PAGE 4 | December 7 , 2018 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
PEOPLE
Terry Lansing retires after 28 years at Bakers Local 114
Terry Lansing, longtime secretary-treasurer
of Bakers Local 114, retired Dec. 2 after a
lifetime of involvement in the labor move-
ment. Lansing joined Local 114 in 1976 as
an employee of Williams Bakery in Eu-
gene—following a failed effort to unionize
a non-union bread plant in Salem. He soon
became a shop steward and a union officer,
and went to work for the local as a full-time
business agent in 1990. He has served as
Local 114’s top officer since 2004.
Portland-based Local 114 represents
about 1,150 workers: Roughly 850 at the
Franz, Kroger, Safeway and Bimbo/
Oroweat wholesale bakeries, and about
300 at grocery store bakery departments.
Lansing’s union involvement predates
his time with the Bakers. He grew up in
San Rafael, California, and went to Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley on a Ful-
bright scholarship. There he became a
member of the Worker Student Alliance, a
radical faction within the group Students
for a Democratic Society. After numerous
acts of campus civil disobedience against
the Vietnam War, he was kicked out of
school and banned from every campus.
He then got a warehouse job and took
part in a union organizing campaign. It
failed, but the Teamsters let him use their
hiring hall, and he got a union-represented
job at Doughnut Corporation of America.
It was after the plant closed in 1974 that he
moved to Oregon.
When Lansing first went to work for Lo-
cal 114 in 1990, Fred Meyer was rapidly
THE HAND-OFF Because Lansing is retiring one
year into his three-year term as secretary-treasurer,
the union executive board appointed Darren
Hamann to replace him until union officer elections
are held in Dec. 2020. To replace Hamann as busi-
ness agent, the board named Alejandro Ahumada.
BEST UNION RETAIL BAKERY?
“The best union scratch bakery right now
is Rosauer’s in Hood River. They make
everything down to the pie crust from
scratch. They have real bakers and cake
decorators. Roth’s IGA chain in Salem also
still operates scratch bakeries. The best
sourdough bread you can get is out of a
Roth’s store.”
— Terry Lansing
expanding, and it was his job to organize
members into the union. Later, plant clo-
sures and a change in retail baking methods
slashed Local 114’s membership from
about 2,000 to a low point of 1,014 in
2005. In the early 2000s, hundreds of union
jobs were lost with the closure of the Won-
der Bread plant in Portland and the
Grandma’s Cookies plant in Beaverton.
Meanwhile, starting with Fred Meyer in
1995, in-store bakeries stopped making
products from scratch and instead thawed
and baked frozen goods produced else-
where. Baking departments went from four
or five members per store to two, now
mostly cake decorators.
Looking back, Lansing is proudest of the
times he was able to save members’ jobs, and
he’s proud of his role on the Oregon Bakers
Union Trust providing outstanding and af-
fordable health benefits to 900 families of
workers on the wholesale bakery side.
If he has any regrets, it’s the failure of a
series of organizing campaigns — Dave’s
Killer Bread, Breadsong Bakery, and Port-
land Specialty Baking.
“We’ve always lost our campaign in the
last two weeks to a union buster. The new
generation’s gotta figure out how to handle
that, because employees generally are
scared and a union buster knows how to
come in, exploit that fear, and convince
them to give the employer another
chance.”
...Hawthorne Burgerville goes union
From Page 1
legal minimum wage); 15-
minute rest breaks instead of
the 10-minute legal minimum;
one free meal per shift (cur-
rently workers get a 70 percent
discount); agreement that tip
jars may be placed next to cash
registers; standard union rights
like “just cause” and “progres-
sive discipline”; and a halt to
employer efforts to verify that
employees are legally allowed
to work in the United States.
Schlenz says the company
has refused to reply with its
own economic proposals until
after the two sides reach tenta-
tive agreement on non-eco-
nomic proposals. That hasn’t
happened, and Schlenz says
Burgerville has agreed to no
tangible improvements so far.
In the negotiations, Burg-
erville is represented by attor-
ney Kristin Bremer Moore, a
partner in the Tonkin Torp law
firm.
Even with negotiations tak-
ing place, union supporters
DID YOU KNOW?
■ Burgerville Workers Union is
asking the public to boycott all
44 Burgerville locations until a
fair union contract is signed. At
least 17 unions have endorsed
the boycott.
■ Burgerville Workers Union is
affiliated with Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW).
have continued to take action in
the stores, and the company has
continued to terminate union
supporters.
Since the union campaign
launched publicly in 2016,
Burgerville Workers Union has
filed 28 charges with the
NLRB alleging violations of
federal labor law. At least seven
of the charges, known as “un-
fair labor practice” charges,
stemmed from cases where
union supporters were termi-
nated. But none of those re-
sulted in the NLRB issuing for-
mal complaints, possibly
because it’s hard to prove anti-
union motives contributed to
the firings.
One charge did result in a
cease-and-desist order from a
federal administrative law
judge: In a case stemming from
a July 2016 incident at the Van-
couver Plaza restaurant, Burg-
erville was ordered to stop
telling workers they can’t
leaflet on the property while
off-duty.
Then this September, 10
union supporters at the 8218
NE Glisan St restaurant were
sent home for wearing “Black
Lives Matter,” “No one is ille-
gal,” and “Abolish ICE” but-
tons (ICE stands for Immigra-
tion and Customs Enforce-
ment). The company later pro-
vided back pay to the workers,
but also announced a new anti-
button rule company-wide
without the union’s agreement.
James Curry, a union sup-
porter at the Hawthorne store,
told the Labor Press that Burg-
erville’s workplace reality is
very much at odds with the
company’s progressive reputa-
tion.
“Their relationship with lo-
cal farms, using renewable en-
ergy, those are helpful and
good, but in terms of working
there, our conditions as work-
ers, it’s just like any other fast
food place,” Curry said. “We
get paid minimum wage. We
have clocks on the wall telling
us how fast we need to work.”
“And even if all the branding
were true,” Curry said, “we
would still deserve to get paid
more than we are, and have
more of a voice in the work-
place.”
NW Labor Press
staff changes
Cheri Rice, 64, is retiring after
20 years as bookkeeper and of-
fice manager at the Northwest
Labor Press. Rice managed the
paper’s business operations and
worked with local unions to
maintain accurate meeting no-
tices and a 60,000-person sub-
scriber list. Her last day was
Nov. 28.
Rice was born in Kennewick,
Washington, and graduated
from Centen-
nial High
School in
Gresham,
Oregon. The
daughter of a
union meat
cutter, she
grew
up
reading the
Cheri Rice
Labor Press,
and ended up making a career of
keeping labor organization of-
fices running smoothly. She
started in 1977 as a dues clerk at
the Portland office of Sheet
Metal Workers Local 16. In
1985 she went to work for
United Food & Commercial
Workers Local 555, where her
father Keith Jons was by then
the head of collective bargaining
for the union’s meat division.
She stayed there 12 years as
dues clerk, bookkeeper and sec-
retary to the union president.
Throughout her union career,
she was a member of Office and
Professional Employees Local
11, which was led for a time by
her brother-in-law Mike Rich-
ards. Retiring with a union pen-
sion, she’ll spend more time
with family, splitting her time
between Neotsu, Oregon, and
Arizona.
Succeeding Rice as office man-
ager is Jill
Lukens.
Lukens, 48,
comes to the
Labor Press
after 22 years
managing a
small down-
town Port-
land dental
Jill Lukens
office. Like
Rice, she was raised union. She’s
the daughter of Judy O’Connor,
who worked as office manager
of the Northwest Oregon Labor
Council for nearly 16 years and
then served as the organization’s
executive secretary-treasurer
from 1998 to 2009. Lukens’ hus-
band of 29 years is Will Lukens,
business representative at Ma-
chinists District Lodge W24.