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April 6, 2018 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
UNION ORGANIZING
Guest Opinion
By Bob Tackett, Executive Secretary Treasurer
Northwest Oregon Labor Council
Photo by Russell Sanders, courtesy of Oregon AFL-CIO
Replace NAFTA, don’t make it worse
Outside Burgerville’s locked headquarters building in Vancouver, Washington, members of Burgerville Workers
Union say they’ll go forward with a first union election.
Burgerville Workers Union files for a
union election — at one location
Accompanied by Oregon AFL-
CIO President Tom Chamber-
lain and other union and com-
munity supporters, a delegation
of about a dozen Burgerville
workers paid a visit the com-
pany’s Vancouver, Washington,
headquarters March 26 to de-
liver a message: Burgerville
Workers Union has majority
support at Burgerville’s South-
east 92nd Avenue and Powell
location in Portland, and if the
regional fast food chain didn’t
voluntarily recognize the group
within two days, the union will
ask for a government-adminis-
tered union election at that site.
But when they arrived on
foot at the headquarters build-
ing just after 1 p.m., the delega-
tion found doors locked, desks
near the windows unoccupied,
and no one to come to the door
at first. After talking through a
locked glass door to someone
who appeared in the lobby, they
taped their demand letter to the
front door and departed.
Two days later, hearing noth-
ing from the company, they
filed their petition with the Na-
tional Labor Relations Board
(NLRB).
Burgerville is a privately-
owned regional fast food chain
with 42 stores. It promotes itself
as local and sustainable, but
pays workers at or near mini-
mum wage. Burgerville Work-
ers Union is calling for a $5 an
hour wage increase.
Union activists believe they
have majority support at the
92nd and Powell location. This
will be their first call for an of-
ficial union election since they
publicly launched the union
campaign in April 2016.
But the union’s supporters
emphasize that their union ex-
ists as an organization of work-
ers, regardless of whether it has
the support of a majority.
They’re asking for a vote be-
cause demonstrating majority
support in an election adminis-
tered by the NLRB would obli-
gate the company legally to ne-
gotiate with the union.
“We already function as a
union,” said Mark Medina, a
union supporter at 92nd and
Powell. “This is just to make
the company sit down with us.”
Since Feb. 2, Burgerville
Workers Union has been calling
on the public to boycott the
company until it comes to terms
with the union. The boycott has
so far been endorsed by 19
unions as well as by other or-
ganizations and individuals.
—Don McIntosh
No joke: Workers at The Onion
satirical content site go union
graphical, and video work they
produce. The union would in-
clude about 100 creative staffers
who produce content for The
Onion and its sister publications
A.V. Club and ClickHole.
campaign, Game Workers
Unite, think so. More than 200
academics, coders, artists, and
independent designers have
pledged their support for the
campaign, which debuted pub-
licly during the March 19-23
Game Developers Conference
in San Francisco. It aims to con-
nect “pro-union
activists, exploit-
ed workers, and
allies … in the
name of building
a unionized game
industry.”
They’re report-
edly looking at
the Screen Actors
Guild and Writers Guild of
America as possible allies.
At the famed humor website
The Onion, more than 90 per-
cent of workers have signed
union cards. On March 27 they
asked their management to rec-
ognize their decision to join
Writers Guild of America. Of
course they did it in their own
style, with a letter entitled,
“Onion Inc.’s Groveling, Un-
grateful Staffers Unionize.” But
the goals, at least, are serious: To
ensure fair wages, hiring prac-
tices, consistent benefits, and
severance pay, have a say in im-
portant decisions that affect
them, and to maintain independ-
ent oversight of the editorial,
A video game workers union?
Video game developers have lit-
tle job security,
earn less than other
tech workers, and
work insanely long
hours — as much
as 100 hours a
week during what
are known as
crunch periods.
Could it be time
for a union? Supporters of a new
Whether President Donald Trump can deliver on his
pledge to stop outsourcing and make trade agreements
“much better for American workers” is now being tested
as the administration works to renegotiate the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
President Trump must secure a new deal that eliminates
NAFTA’s incentives to outsource American jobs and lev-
els the playing field by adding strong labor and environ-
mental provisions with swift and certain enforcement to
raise wages for all workers. Otherwise, companies will
continue to move U.S. jobs to Mexico, pay workers
poverty wages and dump toxins, then import the products
back here to sell.
The stakes are high for working families in Oregon.
Oregon has lost 12,000 of its manufacturing jobs since
NAFTA and other similar trade deals went into effect.
More than 68,000 specific Oregon jobs have been cer-
tified under just one narrow government program as lost
to outsourcing or imports under NAFTA. These numbers
represent a significant undercount of the actual jobs lost,
given the program only covers certain types of jobs.
Overall, more than 930,000 American jobs already have
been certified by the U.S. government as lost due to
NAFTA. Every week NAFTA helps corporations out-
source more middle class jobs to Canada and Mexico, in-
cluding recently at GE, Carrier, and Nabisco.
According to the Department of Labor, manufacturing
workers who lose jobs to trade and find reemployment are
typically forced to take pay cuts. Two of every five rehired
in 2016 were paid less in their new jobs. One in four lost
greater than 20 percent of their income. That means a
$7,700 pay cut for the median wage manufacturing
worker earning $38,000.
This is the opposite of what NAFTA boosters promised
23 years ago when the deal was debated by Congress.
They promised that NAFTA would improve the U.S. trade
balance with Mexico and Canada, and create 200,000 new
jobs in each of NAFTA’s first five years. Instead we’ve
lost almost one million jobs as a small surplus with Mex-
ico and small deficit with Canada became a massive $176
billion NAFTA goods trade deficit in 2016. The rate of
our service sector exports even slowed.
Meanwhile, corporations have collected more than
$392 million in taxpayer money using NAFTA’s “in-
vestor-state” tribunals, where corporations can sue gov-
ernments before panels of three private lawyers to demand
unlimited sums of taxpayer funds over our environmental
and health laws that they claim violate the corporations’
NAFTA rights.
A good NAFTA replacement must ensure imported
food, goods and services meet U.S. consumer and envi-
ronmental standards and eliminate NAFTA’s existing
terms that drive up the price of lifesaving medicines by
giving pharmaceutical companies extended monopolies
to avoid generic competition.
Oregon can clearly benefit from trade with NAFTA
countries. But a tweak to NAFTA won’t cut it. We want a
NAFTA replacement we can support, meaning one that
raises wages and creates good jobs for people in Oregon
and across the nation.
Bob Tackett is the executive secretary treasurer of the Northwest Oregon
Labor Council and a 43-year member of United Steelworkers Local 330.