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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 7, 2015)
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | August 7, 2015 | PAGE 5 Hard feelings linger after Fast Track vote in Congress Labor in no mood to pal around with Democrats who voted for it By Don McIntosh Associate Editor Oregon labor unionists don’t seem likely to forget the recent Fast Track vote in Con- gress any time soon. The Fast Track leg- islation will make it easier over the next six years for Congress to pass more cor- porate-friendly foreign deals like the pro- posed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Nationally, Democrats voted by lop- sided margins against Fast Track: Fewer than one in six House Democrats and one in three Senate Democrats voted for it. But four out of the six Oregon Democrats voted for it, and one — Sen. Ron Wyden — was indispensable to its passage. The votes, held in late June, were 218-208 in the House and 60-38 in the Senate. Given the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule, any senator who voted for Fast Track could have halted its passage if they’d voted the other way. Wyden not only voted for it, but brokered a deal with Republicans that brought other fellow Democrats along. That earned him praise and thanks from President Barack Obama, who had pushed Fast Track hard for months. In the speech Obama made when he signed fast track into law, he named eight members of Congress who made it happen: Wyden and fellow Sen- ate Democrat Patty Murray (Washing- ton), plus some of the most anti-union Republicans in Congress: House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Congressmen Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), Ron Kind (R-Wisc.) and Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio). And in the House, had five “yes” votes gone the other way, Fast Track would have failed. Oregon Democrats Earl Blu- menauer, Suzanne Bonamici, and Kurt Schrader were three of those five. The damage to their relationship to or- ganized labor is beginning to be felt. The Northwest Oregon Labor Council re- solved not to invite them to its annual La- bor Day picnic this year. The announce- ment of that decision was greeted with general applause at the July 7 meeting of the Oregon AFL-CIO Executive Board. Likewise, the Oregon AFL-CIO won’t be inviting any Fast Track Democrats to its biennial convention in Seaside this Oc- tober. That’s never happened before. And there’s more to come. “Our message is: ‘You damaged the relationship. It’s up to you to fix it,’” Ore- gon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamber- lain explained at the Executive Board meeting. Sen. Wyden is up for re-election in 2016, and so are all the Fast Track De- mocrats in the House, since they must run every two years. United Food and Commercial Work- ers, both nationally and in Oregon, has resolved not to support the re-election campaigns of members of Congress who voted for Fast Track, in any way. And at least one other national union is ready to back a primary challenger to Wyden, if one should emerge. Meanwhile, the Oregon Working Families Party, a union-backed minor party, is looking at all options. It would support (and might help recruit) a chal- lenger to Wyden in the Democratic pri- mary. Failing that, the party is likely to challenge Wyden in the general election with a candidate of its own. If and when the TPP is finalized and goes to Congress for a vote, Fast Track Democrats might have an opportunity to rehabilitate their credibility with labor. Voting against TPP might heal the wound; voting for it will throw salt in it. Obama has touted the supposed unprece- dented workers’ rights protections of the secretly-negotiated deal, but national AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, whose staff has had access to the classi- fied texts, has said that’s a flat-out false- hood. Trade partners for the deal include Vietnam, an authoritarian state whose impoverished workers lack basic rights, and Malaysia, classified by the U.S. State Department as one of the worst countries in the world for forced labor and human trafficking. TRUE BLUE Not all of Oregon’s Democrats voted for Fast Track. The Oregon AFL-CIO says Sen. Jeff Merkley and Congressman Peter DeFazio deserve the thanks of union mem- bers for their “no” votes and for speaking up in Congress to oppose it. See DeFazio’s House floor speech online at http://bit.ly/1eicQEJ,and Merkley’s Senate floor speech (at the 9:45 mark) at http://cs.pn/1Jg- pDVc. 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