NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | September 21, 2018 | PAGE 3
IN COORDINATION WITH THE AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION
Industrial Athlete campaign to launch at Intel jobsite
Starting the week of Sept. 24, the American
Heart Association will be launching a year-
round Industrial Athlete campaign for con-
struction workers at Intel’s massive jobsite
in Hillsboro.
The Industrial Athlete campaign is fo-
cused on improving the health of the con-
struction industry, which is disproportion-
ately affected by heart disease and stroke.
The program focuses on the habits found
within the construction industry that in-
crease risk for heart disease, including:
sugar-sweetened beverages (soda,
Gatorade, energy drinks, coffee), physical
inactivity, sleep deprivation (long com-
mutes, odd hours), poor nutrition (food
choices offered on jobsites and in vending
machines), tobacco (smoking, vaping, and
chewing) and stress (long hours, quick
deadlines, physically demanding).
“We talk alot about job safety issues, but
not a lot about personal health,” said Bart
... Robert Camarillo
From Page 1
multiple generations of sons fol-
lowing fathers into the trade. Ca-
marillo had none of that back-
ground.
“I didn’t have the right last
name, or know the right people,”
he recalls.
Turned away by the union, he
worked on the industry’s
nonunion side. As a structural
ironworker, his job was to lay
metal decking, tie rebar, and hoist
and weld the steel beams that
form the skeletons of buildings.
He loved the work, and was
happy with the pay. But like so
many nonunion workers, he did-
n’t realize he was being robbed of
wages he was legally entitled to.
On public construction proj-
ects like schools and fire stations,
contractors are required to pay a
specified hourly rate known as
the prevailing wage. The rule is
meant to take wages out of com-
petition so that contractors can
compete on their efficiency and
quality, not on who can pay
workers the least. But as every
building trades union representa-
tive knows, cheating by non-
union contractors is rampant on
prevailing wage projects.
Camarillo’s nonunion em-
ployer used those higher-than-
usual-wage public construction
jobs as a reward for the com-
pany’s hardest workers. Camar-
illo was one of them, and was
thrilled to get the premium wages
those jobs offered. What he didn’t
know was that his boss was pay-
ing him the prevailing wage rate
for laborers, not the rate for iron
work — the work he was doing.
As time went on and his em-
ployer began competing against
union contractors for prevailing
wage work, Local 29 organizers
Bob Clerihew and Jeff Carlson
began dropping by construction
sites to talk to its workers. Some
co-workers gave them a hostile
reception, but Camarillo met with
them. They told him about the
prevailing wage law, and showed
him how he had been cheated.
The union hadn’t wanted him
in 1997. Now it was 2001, and
the organizers courted him for
months. One night over dinner at
the Tony Roma’s at Mall 205,
they clinched the deal: He would
join the union, and start from
scratch in the union apprentice-
ship program.
Now, as a Local 29 member,
he was able to file a wage theft
complaint with the union’s help.
The state agency known as BOLI
(Bureau of Labor and Industries)
investigated, and in the end or-
dered the company to pay him
$7,000 in back pay for work he’d
done on West Salem High School
and other public projects.
Several hours into Camarillo’s
first day as a union member
working on a union job, Clerihew
and Carlson showed up to ask if
he’d help them talk to nonunion
iron workers.
“I was willing to do whatever
it took,” Camarillo says.
While continuing to learn the
trade, he volunteered many other
times to help the union in its out-
reach to nonunion iron workers.
Meanwhile, he earned a reputa-
tion for hard work, and found that
contractors kept him on from job
to job.
“When I came in,” Camarillo
recalls, “there weren’t a lot of
women or people of color. It was
a predominantly white work-
force. I had to prove myself every
day, every job site.”
In 2005, after a four-year union
apprenticeship, he became a jour-
neyman iron worker at the age of
28. The following year, Local 29
brought him on staff as a full-time
business rep and organizer. In the
years to come he served as a
union vice president, president,
and a member of the Examining
Board, which evaluates appli-
Dickson, president of On Electric Group,
one of the largest union electrical contrac-
tors in the Northwest. Dickson spoke at the
Oregon State Building and Construction
Trades Council convention last month in
Sunriver.
“We will combine our expertise and re-
sources over the next year to empower con-
struction workers to better health, while
providing engaging education, innovative
and impactful awareness messaging, and
actionable steps to measure and improve
health,” Jana Boyle, senior business devel-
opment director of the Amercian Heart As-
sociation in Portland, told the Labor Press.
Additional Industrial Athlete programs
will be launching this fall throughout the
Portland metro area.
Look for Industrial Athlete campaign
messages in future issues of the NW Labor
Press.
cants for membership. He was
appointed a delegate to the Co-
lumbia-Pacific Building Trades
Council, which is the local coun-
cil of construction unions for the
Portland metro area. There, he
got to know the leaders of other
construction trades unions. In
2014, he became its president. In
2016, he went to work for the
Iron Workers international.
His union’s full name is the In-
ternational Association of Bridge,
Structural, Ornamental and Rein-
forcing Iron Workers. Ironically,
Camarillo never did get to work
on a bridge while his tools were
spud wrenches and bull pins, but
he helped as a rep to win bridge
work for union contractors, and
now at the state building trades
council he’ll help secure funding
for bridges and other infrastruc-
ture.
Colleagues and co-workers de-
scribe Camarillo as dedicated,
dynamic, and driven — a hard
worker deeply committed to the
wellbeing of working people.
He approaches his new role
with the mindset of an organizer.
He’ll look for new allies, and
seek closer collaboration with all
the unions. And he’ll try to get
Oregon’s political leaders better
acquainted with building trades
unions, both by bringing con-
struction workers into the halls of
the State Capitol, and by inviting
legislators, agency heads and pol-
icy-makers to tour job sites and
union training centers.
“I want them to know what
our issues are, so that they can
better understand where we’re
coming from and see that we’re
not being unreasonable,” Camar-
illo said.
And he’ll appeal to lawmakers
to get serious about combating
wage theft. In fiscal year 2016-
17, BOLI responded to hundreds
of wage theft claims in the con-
struction industry alone, and col-
lected more than $600,000 in un-
paid wages for workers. Having
seen wage theft first hand, Ca-
marillo knows far more than that
go unreported.
He also hopes his example will
inspire people of color and
women to seek leadership posi-
tions in their unions.
Finally, he says he’d like to see
affiliates ramp up their commit-
ment to organize.
“If you look at the preamble of
every constitution of every craft
in the building trades, they all say
something about organizing all
workers in our trade or our craft,”
Camarillo said. “All. It doesn’t
say we will only organize some.”
“Organizing,” Camarillo says,
“is what built our unions.”