■ z
o
i!
L O C A L 5 0 3 SEIU Local 503, af l - cio , clc
PRESORTED
. STANDARD
U.S. POSTAGE
PAID
Permit No. 202
Salem, Oregon
Oregon Public Employees Union
P.O. Box 12159
Salem, OR 97309-0159
S E IU
Stronger Together
address service requested
Power in the Workplace Starts With You
by Leslie Frane,'SEIU Local 503, OPEU Executive Director
L
accepted the position of Executive Director of
SEIU Local 503 because I admired this Local from
,afar. Now, after six weeks on the job, I've come to
respect our leaders, members, and staff from up dose.
Already, I feel part of this Local, and I'm excited about
helping to guide its future.
The key to our future, I'm convinced, lies with
worksite leaders throughout the state. Organizing
starts in the workplace. We take the first steps toward
strengthening our Union when individual members take
leadership in making their working conditions fairer.
Every day, I hear stories of stewards and other
leaders who organize their coworkers to take action against unfair
working conditions. More than any other reports, these stories
affirm my conviction that our Union is on the right track.
Let me share a few of these stories with you. Linda Ingham
is a steward in the State Print Plant. When the state hired a new
supervisor on night shift, Linda began to hear reports about this
supervisor's inappropriate behavior. He monitored how frequently
employees went to the bathroom. He belittled and threatened
workers, with comments like "How7 are you going to make your car
payments if I fire you?" He seemed to focus his wrath on workers
who had difficulty standing up for themselves.
When individual complaints to this supervisor's boss did
not solve the problem, Linda decided to get serious. She organized
the entire shift to document every instance of the supervisor's rude
■
behavior. Armed with dozens of written accounts of the
supervisor's harassment of union members, Linda and her
coworkers demanded a formal investigation. A month later, the
supervisor was history.
Another example comes from the forestry department,
where Mary Basham is a shop steward. Management planned
to contract out bargaining unit work at Phipps Nursery, near
Elkton in Southern Oregon, without doing the feasibility study
required by our collective bargaining agreement. Mary filed a
grievance, and she sent a letter to the state legislators from the
area. But she did not stop there. She also organized nearly 50
coworkers to come together, on their day off, to present the
grievance to the plant manager as a group. Nothing like this
had ever happened at Phipps Nursery before! Two days later,
Mary got a commitment that the state would do the feasibility
study.
With leaders like Linda Ingham and Mary Basham, I
know that our Union is in good hands. As an organization, we
have critical challenges ahead of us—contract campaigns,
general elections, initiative battles, and state budget crises. We
should devote significant union resources to making sure we
win them. But our fights at the print shop and the nursery
remind me of die importance of our smaller, day-to-day
struggles for dignity and justice at work. Linda and Mary's
stories also remind me just how much power we have when we
organize ourselves, in the workplace, to fight back.
I
________________________________________________________