped win
arbitrations and defend con-
tracts, and won reinstatement for
dozens of transit workers. She
also advised union leaders dur-
ing years of battles with public
transit agencies like TriMet and
private contractors like multina-
tional First Student.
Stoner, 65, is a Portland na-
tive and the daughter of Cal
Stoner, an ardently pro-union
electrical contractor. Stoner
Electric Group, which he
founded in 1960, continues to
140
employ members of
States. She studied law at
IBEW Local 48 to
University of Houston,
this day.
and met videographer
“My dad loved
George Slanina, whom
IBEW,” Stoner says.
she later married.
“I grew up thinking
Moving back to Port-
unions were wonder-
land in 1988, she passed
ful.”
the Oregon bar and did
And she still thinks
outside legal work for Lo-
that. Despite their de-
cal 757 and other clients
cline, unions are still Susan Stoner until joining the union as
workers’ best de-
staff attorney in 1991.
Stoner says she’s grateful to
fense, Stoner says, and the most
democratic institutions they’ll have represented bus drivers and
mechanics: “They are oriented
encounter.
“Our job in the union,” Stoner toward service to others, and
says, “is to resist exploitation they’re always on time,” Stoner
and the greed of the people who said.
If she has one bit of parting
are running our working lives.”
Before settling down as a la- advice, it’s a call for unity:
bor lawyer, Stoner says she was “Members need to realize that
a hippie and an activist. Gradu- dissension within the union em-
ating from Wilson High School powers the employer.”
In retirement, Stoner will
in 1967, she joined up with
spend time at home in Southeast
causes from anti-war to anti- Portland finishing the fifth book
poverty to historical preserva- in her series of self-published
tion. She worked for the home- historical mystery novels set
less youth clinic Outside In, amid the labor union ferment of
started a women’s health clinic, 1900s Portland. Titled Deadline,
and volunteered with a prisoner it deals with a real-life conflict
support group. She enrolled at between cattle and sheep ranch-
Marylhurst College in 1975, and ers in Central Oregon.
earned independent study credit
Stoner’s successor as ATU
interviewing activists in the Local 757’s general counsel is
Eastern and Southern United Lane Toensmeier.
You need a lawyer
who understands how
your union disability
benefits and your
Social Security
disability benefits
will fit together.
leaks show U.S. negotiators push-
ing the other countries to:
• Agree to an “Investor-State
Dispute Resolution” process in
which foreign investors can sue
governments in special tribunals
of trade lawyers — if new regu-
lations reduce expected profits;
• Agree to extraordinarily long
monopolies for copyrighted
works — 70 years after the death
of a copyright holder; and
• Expand drug company prof-
its by giving them the right to ex-
tend drug patents for new uses,
requiring generic manufacturers
to re-run expensive tests to prove
drug safety, and outlawing sys-
tems that price medicine accord-
ing to clinical benefits.
For the AFL-CIO, TPP comes
in a larger context of 20-plus
years of trade agreements that
have coincided with record trade
deficits and the loss of millions
of American manufacturing jobs.
“Today, the trade policies of
the United States are undermin-
ing the interests of working peo-
ple,” the national AFL-CIO Ex-
ecutive Council declared in an
official statement adopted Feb.
23 in Atlanta. “When decisions
about economic policy are made
behind closed doors, those deci-
sions tend to advance the policy
preferences of political and eco-
nomic elites, not the broad inter-
ests of the populace at large.…
U.S. trade deals — from
NAFTA and CAFTA to Korea
and Colombia — form a moun-
tain of broken promises made to
workers. With NAFTA and Ko-
rea, we were promised more
jobs and higher wages because
the deals would make it easier to
export U.S. products. Instead,
the deals made it easier to export
U.S. jobs.”
Both supporters and oppo-
nents of the TPP have stepped
up their campaigns.
Obama cabinet officials are
criss-crossing the country to
stump for the TPP. Obama’s
Commerce Secretary Penny
Pritzker — the billionaire Hyatt
heiress — flew to Portland Feb.
17 to talk up the TPP with local
execs at a nonunion Leatherman
Group factory. And Obama
trade czar Michael Froman —
in magazine articles, TV inter-
views, and meetings with
elected officials — has been
selling the idea that the TPP will
bring jobs back to America. [It’s
already brought his predecessor
a job: Ron Kirk, who started the
TPP negotiations in 2009, left in
2013 to take a job as an interna-
tional trade lawyer providing
“strategic advice to companies
with global interests.”]
On Feb. 26, US. Sen. Jeff
Merkley (D-Oregon) and seven
other senators took to the Senate
floor to speak in opposition to
fast track and the TPP.
The same day, President
Obama met in person with
members of Congress, including
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore-
gon), to seek support. Obama
even invited a reporter from
Portland’s KGW-TV to the
White House for a two-minute
interview in which he implied
the TPP will have “tough pro-
tections for labor rights and the
environment.”
Congressman Peter DeFazio
(D-Oregon), who voted against
NAFTA and every agreement
since, just laughed at that claim.
“These things can change at
any time,” DeFazio told the La-
bor Press by phone, “but the last
time I checked, the environmen-
tal provisions were meaningless
and the labor provisions were
non-binding, yet the ‘investor-
state’ provisions are stronger
than ever: Corporations can sue
the United States of America for
a loss of anticipated profits — to
undermine environmental, labor
or consumer protection laws.”
Elizabeth Swager, director of
the Oregon Fair Trade Cam-
paign, says DeFazio and
Merkley are certain “no” votes
on fast track. But other members
of Congress from Oregon and
Southwest Washington aren’t
signaling how they’ll vote. And
fast track’s fate may depend on
Wyden, the most senior Demo-
crat on the Senate Finance Com-
mittee. Wyden voted for
NAFTA in 1993, and most other
trade agreements since then. But
a disagreement between Wyden
and Senate Finance Chair Orrin
Hatch (R-Utah) over the details
is causing a delay in the fast
track bill.
On March 4, Oregon AFL-
CIO President Tom Chamber-
lain flew to Washington, D.C.,
to lobby members of the Oregon
delegation.
“I think we have a shot at
stopping this one,” Chamberlain
said. “But it’s going to take peo-
ple calling their elected repre-
sentatives.”
The Oregon AFL-CIO is holding a “Push
Back the Fast Track” rally Monday,
March 9, at 5:30 p.m. at Director Park,
815 SW Park Ave., Portland.