News
Page 4
Street Roots • Nov 11-17, 2016
Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom
Chamberlain discusses union
busting in Portland, how building
critical infrastructure will create jobs
and other issues facing the workforce
BY EMILY GREEN
STAFF WRITER
ew have fought as relentlessly for the
rights of Oregon’s workers as Tom
Chamberlain.
He’s been deeply involved in labor organizing
since the 1980s and today is immersed in some
of the most urgent issues facing low-wage
workers - from efforts to turn his
,. •
organization’s office space, into affordable
housing to lobbying the Legislature for changes
that would benefit everyone in Oregon’s
workforce.
After graduating from North Portland’s
Roosevelt High School in 1972, and following a
brief stint in the U.S. Air Force, Chamberlain
became a firefighter with Portland Fire and
Rescue, where he worked nearly 30 years.
He also joined the Portland Firefighters
Association Local 43 and moved up the ranks
of the union until 1998, when he became its
president.
After firefighting, he became policy adviser
to former Gov. Ted Kulongoski, a position he
left in 2005 when he was unanimously elected
president of Oregon AFL-CIO, a position he
holds today.
With more than 300,000 members among its
affiliated unions, Oregon AFL-CIO represents a
wide range of professions, such as
steelworkers, plumbers, teachers and letter
carriers.
But whether you belong to a union or not,
Oregon AFL-CIO’s legislative agendas are likely
to affect you. It was a strong advocate for
raising the state’s minimum wage and for
giving all Oregonians paid sick days, and next
session it will be advocating for fair scheduling
laws.
While union membership across the U.S. has
declined considerably since its peak in the
1950s, membership in Oregon remains higher
than the national average, with roughly 16
percent of workers represented in 2015,
according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics.
And Oregon’s unions are growing,
Chamberlain said.
While membership was lost during the
recession, he said unions have not only made
up for those losses, but the United Food and
F
PHOTO BY DIEGO DIAZ
Tom Chamberlain has been the president of Oregon AFL-CIO since 2005.
Commercial Workers International, Machinists
Union and American Federation of Teachers
are bringing in thousands of new members,
organizing employees at Portland State
University, Portland International Airport and
in the private sector.
We recently sat down with Chamberlain at
the Oregon AFL-CIO’s Portland headquarters,
about a half block off Southeast Powell
Boulevard. We began by discussing the shift
among some of the nation’s most prominent
blue-collar unions toward working with, rather
than against, environmentalists.
Tom Chamberlain: The manufacturing
unions have been attacked on two fronts: One
is trade agreements - that devastated our
manufacturing base - and environmental issues
have been a secondary hit.
Now groups like the Steelworkers, who have
probably been as impacted as any union that
we have in the federation, have actually been
on the forefront of some type of transition.
When you talk to manufacturing unions, it’s
not that we don’t believe in global warming; it’s
that we know this transition from carbon-based
fuels to a greener type of energy, it’s going to
come with costs, and those costs will fall
disproportionately on our membership.
So the Steelworkers have formed the
BlueGreen Alliance, which brings labor and
environmentalists together in trying to create
some type of transition for their folks, and the
transition is difficult because we know, for
example, in the forest industry, when we put
some restriction on logging practices, there
was a loss of family-wage jobs.
We believed we could train our way out of it,
and it never happened because oftentimes you
can’t train your way out of it when the folks
that are being hit are in their 50s.
You have part of the labor movement that
tends to be more environmentalist focused, and
you have another group that’s being impacted,
trying to figure a way out
Whether it’s transition or just straight-up
environmental issues, I think there’s a lot of
experimentation occurring on the national
level, and in various states.
Then I see unions like IBEW, which is the
See CHAMBERLAIN, page 5