SERVING ORGANIZED LABOR IN OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON SINCE 1900
NORTHWEST
LABOR
PRESS
VOLUME 117, NUMBER 4
IN THIS ISSUE
SCALIA’S DEATH GIVES UNIONS REPRIEVE The
Supreme Court now might tie 4-4 on Friedrichs. | Page 5
LAWMAKERS BOW TO BOEING A bill to tie tax breaks
to actual jobs dies in the Washington state senate. | Page 6
Meetings p.4
Classifieds p.6
Labor History p.7
PORTLAND, OREGON
FEBRUARY 19, 2016
Nabisco recruits strikebreakers —
before union bargaining even begins
Oregon minimum wage
raise speeding to passage
By Don McIntosh
Associate Editor
There may be signs of labor
strife ahead for about 2,200
workers at Nabisco’s six re-
maining U.S. plants (including
about 200 workers at Nabisco’s
Portland Bakery) and two dis-
tribution centers.
National bargaining began
Feb. 16 between Bakery, Con-
fectionery, Tobacco Workers
and Grain Millers International
Union (BCTGM) and Nabisco
parent company Mondelēz In-
ternational. But already in late
January, online ads began ap-
pearing, offering temporary
jobs at $28 an hour to workers
with experience operating
dough machines, continuous
bake ovens, salters and spray
oil machines, “for a possible la-
bor dispute that may occur on
or about February 29, 2016.”
Feb. 29 is the date BCTGM’s
existing union contracts expire
at the eight Nabisco facilities.
The ads were posted by
Michigan-headquartered Huff-
SALEM — A bill to raise Ore-
gon’s minimum wage is moving
quickly through the short 2016
session of the Legislature. Unlike
two pending union-backed ballot
measures that would create a
statewide minimum of $15 or
$13.50, Senate Bill 1532 would
divide the state into three regions.
By July 2022, the minimum
wage would rise to $14.75 in the
Portland metro area (inside the
Urban Growth Boundary),
$13.50 in 16 Northwestern Ore-
gon counties plus Josephine and
Jackson counties, and $12.50 in
the rural “frontier” areas of the
rest of the state. The raises would
ADD PICKETERS HERE? Seven of these strange tombstone-like engraved
stones appeared last fall outside the Portland Nabisco bakery. Is it a prepa-
ration for picketers? Company spokesperson Laurie Guzzinati wouldn't say
precisely, saying only that the signs were installed to delineate property
boundaries after a periodic safety and security review.
master Crisis Response. The
company, which calls itself “the
leading provider of strike man-
agement solutions,” provides
replacement employees and
strike security. The ads don’t
mention Nabisco or Mondelēz
by name, but they’re for jobs in
the same cities as the Nabisco
plants. Those are: Charlotte,
North Carolina; Fairlawn, New
Jersey; Richmond, Virginia;
Chicago, Illinois; Denver, Col-
orado; Atlanta, Georgia; and
Turn to Page 2
PART ONE OF A SERIES
Jail time for wage thieves?
Will Oregon legislators get tough on wage
theft? Not this year. Not really.
By Don McIntosh
Associate Editor
To an out-of-work union tile-setter from Las
Vegas, the promise of four
months of work at a
Tigard, Oregon, Embassy
Suites sounded enticing.
Las Vegas construction
work had all but dried up
for Bricklayers and Allied
Crafts Local 13. So Johnny
Hilditch drove to Oregon
on his own dime last Au-
gust to work nonunion for Johnny Hilditch
Residential Commercial Interiors (RCI), at
$18 an hour plus free lodging in the hotel. But
in October, the paychecks stopped coming.
Some RCI crew members stopped working.
Hilditch and several others stayed, hoping for
a lump-sum check when the room-by-room
remodel of the Washington Square Embassy
Suites was complete. The work ended in De-
cember, but the pay never came. Company
owner Joe Rogers — seldom seen on the work
site — stopped returning phone calls. Hilditch
estimates he’s owed $6,500. And there was
worse to come. Hilditch says when he went to
apply for unemployment, he was told there
was no record of his employment in Oregon.
That may be because RCI hadn’t paid unem-
ployment insurance.
Hilditch wasn’t the only one. Eugene resi-
dent Lex Sanderson is a journeyman floor in-
staller and former member of Seattle-based
Painters and Allied Trades Local 1238. He
says RCI promised him $25 an hour to lay car-
pet in the Embassy Suites remodel, but only
ever paid him $20 an hour. Problems began
with his very first paycheck, which was late.
The company paid straight time for overtime,
not time-and-a-half as required by law. When
Turn to Page 3
take place each year on July 1,
starting this year, and would rise
with inflation after 2022.
The bill passed the Senate
Feb. 11 by 16-12. No Republican
voted for it, and Betsy Johnson
(D-Scappoose) was the only De-
mocrat to vote against it.
It passed the House Business
and Labor Committee by a 6-5
party line vote Feb. 15.
As of press time, it was await-
ing a vote on the House floor,
where it was expected to pass.
Gov. Kate Brown announced she
will sign it if it passes, though it
differs from an earlier version
she proposed.
Union campaign crushed at
Portland Specialty Baking
In three weeks, union support
went from 61 percent to 23 per-
cent. Here’s what happened.
At a large industrial bakery in
Gresham, an intensive anti-
union blitz by company man-
agement turned a pro-union ma-
jority into an overwhelming
“no” vote in just 24 days.
When Bakers Local 114 filed
Jan. 11 for a union election, 102
of the 167 workers at Portland
Specialty Baking had signed
cards saying they wanted a
union. By the time the National
Labor Relations Board (NLRB)
conducted an election on Feb. 4,
just 38 voted for the union, and
123 voted against.
Local 114 officials and AFL-
CIO union organizers were very
surprised by the result, and
struggled to figure out what hap-
pened.
“We blindsided the company
when we filed, then we got
blindsided three weeks later,”
said Local 114 Secretary-Trea-
surer Terry Lansing.
In the week before the elec-
tion, 75 workers had signed a
“vote yes” petition. But Portland
Specialty Baking used every ad-
vantage at its disposal, starting
with access to workers.
The company brought in a
professional union-buster from
Illinois, who led presentations at
the beginning of nearly every
shift, for two weeks. Workers
were then called in one by one
for individual meetings with
two or three managers at a time,
and most workers were called in
multiple times. Lansing says
Local 114 plans to file charges
with the NLRB accusing the
company of breaking federal la-
bor law in those meetings — in-
terrogating workers about their
views on the union, promising
(and making) improvements to
wages and schedules in order to
buy support, and threatening
that those improvements would
vanish if the union won.
If company managers neg-
lected workers before, after the
surprise arrival of the union,
they turned on the charm. For
the first time, company commu-
nications were translated into
workers’ own languages. A
manager no one liked disap-
peared from the plant without
explanation. An unpopular su-
pervisor was transferred to a dif-
ferent production line. An open
Turn to Page 5