Our Oregon AFL-CIO President Graham Trainor had a prescient opinion piece published in The Northwest Labor Press under the date of February 19, 2024. The piece is forward-looking in the immediate sense that it anticipated the strike at PeaceHealth, classified staff at the Salem-Keizer School District winning a tentative argreement without striking, the tentaive agreement reached covering state higher ed classified workers, and some other union-won victories. It is also forward looking in the sense that it forecasts widespread interest by working-class people in what unions are doing in our state and in the sense that the article is a kind of preliminary report-back from the first-ever Oregon Strike School. The school was one of a few experimental efforts held around the United States intended to help build capacity for organizing and winning strikes, and as such it demonstrates that we're reaching a new stage in Organized Labor. I am going to repost Brother Trainor's piece in its entirety below and provide a few additional comments of my own below that.
Oregon labor is still strike ready
By GRAHAM TRAINOR, Oregon AFL-CIO president
On January 27, over 100 trade unionists gathered for the first-ever Oregon Strike School, a day-long training focused on building stronger and more effective contract campaigns and powerful strike threats throughout Oregon labor. With attendees from over 30 different unions from across Oregon’s economy, it was clear that our movement isn’t satisfied with the history-making action of 2023. In fact, based on the energy and the focus at Strike School, and what we continue to see in the first few months of 2024, last year’s labor action was just the beginning.
In my article last month, I highlighted how strikes and collective action reached incredible heights in 2023. We saw double the number of workers who went on strike in 2022, the highest seen in over a decade. And countless other groups of workers built powerful, strategic, and credible strike threats as well, winning big before needing to strike.
Just over the last 12-18 months, we’ve seen nurses and health care workers win big using a multi-faceted strategy including legislative victories, strike threats, and powerful and well-timed strikes, all with a backdrop of constant new organizing. We’ve seen public service workers and woodworkers win big by using their most powerful weapon. We’ve seen autoworkers wage an inspirational campaign that not only won a game-changing contract, but has been the spark for new organizing throughout the automobile industry and supply chain. We’ve seen building trades unions build some of the most credible strike threats that I’ve seen in my career, and winning big because of it. We’ve seen actors and writers around the country take on powerful corporations and CEOs, spotlighting the real fears and concerns about artificial intelligence disrupting their industry and undermining their jobs. We’ve seen hundreds of thousands of package delivery and warehouse workers leverage their collective power in Oregon and across the country to win a historic agreement at UPS. At the end of 2023, we saw the first teachers’ strike in Portland’s history drawing national attention to the need for more robust funding for public education and achieving the schools our children deserve. Last month, we saw graduate employees at the University of Oregon use the threat of a well-organized strike to win a historic contract. And right now we’re seeing more healthcare professionals say “enough is enough” in Lane County, walking the line for a fair contract and higher education workers across the state holding practice pickets as their contract campaign heats up.
This brief summary showcases something really important. Strikes — and well-organized, credible strike threats — work. They win life-changing contracts.
Amidst this excitement and momentum, we must never lose sight of just how unfair and imbalanced the economy is as the working class continues to be squeezed by inflation, the lack of affordable housing, the student debt crisis, all while facing hostility and backlash from the multi-billion dollar union-busting industry every time we try to organize unions. Understandably, working people are looking to see who’s fighting for them, who’s on their side.
And when they see the labor movement consistently in the streets, in state legislatures, and at bargaining tables holding the line for our shared values, it comes as no surprise that we’re seeing historic union favorability statistics and nine out of 10 young people supporting our movement.
This is our time to push back with every ounce of our being on the rigged economic system and win what’s ours from the wealth our labor creates. This is the moment to strategize, to dig deep, and to build the strongest contract campaigns our movement has ever seen. And as we do that, it won’t just be our movement that is better for it. The working class and our democracy will be better for it as well. See you on the picket line!
And here is my take on Brother Trainor's article:
As I said above, this is a forward-looking article on several counts. I hope that there will be more Strike Schools coming and that they will help unite union members across union and geographic lines, and across racial, gender, and social and political lines as well. It is good to hear labor leaders speak plainly about a "working-class" and not limit themselves and our movement to talk about a middle-class and the even more vague "working families." There is a strong opening here to continue building labor-community coalitions not only on the basis of temporary shared interests, but on long-term shared interests as well. I hope that the logic expressed here will help build towards a win for the working-class in November and for either a revitalized all-people's and grassroots-driven Democratic Party or a new political formation that better expresses progressive and working-class-led needs. Please see this and this for updates on Oregon AFL-CIO endorsements in key legislative races.
Now, I have been on strike many times, though only one of those strikes was completely union-authorized, and I have participated in scores of other strikes over the past fifty-two years. There was often a thin or porous line separating union-led and community-supported or community-initiated strikes in the coalfields when I was a younger person, and if you had relatives or friends or neighbors on strike then you hit the picket lines with them. This often resulted in arrests and in getting fired, but it was always worth the trouble. There were people in my generation---I was one of them---who came to idealize striking.And there were union members---my father was one of them---who reactively took pride in never having voted for a union contract. We looked tough and we talked tough, but I have come to realize over the years that many of the most "strike-happy" folks do not make good union builders and organizers.
Harlan County, Kentucky mine workers organizing.
The context that prevails today is very different than what we saw in the 1970s, when part of the labor movement was still on the offensive from the late 1960s, and it is also quite different than what was taking place from the early 1980s to around the turn of the cenrury, when we took some heavy defeats, went on the defense, and often shot ourselves in our feet and blew off most of our toes. It took the Battle of Seattle (1999), Occupy (2011), Black Lives Matter (2013), the George Floyd protests (2020), and other social movements to begin to push unions in the right direction. This coincided with a strengthened and new push to organize from within labor, a combination of restive union members pushing and some union leaders being willing and able to listen and act. And after twenty-five or thirty years we still don't have the critical numbers of activists and union members needed to successfully turn the tide in our favor. The AFL-CIO set a goal at one point of organizing and gaining one million new union members, but our magic number needs to be closer to ten or eleven million.
With all of the above in mind, then, I think a great deal about how the pieces might fight together to win over ten or eleven million people to becoming union members and how to inculcate disciplne, solidarity, and building leadership in a society that stresses individualism and seems to be tearing at the seams, a country that seems closer to civil war right now than it does to class conflict and far from reinventing itself as a capable democracy. Truth be told, we're not going to bring in critical numbers of people and still maintain our leadershiop and the way we do things. Union members and leadership need to choose within the conundrum which side we're on.
I'm encouraged to read Brother Trainor writing that "Amidst this excitement and momentum, we must never lose sight of just how unfair and imbalanced the economy is..." and
Brother Trainor ends on exactly the right note when he says "This is our time to push back with every ounce of our being on the rigged economic system and win what’s ours from the wealth our labor creates."
It's in finding the balance between a "labor movement consistently in the streets" and in the "state legislatures, and at bargaining tables" where some of our biggest difficulties and contradictions set in. In practical terms, I think, this means a very different way of formulating our demands. Can we figure out how to put forward demands that represent our communities as well as union members? Can we get to Project Labor Agreements without giving up the right to strike? Can we build union density in the service and logistics industries and still win more than the minimum and dues check-off? Can we find new ways of working with seniority that keeps recently-hired women and people of color working in majority-male and majority-white workplaces when there are layoffs?
Continuing on, I believe that the way we do politics now is backwards. We chase candidates who are in the system, we compare scorecards, and we work through PACs to support them. I want to suggest that we instead test people within our movements and allow ourselves to be tested as well---and strikes can be a primary means of doing this---and see who emerges as leaders over time and make them our candidates. The money for campaigns will then likely flow from the movements, but the funds needed may be less because at that point we're building people power at the base. Here is Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates speaking to the points I'm making here:
The views expressed here by the author are not those of the Marion-Polk-Yamhill Central Labor Chapter or the Oregon AFL-CIO.
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