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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