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
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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
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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.
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