SERVING ORGANIZED LABOR IN OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON SINCE 1900
NORTHWEST
LABOR
PRESS
VOLUME 117, NUMBER 13
IN THIS ISSUE
ALL-NEW HOUSE OF LABOR Oregon AFL-CIO will tear
down its HQ to create affordable housing. | Page 2
PROUD TO BE UNION – AND TRANSGENDER
Oregon’s Pride at Work president tells her story. | Page 5
Labor History p.4 Meetings p.6 Clinton Endorsed p.12
PORTLAND, OREGON
JULY 1, 2016
Laid-off Nabisco workers travel the country
to promote boycott of Mexican-made Oreos
In Portland, a laid-off worker
delivers a message: The fight is
bigger than Mondelēz
By Don McIntosh
Associate editor
Chicago bakery worker An-
thony Jackson was laid off from
Nabisco March 23. On June 16
and 17, he visited Portland as
part of a multi-city tour to pub-
licize his union’s boycott of
Mexican-made Oreos. Jackson
is one of several hundred Chic-
ago workers who were disposed
of when Nabisco, a highly prof-
itable and iconic American cor-
poration, decided to make even
more money by shifting more
production to Mexico.
The story began in May
2015 when Nabisco parent
company Mondelēz told lead-
ers of Chicago-based Bakery,
Confectionery, Tobacco Work-
ers and Grain Millers
(BCTGM) Local 300 that it
At a Boeing contractor in Portland,
workers vote whether to go union
Anthony Jackson (right) lost his job at the Nabisco bakery in Chicago
when the company shifted production lines to Mexico. Jackson flew to
Portland June 16 in part to join a protest picket line outside Nabisco’s Port-
land bakery with Portland Nabisco workers like Lamar Kennedy (left).
would close nine of 16 produc-
tion lines in Chicago — and
spend $130 million to open
four new ones at its plant
in Salinas, Mexico — if union
workers in Chicago didn’t offer
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WORKERS RIGHTS
Cancer survivor who was fired for medical
marijuana is back on the job in Lane County
Thanks to Oregon AFSCME, a
Lane County IT worker is back
on the job six months after he
was fired for off-the-clock use
of marijuana.
Michael Hirsch, 60, was ter-
minated two days before
Christmas because his urine
tested positive for marijuana.
But that’s because, on the ad-
vice of a doctor, he’d been us-
ing it at night to deal with pain
and cramping from having un-
dergone chemotherapy and ra-
diation for stage 3 prostate can-
cer. As detailed in a June 13
arbitrator’s ruling, there was
never any complaint about
Hirsch’s performance as a sen-
ior programmer and systems
analyst for the county, nor any
sign he was impaired on Nov.
12, 2015, the day he was or-
dered to take the drug test.
That day, according to Lane
County attorneys, Hirsch was
five to 10 minutes late to an off-
site diversity training, and he
grabbed
some Hal-
l o w e e n
candy in a
bowl by the
door on the
way in. Then,
during small
group exer-
cises an hour
Michael Hirsch into the train-
ing, a trainer
walked by him and noticed the
smell of burnt marijuana on his
clothes.
“It was the smell on my
fleece jacket,” Hirsch tells the
Labor Press. “Apparently that
material holds smells, and I had
worn it outside when I took my
medicine, so the smell stuck to
it.”
The trainer called county
HR, which ordered that Hirsch
be removed from the training
and drug-tested. Six weeks
later, he was terminated for the
positive test result.
At his union grievance arbi-
tration hearing, co-workers tes-
tified that Hirsch acted nor-
mally before the training and
participated normally once he
was there. There was no safety
issue, and no prior offense.
“The fact is I was never im-
paired at work, and they would
admit that,” Hirsch says. But
past cases had not gone well for
employees who made that de-
fense. Even though marijuana
is now legal in Oregon for both
medical and recreational use,
case law continues to preserve
employers’ rights to fire work-
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About 180 nonunion workers
who paint commercial aircraft at
the Portland airport will vote
July 7 and 8 on whether to join
the International Association of
Machinists and Aerospace
Workers (IAM).
The workers paint brand-new
Boeing aircraft prior to delivery
to Boeing customers — in a pair
of aircraft hangars that Boeing
leases from the Port of Portland.
And they work alongside about
a dozen Boeing employees. But
they themselves are not Boeing
employees.
Instead, they work for a sub-
contractor called Commercial
Aircraft Painting Services
(CAPS), which is listed in Ore-
gon corporate records as owned
by Paul and Rhona-Joy
Lubomirski. Paul Lubomirski
owns a similar company in
Louisiana known as Aviation
Exteriors, Inc. (AvEx).
IAM represents about 30,000
Boeing workers, but in recent
years the company has shifted
work to contractors and non-
union locations.
At CAPS, employees work
four or five 12-hour shifts a
week with a one-hour unpaid
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Cure for corporate medicine:
A doctors’ union contract
Doctors who unionized to fight
outsourcing at PeaceHealth in
Eugene now have a first contract
Doctors at PeaceHealth Sacred
Heart hospital in Springfield,
Oregon, thought they’d be car-
rying picket signs June 23. In-
stead, that day they wrapped up
a unanimous vote to approve
their first-ever union contract.
The agreement preserves
benefits, raises pay 4 percent,
and sets performance bonuses
for things like avoiding patient
readmission. But the union ef-
fort was never about the money,
says Sacred Heart doctor David
Schwartz, president of the Pa-
cific Northwest Hospital Medi-
cine Association. PNHMA —
also known as American Feder-
ation of Teachers (AFT) Local
6552 — was formed to fight
outsourcing and give hospital
doctors greater say over the
quality of care. In early 2014,
PeaceHealth Sacred Heart ad-
ministrators announced plans to
outsource the hospital’s 36 doc-
tors to a management company
that would become their em-
ployer. About a third of them
quit. The rest joined a union.
“We didn’t want to end up
working for one of these man-
agement companies that was
only interested in squeezing out
a profit,” Schwartz said. “We
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