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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 2, 2018)
SERVING ORGANIZED LABOR IN OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON SINCE 1900 NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS VOLUME 119, NUMBER 3 IN THIS ISSUE UNION MEMBERSHIP HOLDS STEADY: In 2017, 10.7 percent of American workers were in a union. | Page 4 ATU BLASTS PICK FOR TOP TRIMET JOB : Union hoped the board would hire a change agent. | Page 5 Meeting notices p. 6 I-5 bridge replacement p.11 PORTLAND, OREGON FEBRURY 2, 2018 WORKERS’ RIGHTS POLITICS Meet the ‘anti-union’ organizers A union-backed challenge to Oregon’s Greg Walden By Don McIntosh You’ve heard of union organiz- ers — union staff who recruit workers to join a union. And you’ve heard of union busters— high-paid consultants that employers deploy to talk workers out of a union. Now, there’s a third force: founda- tion-funded “anti-union organ- izers” who send mailings and knock on doors trying to get workers to drop their union membership. They’re employ- ees of a group called the Free- dom Foundation, which oper- ates in Washington, Oregon, and California. Freedom Foundation uses public records requests and le- gal action to get public em- ployee union membership lists, and then follows up with mail- ings, phone calls, and in-person visits to union members’ homes, all with one message: WINK, WINK. Freedom Foundation CEO Tom McCabe winks at a union photographer as he heads into a fundraiser for the anti-union group. The event, was headlined by millionaire Steve Forbes, appropriately enough. The group pursues a pro-millionaire agenda: defunding and defanging la- bor, the last remaining obstacle to control of government by big business. Drop the union, and save some money. The group began in the state of Washington in 1991 as the Evergreen Freedom Founda- tion. For its first two decades, it Turn to Page 9 By Don McIntosh Eric Burnette says it was the flat tire of a pickup truck that made him decide to run for Congress. A registered Democrat, Bur- nette lives in Hood River, Ore- gon, a couple blocks from the house of one of America’s most powerful Republicans — Con- gressman Greg Walden. Walking by the house last Spring, Burnette noticed the right front tire on Walden’s pickup was half flat. Seeing the truck day after day, he came to conclude it hadn’t been driven in some time — because Walden hadn’t been home. At the time, Walden was knee-deep in the process of writing a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and was dodging town halls and public appearances back home, prompting a “Where’s Walden?” campaign. Congressional contender Eric Bur- nette says the best antidote to grow- ing inequality would be the reunion- ization of the American workforce. “It just struck me that here’s a guy who’s working on legisla- tion that was going to knock 35,000 to 55,000 of his own constituents off health care, with Turn to Page 10 PEOPLE A lifetime of beating back barriers Last month in Detroit, IBEW Local 48’s Donna Hammond received an award for a lifetime of work advancing equity and building up organized labor. By Don McIntosh For every white man who held her back, called her the ‘n’ word, or otherwise gave her grief, Donna Hammond says she had the good fortune to find another who would give her an equal shot at succeeding or fail- ing on her own merits. Hammond, 61, is retiring this year after 39 years as a union electrician and IBEW represen- tative. In a panel presentation next week hosted by University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center, she’ll talk about her long struggle to over- come racial and gender barriers. It was 1978 when Hammond, then 22, became the second black woman admitted to Local 48 since its founding 65 years earlier. As a black woman in an over- whelmingly male and white trade in one of the whitest cities in America, she endured cultural isolation, personal hostility, and worse. To those challenges, Hammond brought a dose of sass, and a sense of when to pick her battles. Her first union dispatch as a brand-new apprentice was to a now-defunct company called Ace Electric. On Day One, she was assigned to cut metal struts — at a work station decorated with pictures of women from a nude magazine. She didn’t say a word. Instead, she got a copy of Playgirl Magazine and the next day put up nude male pictures next to the others. After that, all the pictures came down. On construction sites, she as- signed herself a nickname, “Brown Sugar,” and put that on her hard hat. She also set bound- aries: Say what you want, but keep your hands to yourself. “I told everybody, ‘Call me baby, call me whatever you want, but do not touch my body.’” Not everyone listened. One day on the fourth floor of the construction site for the down- town Marriott hotel, a co- worker pinched her butt. She hit him, and nearly knocked him off the building. Word got around, and no one touched her again. Hammond used to tell a rid- dle back in the 1970s that still stumps some people to this day: An electrician and a plumber were waiting in line to get into a builders show. One of them was the father of the other one’s son. How could that be? If it took you a minute to guess the answer, that may be because society’s mental image of an electrician or a plumber is of a man, not a woman. Yet Hammond says it wasn’t so much her gender that co- workers took issue with over the years, but her race. Turn to Page 4
