Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 16, 2019)
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | August 16, 2019 | PAGE 31 AFL-CIO TO CONGRESS: Pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act By Richard Trumka President AFL-CIO On behalf of the 12.5 million members and 55 unions of the AFL-CIO, thank you for invit- ing me to testify today. I want to thank House Edu- cation and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott and his colleagues for the foresight they have demonstrated in crafting this important legislation. Gallup recently put the pop- ularity of unions at 62 per- cent—a 15-year high. The Wall Street Journal re- ported that 2018 was the biggest year for collective ac- tion in three decades. Teachers from West Virginia to Arizona. Google employees. Workers in every sector and every region are embracing the transforma- tional power that comes from joining together in common cause. MIT found that half of non- union workers would vote to join a union today if given the chance. That’s more than 60 million Americans. So why haven’t we union. Pro-union work- seen a rise in union ers are fired. Employers membership commen- refuse to bargain in surate with this surge good faith. Some refuse in approval, recogni- to bargain at all. And far tion and desire? The too often, the financial answer is clear: Our consequences for break- woefully outdated la- ing federal law are vir- bor laws no longer tually nonexistent. serve as an effective This must change. Richard Trumka means for working The Protecting the people to have our voices heard. Right to Organize Act will The stated purpose of the Na- change it. tional Labor Relations Act is to Imagine if, when running for encourage collective bargain- office, your opponent could ing. Yet in the more than 80 force the electorate to listen to years since its passage, every speeches urging them to vote amendment to the law has made against you. Imagine your op- it harder for workers to form ponent had the power to punish unions. these voters if they supported Today, union-busting con- you. Imagine that Congress re- sultants are paid tens of millions fused to recognize your rightful of dollars to deny workers a election. And then imagine that voice on the job. And once a once you were finally seated, union election is won, these you were denied the basic rights same bad actors do everything and responsibilities that come in their power to undermine the with the office. collective bargaining process. This is the grim reality for a Workers are forced to sit in huge number of workers seek- meetings where the only item ing to form a union today. Mis- on the agenda is bashing the information. Reprisal. Delays. ...Troll on the hill From Page 1 “We didn’t want to say some- thing if there was any chance we were wrong, because the stakes were high in this,” Miller recalls. Miller wrote up an article about what he’d found, but didn’t pub- lish it, yet. Then the trolling escalated. The accounts started posting anti-union memes, hashtags like #AFSCMEHypocrisy, and spreadsheets with phony num- bers trying to make the case that union dues were regressive. “Vragina” began trolling the union’s Facebook account as well. After Vragina criticized union bargaining team member Jennifer Barker by name, the union social media team banned him from the Facebook page. Then the McFadden and Vragina accounts changed their Twitter display names to “Progress Val- ues 1” and “Luke Warm” and followed a bunch of Local 328 members. [On Twitter, accounts have both a permanent user name, or handle — which comes after the @ sign — and a display name, which they can change.] Miller and the others decided it was time to go public with what they’d found. But first, they’d call Dan Forbes, OHSU’s vice president of human re- sources — to give him a courtesy heads up, but also because they had suspicions about another fake account with the name Peter Pumpkin Eater. Since April, Peter Pumpkin Eater had pretended to be a Local 328 member at OHSU’s West Campus (and complained the union had been ignoring West Campus). Recently “Peter” had started interacting with the Fren- gle-linked accounts, and held what seemed like a coordinated back-and-forth discussion about how Local 328’s dues are regres- sive and harmful to lower-wage workers. Peter Pumpkin Eater chose for his avatar a picture of iconic socialist union leader Eu- gene Debs, who ran for president in 1918 from a prison cell for op- posing World War I. Members of the union social media team studied the account closely to see if it had links to any other member of the bargaining team. One of the account’s few early activities had been entering a contest for concert tickets for an obscure band — a band that HR director Dan Forbes hap- pened to like. Forbes’ middle name is Peter. Could one of A REAL ASSHOLE MOVE BY A MANAGER: OHSU budget & financial department exec- utive Patrick Frengle named his Twitter account “Aanus McFadden” and used it to troll the union he sat across from in contract bargaining. OHSU’s top executives be pos- ing as a union member to troll the union he was sitting across from at the bargaining table? When an Oregon AFSCME staff person called Forbes to tell him about the trolling, Forbes was surprisingly silent. He didn’t ask which member of the bar- gaining team they had fingered as the culprit. And while the con- versation was under way or im- mediately after, the Peter Pump- kin Eater account was deleted. On its blog, Local 328 went public and outed Frengle for his trolling. Willamette Week and other news outlets picked up the story. Within 24 hours, OHSU is- And even after all of those ob- stacles are overcome, an out- right refusal to recognize the election results. I’ve included several such examples in my written testimony. That’s why half of non-union workers want to join a union to- day, yet less than 12% actually have one. Why does this matter? Sim- ply put, workers in unions bar- gain for higher wages and are much more likely to have health care and a pension. The union advantage is even greater for people of color and those with- out a college degree. Unionized workers have a real say in criti- cal workplace issues like time off to care for a loved one, the deployment of technology and protection from discrimination. A happier, healthier, more upwardly mobile workforce is good for our economy as con- sumers have additional money to spend. Local tax revenues in- crease, and education funding is bolstered. Inequality shrinks. It’s a virtuous cycle. sued an apology on Twitter: “We’re deeply disappointed to learn about this inappropriate conduct on social media. We are sorry. We can confirm that this individual has been removed from our bargaining team, effec- tive immediately, and is prohib- ited from participating in any fu- ture negotiations.” The union then shared what it knew about Peter Pumpkin Eater with another OHSU executive. The next day, OHSU announced Forbes’ resignation, adding that he won’t take part in bargaining, but will continue other duties un- til November. If any union member had done what Frengle and Forbes did, they’d be walked out by security and terminated, Miller says. “The irony of all this was none of the trolling was well done,” Miller says. “None of it was ef- fective. None of it reached many people.” It may also have violated Ore- gon law. Oregon’s public employee collective bargaining law, like the federal labor law that covers pri- vate sector workers, requires unionized employers to bargain in good faith. That doesn’t mean employers like OHSU have to agree with union proposals, but it does mean they have to deal honestly and respectfully with the union. The union movement and all working people are hungry for pro-worker reforms to our ex- isting labor laws. The PRO Act would do many important things, chief among them pro- vide more substantial relief for workers whose rights have been violated...ensure a process for reaching a first contract once a union is recognized...and create a true deterrent, so employers think twice before violating the law. Something is happening in America. Workers are embrac- ing collective action with a fer- vor I haven’t seen in a genera- tion. It is time for our laws to catch up. It is time to make the PRO Act the law of the land. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka deliv- ered this statement before the House Ed- ucation and Labor Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions in support of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act on July 10. Showing up at a union meet- ing in disguise —pretending to be a member, and then abusing union volunteers, spreading dis- information, and trying to cause dissension — is not good faith. That’s what Frengle and Forbes did, only instead of a union meet- ing it was union social media. An attorney for Oregon AF- SCME emailed OHSU manage- ment asking that it not destroy any evidence, and on Aug. 9, the union filed an unfair labor prac- tice charge against OHSU with the Oregon Employment Rela- tions Board. The union could end up withdrawing the charge as a peace offering if members ratify a new contract. At a marathon 21 hour nego- tiation session Aug. 13, OHSU dropped proposals that had been angering members for months, including a health insurance take-back, a two-tier arrange- ment that would have treated new hires differently, and an un- popular paid time off (PTO) pol- icy that would have incentivized members to work while sick in order to save vacation days. With those obstacles out of the way, the two sides reached tentative agreement on a new three-year contract that will raise wages 9.25% and make other improve- ments. Members will vote on the agreement in early September.
