The Oregon Labor Dispatch is a weekly email and blog series designed to keep Oregon’s workers informed of the latest news about unions, worker power, and much more. Each week, we bring you a curated selection of news stories, graphics, and information about upcoming events and actions. When Oregon’s Labor Movement is connected, updated and informed we are able to be stronger advocates for all working Oregonians.
If you have a news story, event or action you’d like to see featured in the Oregon Labor Dispatch please email us at communications@oraflcio.org.
Labor 2024 Events
Find more Labor 2024 events and volunteer opportunities on our solidarity calendar.
Labor 2024 Primary Election Kickoff Canvass
Saturday April 13, 2024 at 10:00AM | Meet at the Oregon Labor Center in Portland
Join Oregon Labor to kick off election season at a canvass for Willy Chotzen and Dan Rayfield. Chotzen is a former AFSCME member who is running for State Representative in House District 46 and Dan Rayfield has been a labor champion in the State House now running for Attorney General. Coffee, lunch and training provided.
Phonebank for Lisa Fragala for House District 8 and Dan Rayfield for Attorney General
Tuesday April 16, 2024 at 5:30PM | Zoom
Talk to union members and likely voters about Lisa Fragala for HD 8 and Day Rayfield for Attorney General. Fragala is an educator and a strong advocate for workers and their families who is running for State Representative in House District 8.
Phonebank for Willy Chotzen for House District 46 and Dan Rayfield for Attorney General
Tuesday April 16, 2024 at 5:30PM | Zoom
Talk to union members and likely voters about Willy Chotzen, a former AFSCME member who is running for State Representative in House District 46, and Dan Rayfield for Attorney General.
Canvass for Phil Chang and Anthony Broadman
Saturday April 20, 2024 at 10:00AM | Meet at the SEIU 503 Center in Bend
Join Oregon Labor at a canvass for Deschutes County Commissioner Phil Chang and Bend City Council Member Anthony Broadman who is running for State Senate in District 27. Coffee, lunch and training provided.
Take Action Today
Letter of Support for Ethos Music Center Teachers and Staff
Ethos Music Center workers will vote on joining AFM Local 99 on April 24th, 2024. Sign the letter of support here.
Upcoming Actions & Events
OHSU Postdoc Picket
Tuesday April 16, 2024 from 12:00-2:00 PM | Elizabeth Caruthers Park in Portland
Join Oregon AFSCME and OHSU Postdoc Workers United to let OHSU know it's time to pay their fair share!
Workers Memorial Day
Friday April 26, 2024 at 9:30AM | Portland Fire and Rescue Station 21 in Portland
Friday April 26, 2024 at 12:00PM | Fallen Worker Memorial in Salem
The Oregon AFL-CIO will honor the 56 workers from across the state who lost their lives while doing their jobs in 2023 with ceremonies in Portland and Salem. For more information and to RSVP click here.
Must Read
April 9, 2024 | Center for American Progress
“The Biden administration has received ongoing attention for its actions to improve the lives of blue collar workers—from walking the picket line with striking autoworkers to ensuring that its signature investments in American industry create good jobs. Pundits and the press often point to actions to expand and raise standards in the construction and manufacturing sectors as central to the Biden administration’s economic agenda. Yet the administration has also taken numerous steps to boost the earnings and wealth of service sector workers, empower them to come together in unions, and hold accountable corporations that violate their rights.”
Oregon and Washington Labor
April 11, 2024 | OPB
“Starting next year, large warehouses will not be allowed to punish employees for failing to meet their quotas, unless those criteria are clearly written out in advance. “The workers will know what to expect. They will also have time to properly adjust to those expectations,” said Steve Konopa, the legislative director with the Teamsters of Oregon. “Without it, there could be serious accidents, or people may be pressing themselves too hard.”
April 10, 2024 | Willamette Week
Union leaders say Legacy cut hours worked by hospitalists without sufficient bargaining. In response, the union filed a charge with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board on April 3. “These changes were made over our objections,” says Dr. Mikeanne Minter, a Legacy hospitalist and member of the PNWHMA. “We didn’t agree to them.”
April 9, 2024 | Portland Business Journal
“Oregon came close to tightening restrictions around the corporate ownership of medical practices during the short legislative session last month. Dozens of doctors, physician groups and associations across a variety of specialties came out in support of House Bill 4130, as did consumer advocates and unions. “Nobody knows much about this, and it’s impacting the health care landscape in a tremendously significant way,” said Rep. Ben Bowman, a Tigard Democrat who sponsored the bill, which died in the Senate. He plans to bring it back next year.”
April 9, 2024 | The Stand
“The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 46 announced late Monday that more than 1,000 Limited Energy Electricians in the Puget Sound area have voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike. The electricians’ contract expired on March 31, but the union agreed to a 10-day extension while continuing to bargain over wages and quality-of-life issues with the Puget Sound Chapter of the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA). That extension expires on Wednesday, April 10.”
April 4, 2024 | Northwest Labor Press
“Union leaders from both districts acknowledge the financial bind the districts are in but disagree with some of the choices administrators made, and wish there had been more union involvement in deciding where to make the cuts.”
April 4, 2024 | KGW News
“Oregon state workers with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 503 branch staged a rally at the Oregon State Library in Salem Thursday to protest what they said are still-ongoing technical issues with the state's new payroll system and demand that Gov. Tina Kotek intervene.”
April 4, 2024 | Northwest Labor Press
“Managers at the Oregon Symphony opened the most recent round of union contract negotiations explaining why they could not pay the wages Musicians Local 99 asked for, said Local 99 Executive Secretary Treasurer Mont Chris Hubbard. Portland’5 Centers for the Arts raised rent and fees for the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall from $895,000 in 2016 to $1.56 million last year.”
Legislation
April 9, 2024 | Denverite
“Denver voters may have a say in whether almost 7,000 city employees have the right to collective bargaining. If the charter amendment ends up on the ballot. Councilmembers Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, Sarah Parady, Shontel Lewis and Chris Hinds are sponsoring a proposed change to the city’s charter that would give city employees collective bargaining rights”
April 4, 2024 | People’s World
“The nation’s rail unions and the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department are hailing the Biden administration’s final rule mandating two-person crews on all but a few of the nation’s freight trains. The rule, strenuously opposed by the nation’s freight railroads, orders a minimum two-person crew—the engineer and the conductor—on all freight trains, especially those miles-long trains the nation’s big Class I railroads run. The unions have lobbied for two-person crews, both at the Transportation Department, the parent agency of the FRA, and on Capitol Hill, for years, but the rail lobby has always blocked congressional action. And it convinced the GOP Trump regime’s FRA to allow one-person crews, as a money-saver.”
Organizing
April 10, 2024 | Reuters
“Workers at Apple's store in Short Hills, New Jersey, have filed for union representation, a staff member who is part of the organizing committee said on Wednesday amid a push for unionization across sectors in corporate America. Companies including coffee-chain Starbucks, ecommerce firm Amazon.com and software giant Microsoft are facing unionization efforts from employees who want better working conditions. Apple retail staff at New Jersey store filed for union representation with Communications Workers of America on April 8, according to John Nagy, who is the operations lead at the Short Hill store and a member of the organizing committee.”
April 10, 2024 | The Chief
“Workers at Partners Coffee in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, will vote this week on whether to join the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1500, nearly two years after workers first started organizing at the shop. If the 22 baristas, roasters, production workers and kitchen employees vote to unionize on Thursday, they’ll join a wave of young workers at other coffee shops like Starbucks and Blank Street Coffee that have unionized since the pandemic.”
April 5, 2024 | The American Prospect
“Mercedes-Benz workers in Vance, Alabama, will vote on whether to join the United Auto Workers (UAW). On Friday, the UAW filed for an election to represent all 5,200 of the plant’s hourly employees, after the union said a supermajority of workers at the company’s mammoth plant signed union cards in three months. Jeremy Kimbrell, a measurement machine operator at the plant, said as part of the UAW’s announcement: “At Mercedes, at Hyundai and at hundreds of other companies, Alabama workers have made billions of dollars for executives and shareholders, but we haven’t gotten our fair share. We’re going to turn things around with this vote. We’re going to end the Alabama discount.”
Actions and Strikes
April 6, 2024 | 12 News
“Workers at a downtown Phoenix hotel walked out on strike during the men's Final Four. Employees at the Sheraton Downtown Phoenix hotel walked out on strike to protest allegations of unlawful behavior by hotel management, according to a news release from UNITE HERE Local 11, a labor union representing more than 32,000 hospitality workers in Southern California and Arizona.”
April 6, 2024 | Common Dreams
“U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders joined hospitality workers in downtown Los Angeles on Friday as they picketed outside one of the dozens of hotels that have yet to reach a contract deal with UNITE HERE Local 11, whose membership is demanding better pay, benefits, and job protections in one of the nation's most expensive cities.”
April 4, 2024 | Eater San Francisco
“About 1,000 cafeteria workers throughout Menlo Park, Sunnyvale, San Francisco, Fremont, and the rest of the country are at the negotiating table with their employers for better pay and working conditions. To raise the stakes, those workers who provide food to Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp amongst other businesses — will picket on Thursday, April 4 from 2:30 to 4:00 p.m. at 250 Howard Street, the San Francisco Meta offices. The sandwich makers, line cooks, baristas, and more seek guaranteed raises, family healthcare, protections against layoffs, gender identity protections, and more.”
NLRB
April 10, 2024 | Reuters
“The U.S. Senate on Wednesday narrowly approved a proposal, which President Joe Biden has vowed to veto, to repeal a National Labor Relations Board rule that would treat companies as the employers of many of their contract and franchise workers and require them to bargain with those workers' unions. The Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, passed the resolution in a 50-48 vote. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat who often votes with Republicans and has been critical of the NLRB rule, and independent senators Angus King of Maine and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona voted in favor of the proposal.”
April 9, 2024 | The Nation
“Elon Musk hates unions, with a white-hot passion that has rendered him delusional. In late November, at a New York Times DealBook Summit where the aspiring-to-be-rich gather to get pointers from the actually rich, the Tesla CEO explained that “I disagree with the idea of unions…. I just don’t like anything which creates a lords-and-peasants sort of thing.” In the same interview, Musk—a mega-billionaire who famously threatened, in 2018, to take away the stock options of Tesla workers if they organized to exercise their collective-bargaining rights—griped, “I think the unions naturally try to create negativity in a company.”
April 9, 2024 | Huff Post
“The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board took a swipe at SpaceX, Trader Joe’s and Amazon on Friday for challenging her agency’s constitutionality. Jennifer Abruzzo, a progressive appointee of President Joe Biden, described such companies as “deep-pocket, low-road employers” that were trying to throw the agency off its mission of protecting workers’ rights “because they have the money to do so.”
Commentary
April 8, 2024 | The Baltimore Sun
“As the city of Baltimore and the wider region grapple with the aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy, we must mourn the six men who lost their lives in the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse last month, and never forget how fragile life can be, especially on a job site — any job site. We also must recognize that we are at a crossroads. How we choose to rebuild will shape the physical landscape of our city and define our commitment to our workers, our communities and our children. We must seize this moment as an opportunity to rebuild responsibly, safely. We must rebuild with a highly trained local workforce that is paid prevailing wages. And we must rebuild around responsible union contractors who partner with minority-owned businesses. ”
April 5, 2024 | People’s World
“Unions and labor activists have been warning that unless labor law is updated corporations will take advantage of the current law and its loopholes to set back progress on countless issues important to Americans. Current labor law, for example, allows bosses to drag their feet for years, at times, in negotiations with workers. Bill Samuel says, that when it comes to a top issue such as comprehensive pro-worker labor law reform, you have to take the long view about accomplishing it. Make that the very long view, as in decades. Which is what Samuel has done as the AFL-CIO Government Affairs Director for almost 24 years.”
Pop Culture
April 8, 2024 | Eater
“It kind of shakes my faith in billionaires,” Marge Simpsons admits to Lisa, three-beers deep after a grueling shift at Gimme Chow, a ghost kitchen and delivery app. In the latest episode of The Simpsons, “Night of the Living Wage,” Marge takes the job to pay off an unexpected medical bill (for someone else’s “emotional-support chicken”). There, she is subjected to frantic, dangerous working conditions for minimum wage, and is refused overtime pay, only to hear the app’s founder, billionaire Finn Bon Idee, insist he’s made his fortune because he works harder than anyone else at the company. It’s at that moment she decides to form a union.”