SERVING ORGANIZED LABOR IN OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON SINCE 1900
NORTHWEST
LABOR
PRESS
VOLUME 119, NUMBER 12
IN THIS ISSUE
WESTERN STATES OPEIU PENSION ASKS FOR CUTS
A 30 percent cut now could prevent insolvency. | Page 3
JANUS, READY OR NOT How public sector unions will
react to the right-to-work Court decision | Page 6
Meeting Notices p. 4
A new wave of media unions p. 7
PORTLAND, OREGON
JUNE 15, 2018
NATIONAL
UNION ORGANIZING
Trump slashes federal union rights
Faculty unionize at OSU and OIT
New executive orders speed the
firing of federal workers and
slash the use of paid union time
to defend them.
By Don McIntosh
President Donald Trump
signed a trio of executive or-
ders on May 25 to speed the
process of firing federal em-
ployees, slash union officers’
use of paid time to defend fed-
eral workers, and order federal
agencies to renegotiate union
contracts.
“This is more than union
busting – it’s democracy bust-
ing,” said J. David Cox Sr.,
AFGE national president, in a
press statement reacting to the
orders. “These executive orders
are a direct assault on the legal
rights and protections that Con-
gress has specifically guaran-
teed to the 2 million public-sec-
tor employees across the
country who work for the fed-
eral government.”
AFGE, which stands for
“ This is a democracy, not a dictatorship. No
president should be able to undo a law he
doesn’t like through administrative fiat .”
—AFGE president J David Cox
American Federation of Gov-
ernment Employees, is the
largest union of federal employ-
ees, with 318,000 members. On
May 30 it filed a lawsuit asking
that the order slashing paid
union time be struck down by a
federal court. AFSCME joined
the suit June 1.
Trump’s Executive Order
13837 says no federal em-
ployee can spend more than a
quarter of their paid time on
union responsibilities. The or-
der also limits total union paid-
time hours to one hour per em-
ployee per year. [A report from
Office of Personnel Manage-
ment says the federal average is
currently 2.95 hours of paid
time per employee.] And the or-
der requires agencies to bill
unions at commercial market
rates for use of meeting rooms,
phones, computers, and other
agency assets.
“The United States Constitu-
tion does not vest the president
with the power to legislate,”
AFGE said in the lawsuit.
“[The order] seeks to impermis-
sibly rewrite portions of the
Federal Service Labor-Man-
agement Relations Statute,
which governs labor relations
in the federal civilian work-
place.”
Under that law, passed in
1978, union officers are al-
lowed to fulfill their representa-
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COLLECTIVE BARGAINING
UPS Teamsters authorize strike
About 280,000 workers could
walk out as soon as Aug. 1
Teamsters members at UPS
voted by more than 90 per-
cent to authorize a strike if no
agreement is reached before
their current five-year union
contract expires July 31, the
union announced June 5.
If that happens, 280,000
Teamsters would walk off the
job. It would be the largest
U.S. strike since UPS work-
ers last went on strike in
1997, for 16 days. UPS is the
largest private-sector union
employer in the United
States.
The two sides have been
negotiating since late March,
but Teamsters are balking at a
Oregon’s labor movement just
grew by 2,500 new members.
Faculty at Oregon State Univer-
sity (OSU) and Oregon Institute
of Technology (OIT) are going
union. On June 5, union cam-
paigns at both universities deliv-
ered union authorization cards
to the Oregon Employment Re-
lations Board.
The two schools were the last
public universities in Oregon
where faculty were not yet
unionized. Under Oregon law,
public employees unionize once
a majority of a proposed bar-
gaining unit signs cards.
At OIT the unit is 172 full-
time faculty, instructors and li-
brarians. They’ll be members of
American Association of Uni-
versity Professors (AAUP).
At OSU, it’s 2,400 faculty in
all departments and campuses.
They’ll be members of United
Academics of Oregon State
University, a joint project of
AAUP and American Federa-
tion of Teachers (AFT). AFT al-
ready represents graduate stu-
dents at OSU, while support
staff there are represented by
SEIU Local 503. The union
campaign among OSU faculty,
years in the making, has been
OSU profs Darrell Ross and Aurora
Sherman turn in union cards June 5.
collecting cards since February.
Union organizing committee
member Darrell Ross says OSU
faculty are unionizing to win a
greater say in university gover-
nance and to secure better work-
ing conditions. In his 27 years as
an entomologist in the OSU
College of Forestry, Ross says
he’s seen steady deterioration in
faculty working conditions.
“There’s increasing reliance
on contingent faculty who work
in contracts of at most one
year,” Ross said. “They have lit-
tle job security, they’re not paid
well, and they often don’t know
until the last minute if they’ll
have their contracts renewed.”
During the campaign, OSU
faculty heard from academics at
UO and Rutgers about how
unions halted that slide and im-
poved job security.
Machinists win toehold at
Boeing South Carolina plant
UPS proposal to create a new
class of driver that would
work weekends at no pay
premium.
Current full-time drivers
now earn an average of $36
an hour. Last year, UPS had
$5 billion profit, and paid its
CEO $14.6 million in total
compensation.
A group of 176 flight-line readi-
ness technicians and inspectors
at Boeing’s factory in North
Charleston, S.C., voted 104 to
65 May 31 to join
the International
Association of
Machinists and
Aerospace Work-
ers (IAM). It’s the
first group of
workers to union-
ize at Boeing’s
South Carolina
factory since the IAM was voted
out there in 2009. Back then, the
plant employed 300. Today it
employs about 6,700 workers
assembling Boeing 787 Dream-
liners. In 2011, the National La-
bor Relations Board (NLRB)
determined that Boeing located
787 assembly in
non-union South
Carolina in part to
punish its union-
ized Puget Sound
workforce for
striking.
South Carolina
is the least-union-
ized state in the
nation, with just 2.6 percent of
workers there in a union.
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