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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (July 3, 2020)
SERVING ORGANIZED LABOR IN OREGON AND SOUTHWEST WASHINGTON SINCE 1900 NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS VOLUME 121, NUMBER 13 Have a Safe and Happy 4th of July! PORTLAND, OREGON JULY 3, 2020 Construction unions call for action after noose incident By Don McIntosh About 7:30 a.m. May 20, a first year apprentice plumber on COVID safety duty was roving around a construction site wip- ing down high-touch surfaces with bleach rags when she saw something that gave her a jolt. On the second floor between two construction elevator doors, someone had hung a thin 30- inch long rope from some wires, tied in the shape of a noose. “It was shocking,” she later told the Labor Press. “Why would somebody do that?” Co-workers on the Southwest Fourth and Montgomery site know who she is, but the appren- tice asked that her name not be used in this story. This is her sec- ond job in a career she’s excited about, and she doesn’t want this encounter to follow her around on the Internet for eternity. But seeing the noose brought up a lot of emotions, she says. Though she’s light-skinned and says she often passes for white, she describes herself as Black biracial. Her great grandparents were sharecroppers. Her grand- father and uncle, both plumbers, left Mississippi to get away from the racial hostility. Grow- ing up she heard her uncle’s sto- ries of nooses hung in their old neighborhood. But she herself had never seen a noose before. Up to then, she had found the Fourth and Montgomery Building site to be a great working environment. Learning to solder pipes as an apprentice plumber at mechani- cal contractor TCM Corp. she’d encountered a friendly and col- laborative workplace culture, both with fellow United Associ- ation of Plumbers and Fitters Turn to Page 4 Wages rise over $3 an hour in new Painters contracts The July 1 raises are the culmina- tion of a ready-to-strike strategy the union set in motion in 2017. By Don McIntosh Members of Painters Local 10 have just won immediate raises of as much as $4.27 an hour in two new master agreements— following an eight-month cam- paign to catch up to the compen- sation of other building trades. Both agreements took effect July 1 and spell out wages, ben- efits and conditions for union painters when they work in Ore- gon and Southwest Washington for contractors in either of two employer groups. One is a new agreement with the Signatory Painting Contrac- tors Organization (SPCO). Rat- ified June 28, it replaces a pre- vious contract that expired March 31. New hourly wages for journeymen will be $26.56 for commercial and residential work (a $2.62 increase); $28.36 for industrial work (a $3.22 in- crease) and $34.23 for bridge work (a $4.27 increase). [Regis- tered apprentices make 70% to 95% of the journeyman rate, while leadmen, foremen and general foremen make wages above the journeyman rate.] The contract also spells out $13.84 an hour in total contributions to union-sponsored funds for health, pension, and training benefits and labor management partnership and promotion. And members got a $300 signing bonus. The new agreement runs through March 31, 2023, and leaves wage increases for the second and third years up to ne- gotiation, given current eco- nomic uncertainty. The other master agreement is a first-ever contract with the Associated Wall and Ceiling International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) closed down ports along the West Coast June 19 in soli- darity with Black Lives Matter. In Oakland, ILWU members joined a massive march outside the port. Police unions come in for questioning Police unions have almost always been an awkward fit in the House of Labor. By Don McIntosh A week into worldwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd, half a dozen na- tional union leaders gave an ad- dress about racial justice in a live June 3 Facebook event or- ganized by the national AFL- CIO. In the livestream watched by over 51,000 people, Bloom- berg labor reporter Ian Kullgren brought up a point that Face- book commenters had been making throughout the event: The AFL-CIO and its affiliates include police unions, and in the current moment, police unions have come to be re- garded as the biggest obstacle to police reform, and the biggest defender of officers ac- cused of misconduct. In the weeks that followed, hundreds of rank-and-file union members, labor-adjacent activists, and newly involved citizens with little knowledge of organized labor pushed on social media and in local union meetings for the AFL-CIO to end its affiliation with police unions. Six thousand signed an online petition; 350 joined a newly created “Drop the Cops” Facebook group. Two national unions—50,000-member As- sociation of Flight Attendants (a division of Communications Workers of America) and 7,000-member Writers Guild of America East—called for the national AFL-CIO to end its only official police-only union affiliation, the 23,000- member International Union of Police Associations (IUPA). In response, the national AFL-CIO General Board is- sued the closest thing to a con- sensus answer by labor official- dom June 9. “We are proud to join the calls for policing and criminal justice reform by Turn to Page 8 A UNION GUIDE TO WASHINGTON’S AUGUST 4 PRIMARY Page 11 Turn to Page 9 Black Lives Matter and the broader civil rights move- ment,” the Board said in the statement. “But we respectfully take a different view when it comes to the call for the AFL- CIO to cut ties with IUPA. First and foremost, we believe po- lice officers, and everyone who works for a living, have the right to collective bargaining. We have a dozen affiliate unions who represent law en- forcement in some form. … We believe the best way to use our influence on the issue of police brutality is to engage our police affiliates rather than iso- late them.” Along those lines, the AFL- CIO pledged to convene a meeting of affiliate unions that have law enforcement units to talk about developing a code of excellence “to create systemic change from within organized labor, including a monitoring
