SERVING ORGANIZED LABOR IN OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON SINCE 1900
NORTHWEST
LABOR
PRESS
VOLUME 119, NUMBER 22
IN THIS ISSUE
OREGON ZOO CONTRACTS OUT FOOD SERVICE
Workers will be better off at Aramark. | Page 5
A SISTER LEADS THE BROTHERHOOD Evelyn Shapiro
wins top office at NW’s largest construction union. | Page 7
Meeting Notices p.6
Union Cab goes nonunion p.9
PORTLAND, OREGON
DECEMBER 7, 2018
WORKERS’ RIGHTS
UNION ORGANIZING
OHSU fights effort by grad student
researchers to unionize
Hawthorne Burgerville goes union
Oregon Health and Science Uni-
versity (OHSU) has filed legal
objections to a union petition
that’s supported by a majority of
its roughly 250 graduate student
research assistants. OHSU ad-
ministrators argue that the re-
search assistants are students,
not workers, and thus don’t have
the right to unionize. That’s an
argument private universities
have made for decades, and fed-
eral judges have gone back and
forth on the question.
But particularly at OHSU, it’s
complete nonsense, said grad
student researchers at a Nov. 15
union rally at the OHSU cam-
pus.
Marc Meadows, who’s in the
fourth-year of a Ph.D. program
in neuroscience, attends no
“What do we want? RECOGNITION! When do we want it? NOW!”
classes, but spends more than 50
hours a week doing research in
retina physiology, trying to shed
light on how synapses form con-
nections in the brain. For that
work, he receives tuition remis-
sion, a $30,000-a-year stipend,
and basic health insurance cov-
erage. He uses the same tools
and works on the same project
Turn to Page 10
So much for antitrust?
Government approves merger of paper mill giants
By Don McIntosh
Northwest paper mill workers,
by now used to painful disap-
pointments, got another one in
November: Federal anti-mo-
nopoly regulators stood aside
and allowed the nation’s second
largest paper producer to gob-
ble up the nation’s fifth largest
paper producer. The $3.5 billion
acquisition of Chicago-head-
quartered KapStone by Atlanta-
headquartered WestRock is the
latest in a decade-long spree of
mergers and acquisitions that
have reduced competition and
restricted supply in the U.S. pa-
per and cardboard packaging
industries — and led to a wave
of job-killing mill closures.
“WestRock has set a pattern:
Buy competitors, close mills,
reduce supply, and drive the
price up,” says Greg Pallesen,
president of the Association of
Western Pulp and Paper Work-
ers (AWPPW). Headquartered
in Portland, AWPPW repre-
sents workers at pulp and paper
mills in Oregon, Washington,
By Don McIntosh
Workers at a third Burgerville
restaurant are seeking federally-
mandated union recognition. In
April and May, workers at the
company’s 92nd and Powell and
Gladstone locations showed
majority support for the Burg-
erville Workers Union in a pair
of elections run by the National
Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Now, 20 of the 25 crew mem-
bers at the 1122 SE Hawthorne
Boulevard store have signed
union authorization cards as
well, and on Nov. 16 they asked
the NLRB to hold an election.
Once the election is held, the
Hawthorne Burgerville workers
expect to join union contract ne-
gotiations that are already under
way for the first two unionized
stores.
“To say it’s been slow going
would be putting it lightly,” said
union spokesperson Emmett
Schlenz about the contract talks,
which have taken place every
two to four weeks since late
May.
Schlenz, an employee at the
Hawthorne restaurant, says
Burgerville Workers Union
gave the company all its propos-
als last summer. The union pro-
posals include an immediate $5-
an-hour across-the-board raise
(currently, substantially all crew
members earn within a dollar of
the $12-an-hour Portland-area
Turn to Page 4
RETIREMENT
Congress delays report on
union pension fix
Together with the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign, members of AWPPW held
a picket outside the mothballed mill in Newberg calling on WestRock to
reopen the mill or sell it to someone who will.
Idaho, California and Virginia.
Since 2000, AWPPW has lost
over 6,400 members and suf-
fered the closure of at least 15
mills. Today it counts just 4,300
members.
Pallesen says there’s no bet-
ter example of WestRock’s
buy-it-and-shut-it-down strat-
egy than the 2015 closure of a
paper mill in Newberg, Oregon,
that had been in operation for
120 years. Before it was closed,
the Newberg mill had been
turning as much as 330,000
tons of recycled paper a year
into newsprint and light-weight
containerboard, which is used
in making corrugated card-
board boxes.
Turn to Page 10
A special Congressional task
force missed its deadline to
solve a looming crisis in union-
sponsored pensions. Pension
plans covering an estimated 1.2
million Americans are projected
to run out of money in the next
20 years, and the collapse of the
largest of them, the Central
States Teamsters Pension, will
wipe out the government’s own
insurance program for multiem-
ployer pensions by about 2025.
The Joint Select Committee
on Solvency of Multiemployer
Pension Plans, created in Febru-
ary, was supposed to produce a
report and vote on a solution by
the end of November. Instead,
the committee chairs Orrin
Hatch (R-Utah) and Sherrod
Brown (D-Ohio) issued a Nov.
29 statement saying the commit-
tee has made significant pro-
gress, and that a bipartisan solu-
tion is attainable, but more time
is needed so the committee can
continue its work.
The plan they’re working on
could be good news for union
members. The Washington Post
obtained a draft of one bill being
considered by the committee
that would direct the Treasury
Department to spend up to $3
billion a year to subsidize pay-
ments for retirees in failed pen-
sion plans, an expense that
would be partly offset by a big
increase in the insurance premi-
ums that all union-sponsored
multiemployer pension plans
pay. The bill would also reverse
controversial retiree benefit cuts
that about a dozen pension plans
have made in order to halt their
slide toward insolvency.