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
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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
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