Northwest labor press., December 18, 2015, Image 1

SERVING ORGANIZED LABOR IN OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON SINCE 1900
NORTHWEST
LABOR
PRESS
VOLUME 116, NUMBER 24
PORTLAND, OREGON
DECEMBER 18, 2015
Uber wins at
City Council
Portland legalizes app-based
ride services, but Novick prom-
ises right-to-unionize ordinance
MORNING ON THE PICKETLINE:
Left: Josh Hall, Bill Broughton, and
Karl Krupicka greet passersby. Above,
Scott Youngberg stands vigil.
Albany Steelworkers: Locked out, but standing proud
By Don McIntosh
Associate editor
ALBANY, Oregon—Monday,
Dec. 7. It’s pitch dark at 5:45 in
the morning as I pull up across
the road from the former
Oremet titanium plant —now
called ATI Albany Operations.
There’s a driving wind, and rain
is coming down in buckets. But
outside the plant gate, eight men
with picket signs walk back and
forth in front of a short line of
cars and vans.
The signs say “Steelworkers
at ATI: Fighting for Good Jobs
in our Community.” The men
are members of United Steel-
workers Local 7150. They’d
rather be inside, earning $30 an
hour processing titanium that
ends up in jet rotors and other
aerospace components. Instead
they’re out in the cold wet two
hours before sunrise, using their
bodies to slow down the scabs
— the out-of-town workers the
company brought in to replace
them. The law says union pick-
eters can’t block vehicles, but
picketers make a practice of de-
laying them — 60 seconds each.
So cars, pickups and a handful
of white shuttle vans with tinted
windows cross the line in one-
minute intervals.
Soon after the last vehicle
crosses the picket line, some of
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Letter Carriers Branch 82 celebrates 125 years of union
National Association of Letter
Carriers Branch 82 celebrated
its 125th anniversary on Dec. 2
with a party at its union hall at
5365 NE 42nd Ave., Portland.
The hall is named in honor of
treasurer emeritus Erwin “Bud”
Strohl.
Branch 82 is NALC’s largest
local in Oregon with 1,394
members covering the greater
Portland metropolitan area,
from St. Helens to Troutdale to
McMinnville. The union has
539 retirees (66 hold gold
cards for more than 50 years of
membership), as well as a
Ladies’ Auxiliary, which was
created in 1905. Interestingly,
the Auxiliary initially was
formed to circumvent an order
by President Theodore Roo-
sevelt in January 1902 (known
REMINISCING: Retired Letter Carrier Dave
McGann looks at an old photograph of
himself as a child with his grandfather —
Portland Letter Carrier Kinard Irving Dixon.
The picture was taken in the late 1940s at
Southeast 104th and Harold. McGann
worked for the Post Office for 44 years, de-
livering mail out of the Kenton Post Office
for 17 years, and the St. Johns Post Office
for 27 years. After retiring in 2005, he be-
came a volunteer for Meals on Wheels,
where he delivers meals to senior citizens
every day of the week.
as the Gag Rules) that forbade
all postal and federal employ-
ees from “directly or indirectly,
individually or through associ-
ations,” soliciting members of
Congress. Branch 82 was the
first to create an auxiliary —
Auxiliary #1 —so that the
wives could take legislative ac-
tion that the members them-
selves could not. The Gag
Rules were rescinded in 1912.
To celebrate the 125th an-
niversary, active letter carriers,
retired letter carriers, union offi-
cers, two former Branch 82
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By Don McIntosh
Associate editor
In Paris, France, when Uber
started operating in violation of
the law, police raided its offices
and arrested its executives. In
Portland, Oregon, when Uber
did the same, Mayor Charlie
Hales promised to make its op-
erations legal within five
months.
Portland City Council had
just reformed taxi regulations in
2012 to improve conditions for
taxi drivers. But the reform
process was dropped when City
Commissioner Steve Novick
took the reins of the Portland
Bureau of Transportation in
2014. Instead, he announced
that a top-to-bottom review of
taxi regulations would be fol-
lowed by a new ordinance to al-
low app-based Transportation
Network Companies (TNCs)
like Uber and Lyft to operate.
Novick told the Labor Press
in November 2014 — before
the rewrite began — that he
hoped the new regulation would
include protections for workers.
That didn’t happen. Nothing in
the ordinance passed Dec. 2
protects workers in the industry.
Instead, the ordinance sweeps
away a regulatory structure that
was fine-tuned over decades to
protect drivers and the public
and ensure stability in the taxi
industry. Most significantly, the
new law gets rid of the caps on
the number of for-hire vehicles
and the rates they can charge the
public. But it also allows more
lax vehicle inspections and
driver background checks. And
it sets up separate and unequal
regulations that favor the out-of-
town app-based upstarts over
Portland’s own taxi companies:
TNCs were given substantially
lower insurance requirements,
and unlike taxis, TNC vehicles
don’t have to have cameras in
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