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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (April 7, 2017)
SERVING ORGANIZED LABOR IN OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON SINCE 1900 NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS VOLUME 118, NUMBER 7 IN THIS ISSUE CHANGES AT OREGON AFSCME Executive director Michael Seville resigns . | Page 3 TODAY’S LESSON: Unions matter, especially now | Page 5 May political endorsements p.4 Meeting notices p.6 PORTLAND, OREGON APRIL 7, 2017 Oregon judge in bakery lawsuit rules against double overtime Portland’s model Community Benefits Agreement could be replaced with ‘CEIP’ Building trades officials say City of Portland managers want to bypass a union-backed agreement that provides more opportunities for women and minority construction workers By Don McIntosh After decades of talk about in- creasing women and minority participation on city construc- tion projects, Portland City Council approved a resolution in 2012 that achieved that. The resolution committed the City to use a model “Community Benefits Agreement” (CBA) that had been developed by a coalition of over two dozen unions, pre-apprenticeship training programs, community groups, and contractor associ- ations over nearly two years of discussion. Implemented on two City construction projects, the CBA had record-busting results: On one project, fully 50 percent of apprentices were “The CEIP takes all the elements that made the CBA successful and dilutes and removes them.” — Maurice Rahming, owner of union-signatory O’Neill Electric minorities and 28 percent were women. Then, for reasons that are still unclear, the City stopped using the CBA. On the next two big City construction proj- ects, city managers imple- mented a “Frankenstein” ver- sion of the CBA which reduced the participation of unions and community groups. Now city managers, led by Dante James, director of the city’s Office of Equity and Human Rights, have released an even more al- tered template for future proj- ects, which they’ll ask City Council to approve on April 26. Union leaders and allies who’ve been tracking it are fu- rious. “After all the time and effort we put into this, it’s a slap in the face,” said Michael Burch, community outreach director for the Pacific Northwest Re- gional Council of Carpenters. “There’s no meat on the bones.” The problem, at least, is very real. Historically, openly- practiced discrimination kept blacks and women in particu- lar out of construction — as workers or as contractors. And Turn to Page 2 Workers Justice Project. The suit is on behalf of seven current and former workers at Portland Spe- cialty Baking, a Gresham indus- trial bakery that busted a union campaign last year. About 175 mostly immigrant workers work long hours for around $10 an hour making baked goods for Starbucks and Walmart. But on March 9, a Mult- nomah County Circuit Court Judge rejected the plaintiffs’ ar- gument that double overtime must be paid after both the 40- hour and 10-hour limits. The lawsuit will still go forward on other issues, including whether the bakery worked workers more than 13 hours – and failed to pay daily overtime – when a 24-hour period included work on two consecutive work days. KGW returns to labor peace A long-festering union dispute at KGW-TV has come to a close. At the Portland NBC affiliate, 26 camera operators and editors represented by IATSE Local 600 ratified a new union contract March 22 — more than two years after their old contract ex- pired. They’re the last of three KGW units to reach agreement. IBEW Local 48, which repre- sents 17 control room operators and technicians, settled in Sep- tember 2016, and SAG-AF- TRA, which represents on-air workers like TV reporters and anchors, settled in February 2016. The three contracts are the first set to be signed with KGW’s new owner. Gannett, the giant newspaper chain that owns USA Today, acquired KGW-TV with its 2013 purchase of Belo Corporation, and then spun off its broadcasting holdings in 2015 as a new publicly-traded com- pany, Tegna, Inc. Tegna alarmed unions with an unusual contract demand: elimi- nate the union “jurisdiction” clause, which says that the unions represent all station em- ployees who do their kind of work. Without that clause, Photo by Donna Hammond, courtesy of IBEW Local 48 Sept. 5, 2012: In front of a packed City Hall audience, Portland City Council votes 5-0 to approve a plan to involve unions in efforts to get more women and minorities on City construction projects. Now that plan is under threat. Oregon law limits manufactur- ing workers to a 13-hour work day, and entitles them to over- time pay when they work more than 10 hours in a day. A sepa- rate law requires overtime pay for all hourly workers after 40 hours in a week. What happens when manufacturing workers work both daily and weekly overtime? Until last year, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and In- dustries (BOLI) advised their employers to calculate daily and weekly overtime and pay whichever was greater. Now it says they should pay the over- time premium twice once a man- ufacturing worker has worked more than 40 hours in a week and 10 hours in a day— in ac- cord with a lawsuit filed last Au- gust by non-profit Northwest On camera and off, KGW-TV is a union production. Above, IBEW Local 48 member Brian Matthews prepares the set of the Portland Today show. nonunion workers could be brought in to do the same work as union members, but under different terms. Tegna owns 46 television stations in total, and has pushed the jurisdiction pro- posal at other union-represented stations. “I never believed their [union jurisdiction] proposal had any- thing to do with running a TV station,” says IATSE representa- tive Dave Twedell. “I think from Turn to Page 9
