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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 18, 2019)
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | October 18, 2019 | PAGE 3 PEOPLE Barbara Byrd wraps up 41-year career in labor movement After 41 years as a labor educator and 14 years at the Oregon AFL-CIO, Barbara Byrd is retiring for real. Two years ago, Barbara Byrd retired from the Labor Education and Research Center (LERC) of the University of Ore- gon after 20 years; last month she stepped down as Oregon AFL-CIO’s sec- retary treasurer after 14 years. At 70, Byrd is wrapping up a 41-year career in which she’s trained hundreds of union leaders across four states, promoted the apprenticeship model of job training, and urged labor organizations to confront cli- mate change. Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, Byrd got an early union education from her father, a newspaper reporter who be- came president of his Newspaper Guild local and representative for the interna- tional union. “He would always say it wasn’t about wages and benefits,” Byrd told the Labor Press. “It was about being able to stand up at work and say what you thought and not be afraid of getting fired.” Byrd got a bachelor’s degree in soci- ology at Rice University in Houston and a master’s degree in labor studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She discovered labor education at UMass when she followed an instructor from union hall to union hall doing steward training. “I watched him teach and I watched the excitement of people in those classes, and it was like a light bulb going off. It was like, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ” In 1978, she began her first job as a la- bor educator at Indiana University, teach- ing union leaders from the steel mills near Gary, Indiana. When her father had a stroke, she returned to Texas in 1981 with then-husband Peter Donohue, an economist and labor union researcher. She helped start a labor studies program at San Antonio College, and earned a Ph.D. in adult education from the Uni- versity of Texas in Austin. With newborn daughter Caitlin, they relocated to San Francisco in 1986 and Byrd took a job directing the Labor Studies and Appren- ticeship Department at City College of San Francisco. But in 1995, frustrated by the high cost of living in San Francisco, they moved to Portland and Byrd began at LERC as a teacher and researcher. At LERC, her teaching developed the skills of countless union stewards and leaders. Her research made the case for the value of union apprenticeship pro- grams, and looked at the challenges of at- tracting and retaining women in that pro- gram, and minority apprentices. In recent years, leadership development became her passion, particularly with the Cas- cade Region Labor Leadership Initiative. In that program, about two dozen high- level labor leaders from Oregon, Wash- ington and British Columbia meet for three weeks for seminars on honing a vi- sion, leading organizational change, and connecting with movements. They come away with a clearer game plan for build- ing their organizations, and a network of peers to turn to for advice. Mid-way through her tenure at LERC, a surprising thing happened. Newly in- stalled Oregon AFL-CIO president Tom Chamberlain invited Byrd to become the union federation’s number two officer, secretary-treasurer, in 2005. The Oregon AFL-CIO had just lost 40% of its mem- bership because of a national union split, Turn to Page 7 ...Multnomah County says seniority rights don’t apply From Page 1 being met. Although CareOre- gon may be a nonprofit entity, their primary perspective will al- ways be that of an insurance company.” “We’re public servants. We don’t want to work for an insur- ance company,” said Kristine Britton Dills, a 19-year County health department employee who expects her position to be transferred to CareOregon. “One of the benefits of working for the County is being able to move around and do different things, to learn and grow, but always under the umbrella of the county’s mission and values, al- ways as a public servant,” Brit- ton Dills told commissioners. The law that Multnomah County managers are citing says the transferred employees, for one year, can’t be laid off or have their salary reduced. But after that, at non-union Care- Oregon, they would be at-will employees who could have wages and benefits reduced or be let go for any reason. Oregon AFSCME union rep- resentative Eben Pullman says the county is misreading the law. Pullman says the law was in- tended to give public employees certain minimum protections if their job is transferred from one public employer to another, or to a non-profit that’s contracted to do the same work. It wasn’t in- tended to supersede greater pro- tections workers might have in a union contract, like the rights that come with seniority. Why seniority matters “More senior employees are more invested in the workplace,” says Local 88 Vice President Raymond De Silva, explaining one of the rationales for the union seniority rights protection. “They’re closer to retirement. If they don’t get those last few years [of employment], this will impact their whole retirement, the money they were expecting after they retire. Some of the newer employees that might have been hired just in the last 12 months, yes this would displace them, but they are not as in- vested as the more senior em- ployees.” De Silva himself has been a County employee for six years, and is one of the employees who expects to have his County po- sition eliminated in the shift to CareOregon. The decision to move to CareOregon wasn’t the County’s: The State of Oregon contracts with non-profit Health “Many of my classmates and former col- leagues have chosen to work for pharma- ceutical companies and insurance carriers, while I have chosen to serve the public good. Every day it becomes harder to sus- tain that decision, as we are continually asked to do more with less, to earn less than those who’ve chosen to work for for- profit corporations, to have our retirement and all aspects of our work slowly erode…” — Sherry Yan, County Health Department Share of Oregon to administer the Oregon Health Plan’s mental health and addiction treatment benefits in Multnomah, Wash- ington, and Clackamas counties. Health Share is what’s known in Oregon health policy jargon as a “coordinated care organiza- tion” (CCO). It’s a network that was set up by the counties and the big health providers — Kaiser, Legacy, Providence, OHSU, and Adventist — to fo- cus on prevention and manage- ment of chronic conditions like diabetes for people enrolled in the Oregon Health Plan. Until now, Health Share has subcon- tracted management of the be- havioral health benefit to county health departments. Now it’s giving the work instead to Care- Oregon, which administers the Oregon Health Plan’s health and dental benefits in the three coun- ties. Under the union contract, Lo- cal 88 could wait until the lay- offs occur and then file a griev- ance, but it asked — and the County agreed — to arbitrate the dispute before Jan. 1. In the meantime, with the transition just 12 weeks away, workers say they’ve gotten no information about whose jobs would be transferred, or what the wages, benefits, and condi- tions would be at CareOregon. De Silva said the union has asked the County for an official list and has asked CareOregon for compensation information, working titles and roles, on- boarding documents. Crickets. Pullman said the list is likely to include mental health call center and crisis line workers, quality control and regulatory compliance specialists, and IT and other workers who manage billing and claims adjudication. At the Oct. 4 commission meeting, health department workers appealed to County commissioners to step in. The County doesn’t have to spend tax dollars to arbitrate the dis- agreement. Chair Kafoury and the com- missioners said nothing. “I was hoping for some ac- knowledgment,” De Silva said. “There was no comment.” In an emailed statement, County spokesperson Julie Sul- livan-Springhetti said the County knows the move has been difficult and distracting for staff, and has been working with employees who want to stay to find other open positions at the County. “One of the challenges for everyone is that we are still ne- gotiating the transfer of this work and don’t have all the an- swers at this stage in the process,” Sullivan-Springhetti wrote. De Silva said the union has met with several commissioners individually, and has further meetings scheduled.
