Northwest labor press., February 15, 2019, Image 1

SERVING ORGANIZED LABOR IN OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON SINCE 1900
NORTHWEST
IN THIS ISSUE
LABOR
PRESS
Are we bringing
the strike back? A heart to heart with Jeff Merkley
SAVE SCABBY THE RAT! A Trump appointee wants to
ban labor’s popular inflatable protester. | Page 3
A FLAG FOR CONSTRUCTION? A “thin green line” flag
proposed to commemorate construction workers. | Page 5
Meeting Notices p.4
VOLUME 120, NUMBER 4
Back from rock bottom, strikes
exploded in number last year
In 2018, an estimated 485,000
workers took part in 20 large-
scale work stoppages of over
1,000 workers, the U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics reported Feb.
8. That’s more U.S. workers
striking than at any time since
1986, and 19 times as many
workers as went on strike in
2017. The largest were by teach-
ers, including 123,000 in North
Carolina, 81,000 in Arizona,
63,000 in Colorado, 45,000 in
Oklahoma, 35,000 in West Vir-
ginia, and 26,000 in Kentucky.
Other notable strikes included
53,000 workers at University of
California hospitals, and 5,000
members of Operating Engineers
Local 302 in Western Washing-
ton. The longest-running large
strike is at Charter Communica-
tions in NY/NJ, where 1,800
members of IBEW Local 3 have
been out since March 28, 2017.
On the job with the plasterers p.8
PORTLAND, OREGON
Oregon millworkers son Jeff
Merkley has been a U.S. senator
10 years, but hasn’t forgotten
where he’s from. He’s one of la-
bor’s most reliable champions,
with a near-perfect labor voting
record. Labor Press reporter Don
McIntosh visited his office to talk
labor policy — and whether
he’s running for president.
The debate over the shutdown is
about whether we should put up
a wall to stop immigrants. What’s
the right approach to immigra-
tion? Trump's presentation was
that murderers and rapists are
swarming the border. And that is
a big lie. What you have is a much
lower level of people coming to
the border than came in years
past. We're at less than a third of
what came across in the year
2000. And mostly now we have in-
stead of individual men seeking
work we have a lot more families
fleeing persecution, fleeing the
FEBRUARY 15, 2019
drug gangs, fleeing death threats
and assault and a whole host of
horrible situations. So there IS a
crisis, but it's a humanitarian crisis
the Trump administration has cre-
ated by the mistreatment of mi-
grants seeking the opportunity to
have an asylum hearing. We want
to treat people in the tradition of
our country, a country in which
most of us are immigrants or de-
scendants of immigrants, with de-
cency and respect. There's no rea-
son to deliberately inflict injury.
And so much has been aimed at
children, and that's just really hor-
rific. There's a piece of the Repub-
lican leadership that wants to sus-
tain a broken immigration system
in order to use it as a political tool.
In 2013, when the Senate worked
really hard to do a bipartisan bill
that addressed all aspects of bor-
der security, people overstaying
their visas, deportations, border
guards, revising the visas, it was
the Republican House that
blocked the fix.
Turn to Page 7
A union-busting billionaire mulls a run for president
A Seattle-area unionist has bitter
memories of the Starbucks CEO
By Don McIntosh
Former Starbucks CEO Howard
Schultz is horrified at a proposal
to return to 70 percent taxes on
him and his fellow billionaires.
He thinks Medicare for All is
un-American. He’d prefer bil-
lionaires were referred to as
“people of means.” He told
MSNBC that “unions are not
the answer” to the problem of
growing inequality. Since he
tweeted his presidential aspira-
tions last month, his mostly-
foam platform has gone over so
poorly that in Indiana he had to
ask his invitation-only audience
to clap, and one poll showed
him the lowest-rated of any po-
tential candidate tested. Yet
CBS, Fox, and CNN have given
the “thinking about it” inde-
pendent candidate for president
copious free air time to share his
“vision for the country.”
Howard Schultz: Plutocrat for presi-
dent? Billionaires own America.
Shouldn’t we govern it too?
All that makes Kent, Wash-
ington, union member Jeff
Alexander a little bit sick.
Today, Alexander, 60, is a
union rep with Operating Engi-
neers Local 286. But in the late
1990s, he worked at the Star-
bucks roasting plant in Kent,
Washington, part of a 22-person
maintenance crew. The crew’s
job was to keep eight Italian-
made roasting machines and
three packaging lines running, in
one of the most automated coffee
roasting plants in the world.
Alexander was bent over
working on an electrical problem
at the loading dock the first time
he met the Starbucks CEO.
“Someone said, ‘Here’s
Howard Schultz!’ I looked up,
my hands all dirty and said, ‘Hey,
Howie, how’s it going?’ He just
looked back down at me and
walked away.”
Alexander, a divorced single
dad taking care of four kids, had
been working graveyard and
swing shift at a meatpacking
plant when he heard that a brand-
new Starbucks roastery was hir-
ing for day shift. Day shift was a
prime reason he took the job. So
when managers started changing
employee schedules and took
away overtime pay for holiday
work, Alexander and others at
the plant were steamed. Several
co-workers went to talk to Oper-
ating Engineers Local 286, and
came back having signed union
cards. Alexander wasn’t one of
them, but he’d earlier been a
member of the union at Oscar
Mayer in Los Angeles.
“I filled out the card. We went
through the plant and talked to
everyone we could. Of course it
went straight to management.
And boom, we were in captive
audience meetings… They shut
the whole plant down to talk
about the union.”
Word got out that Howard
Schultz himself would be ad-
dressing workers at one of the
management-led anti-union
meetings. Alexander, who drove
a 1985 Suburban in those days,
remembers looking out the win-
dow to see Schultz arrive in a
brand-new Jaguar.
“He was making millions a
year,” Alexander said. “I was
making 24 bucks an hour.”
At the meeting, Schultz told
workers they didn’t need to go
union, and should just trust him.
Anti-union rhetoric flowed forth
from the front of the room. The
co-workers who’d started the
union campaign stayed silent.
Alexander spoke up.
“All of a sudden, I was the
poster boy.”
He overheard a manager say
he’d just cooked his own goose.
“It was ‘game on’ after that.
They just come after you,”
Alexander said. “It became very
hostile in the plant, with manage-
ment following you. We were
trying to stick together, wearing
our union hats.”
On Nov. 17, 1999, the vote
took place. Despite the anti-
union blitz, workers won a union
14 to 8. That’s when the real
odyssey began — getting the
thoroughly anti-union company
to agree to a union contract.
“All we wanted was a pen-
sion,” Alexander recalls. “And
we were paying $600 a month
for family medical — back in the
’90s! We didn’t want to pay for
medical, and we wanted a union
pension.”
Starbucks dragged out con-
tract negotiations. After a year,
Turn to Page 5