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.