SERVING ORGANIZED LABOR IN OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON SINCE 1900
NORTHWEST
LABOR
PRESS
Oregon: Oct. 18
Washington: Oct. 10
PORTLAND, OREGON
OCTOBER 7, 2016
Photo courtesy of Oregon AFSCME.
VOLUME 117, NUMBER 19
Deadline
The organizing committee met at Oregon AFSCME to discuss strategy.
Addiction treatment workers unionize
FIGHTING TO KEEP AT-THE-DOOR MAIL DELIVERY: Congress will vote in the lame-duck session on a bill that
would convert at-the-door mail delivery for business and residential customers to centralized cluster boxes. Thou-
sands of family-wage union letter carrier jobs are at stake. More than 75 people joined Letter Carriers Branch 82 at
an informational picket line Sept. 29 in front of the Main Post Office in Northwest Portland to warn customers about
the transformation. They are opposed to Section 202 of House Resolution 5714, a bipartisan postal reform bill that
includes many of the consensus reform provisions backed by postal unions, businesses, and USPS. It is that section
of the bill that ends door mail delivery. “This isn’t just a postal problem, which is why a lot of different groups are
here. This is a people problem,” said Jim Falvey, president of Branch 82. “If this bill goes through, a segment of our
society who are least able to absorb that service cut, will have to absorb that service cut.”
ECONOMIC SNAPSHOT
Workers at a pair of Medicaid-
funded in-patient residential al-
cohol and drug treatment facil-
ities in Portland voted 46 to 3 to
unionize with Oregon AF-
SCME in ballots counted Sept.
28. The unit of 61 workers is
employed by the Oregon chap-
ter of non-profit Volunteers of
America (VOA). For their
work helping addicts recover in
a six-month program of court-
ordered treatment, they’re paid
as little as $10 to $12 an hour.
So when VOA management
brought in the Lane Powell law
firm at hundreds of dollars an
hour, the firm’s cookie-cutter
anti-union campaign fell flat:
After multiple anti-union meet-
ings held by management, just
three workers voted against the
union.
AFSCME represents Volun-
teers of America employees in
New York and New Jersey, as
well as non-profit workers in
Portland who do similar work.
Corporate profits are way up, corporate taxes are way down
A new study by the Economic
Policy Institute and Americans
for Tax Fairness finds that in re-
cent years, corporate profits
have reached record highs —
and so too has the amount of un-
taxed profits U.S. corporations
have stashed offshore: $2.4 tril-
lion. It is estimated corporations
could owe as much as $700 bil-
lion on those profits. In short,
corporations are dodging more
and more of their tax responsi-
bilities.
These are some of the find-
ings in “Corporate Tax Chart-
book: How Corporations Rig
the Rules to Dodge the Taxes
They Owe,” released Sept. 19
by researchers Frank Clemente,
Hunter Blair, and Nick Trokel.
Among the key findings:
• Corporate profits are way up, and
corporate taxes are way down. In
1952, corporate profits were 5.5
percent of the economy, and corpo-
rate taxes were 5.9 percent of GDP.
Today, corporate profits are 8.5 per-
holiday.
• Just 50 companies hold over 75
percent of untaxed offshore prof-
its. Ten companies hold 39 per-
cent of these profits. Just four
companies — Apple, Pfizer, Mi-
crosoft, and General Electric —
hold one-quarter of all untaxed
offshore profits.
• The U.S. Treasury will lose $1.3
trillion over 10 years — about
$126 billion a year — due to the
deferral of taxes on offshore
profits.
cent of the economy, and corporate
taxes are just 1.9 percent of GDP.
• Corporations used to contribute
$1 out of every $3 in federal rev-
enue. Today, despite very high
corporate profitability, it is $1
out of every $9.
• As of 2015, U.S. corporations had
$2.4 trillion in untaxed profits
offshore. Another study, looking
at S&P 500 companies, found
they held $2.1 trillion as of 2014.
This roughly five-fold increase
from $434 billion in 2005 stems
largely from anticipation of a tax
According to the study, the
use of offshore profit-shifting
hinges on a single corporate tax
loophole: deferral. Multina-
tional companies are allowed to
defer paying taxes on profits
from an offshore subsidiary un-
til they pay them back to the
U.S. parent as a dividend. Pro-
ponents of cutting the corporate
tax rate refer to profits held off-
shore as “trapped.” This charac-
terization is patently false, the
study says. Nothing prevents
corporations from returning
these profits to the United States
except a desire to pay lower
taxes. In fact, corporations over-
all return about two-thirds of the
profits they make offshore, and
pay the taxes they owe on them.
Further, there are numerous
U.S. investments that these
companies can undertake with-
out triggering the tax. In short,
deferral provides a mammoth
incentive for multinational cor-
porations to disguise their U.S.
profits as profits earned in tax
havens. And they have re-
sponded to this incentive: 82
percent of the U.S. tax revenue
loss from income shifting is due
to profit shifting to just seven
tax-haven countries.
The intentional erosion of the
U.S. corporate income tax base
has real consequences. Rich
multinational corporations
avoiding their fair share of U.S.
taxes means that domestic firms
and American workers have to
foot the bill.