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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 21, 2018)
PAGE 4 | December 21, 2018 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS THE REST OF THE STORY A look back at some of the stories we reported in 2018 … and what happened afterward THE HISTORIC MACHINIST UNION ELECTION WIN AT PRECISION CASTPARTS In May we reported a legal win for a union campaign among 100 highly skilled welders at Precision Castparts. A sub- sidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, Precision makes cast parts like jet engine components for aero- space and other industries. Pre- cision’s Portland-area welders voted 54 to 38 to join Machin- ists District Lodge W24 in Sep- tember 2017, but the company refused to recognize their union and filed a legal appeal with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) arguing that a welders-only bargaining unit wasn’t appropriate because the welders work in 18 depart- ments on three campuses. The only appropriate unit, Precision argued, would consist of all 2,500 Portland-area workers (a group that previously voted no on the union question). As we reported, in May the NLRB dismissed the company’s argu- ments. But Precision has continued to file legal appeals since then. Its latest appeal was denied Nov. 28. After that, the Ma- chinists again contacted the company to set up dates for collective bargaining and get union reps the customary ac- cess to the job site. As of Dec. 18, they’d heard nothing back. Don’t be surprised if Preci- sion continues to scoff at the law by filing more frivolous challenges. of what we at the time called Trump’s amazing infrastruc- ture ‘bait-and-switch.’ As the Politico news site concluded in late October, the proposal “promptly sank with- out a trace in the Congress his party controls.” But hope springs eternal. With Democrats coming into control of the House in Janu- ary, there could be room for a deal on infrastructure if Trump is prepared to honor his cam- paign pledge. Oregon’s Peter DeFazio will be in charge of the U.S. House Transportation Committee, and he has a plan to raise half a trillion dollars just by updating the gas tax for inflation. The gas tax, the chief funding source for highway in- frastructure, hasn’t gone up in 25 years (since 1993) — un- like the price of concrete, as- phalt, and wages. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE UNION CAMPAIGN AT NEW SEASONS? We haven’t reported on the union cam- paign at New Seasons Market since May. At that time, a pair of newly installed company co-presidents were pledging their willingness to meet with the group New Seasons Workers United, and told the Labor Press by email that New Sea- sons no longer employs union-busting consultants. It took a while, but that meeting did happen. In August, three company exec- utives came out to Cider Riot pub in Northeast Portland for a courteous half- hour exchange with pro-union workers from five stores. Workers say the execu- tives committed to at least three more meetings. But by then the union campaign had suffered some setbacks. Not long after the campaign’s public debut in Novem- ber 2017, support for the union flat-lined when the company brought in anti-union consultants for weeks of store-by-store anti-union meetings. By late spring, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 555 had laid off all but one of the organizers it devoted to the campaign. On July 4, New Seasons Workers United announced a decision to continue on its own, independently of UFCW. The group has been less active since then, and has suffered from employee turnover as union supporters quit the company. New Seasons Workers United continues to meet semi-regularly how- ever, and enjoys the support of Portland Jobs with Justice and other organizations. TRUMP’S INFRASTRUCTURE NEVERLAND As we noted in February, Don- ald Trump campaigned for over a year on a plan to spend $1 trillion on America’s neg- lected infrastructure, but did nothing whatsoever about it his first year in office; then in his January 2018 State of the Union address, he increased the promised sum to $1.5 tril- lion. Psych! Two weeks later, the White House released a 55-page leg- islative outline pledging to spend at most $200 billion in federal money over 10 years. The suggestion was that such a figure — the federal budget equivalent of pocket lint — would somehow incentivize cash-strapped cities and states to dig deep and spend big. [That’s not all: To come up with that $200 billion, the out- line proposed to sell off exist- ing publicly-owned infrastruc- ture to investors — including “transmission assets” belong- ing to federal agencies like the Bonneville Power Administra- tion (BPA), Ronald Reagan and Dulles International Air- ports, and the Washington Aqueduct, which supplies Washington, D.C., with fresh drinking water. That was about the last anybody heard WHAT HAPPENED TO THE UNION CAMPAIGN AT REED COLLEGE? In March, we reported that a group of 52 resident advisers who live and work in the dorms at Reed College voted 34 to 14 to unionize as Local 1 of a newly formed independent union, the Student Workers Coalition. What happened after? The college refused to recognize the union, and instead filed a legal appeal with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) argu- ing that the resident advisers weren’t workers, but students. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the question of whether student employees are just students — or workers with the right to a union — has been the subject of decades of federal litigation. Union supporters at Reed thought the question had finally been settled, for private col- leges, with a pro-union NLRB decision involving grad student workers at Columbia Univer- sity. But administrators at Reed College, that liberal bastion, thought they could maybe take advantage of a Trump-ap- pointed majority to overturn that decision. In mid-June, Reed’s resident advisers filed papers to “declaim interest” rather than go before a Trump-majority labor board and risk overturning the Columbia decision. [Of course, if colleges like Reed don’t feel they need to abide by Columbia, that’s not much different from Columbia being overturned, but it’s possi- ble the decision could stand until a Democratic president enters the White House in January 2021.] “It highlights the weakness of labor law in general right now,” union supporter Seth Douglas told the Labor Press. Douglas, who studied labor history at Reed, graduated in May with a history degree and is now work- ing construction.
