Solidarity with UFCW Local 555 at Fred Meyer locations in the Portland Metro area!

The following note comes from the Oregon AFL-CIO:

It’s time to show your support for union workers at all Portland-area Fred Meyer stores. Unitede Food & Commercial Workers Local 555 has called a weeklong Unfair Labor Practice strike. The action will begin on Wednesday, August 28th at 6am and go through Tuesday,September 3rd at 8am at all Fred Meyer locations in the Portland Metro area, unless a deal is reached that includes a resolution to the ULPs.

When any worker is struggling for the dignity and respect they deserve on the job, it falls on ALL of us to stand beside them every step of the way. We urge you to head to your local Fred Meyer and hold the line until management does the right thing. Pickets will be held at all locations during the stores’ operating hours.

A bargaining update from Local 555 under date of August 23 reads as follows:

August 23, 2024 7:39 pm

On August 23, your Bargaining Committee met with representatives from Kroger, Fred Meyer and QFC for our 5th bargaining session.

Since our very 1st bargaining session, your Bargaining Committee has made it crystal clear: we are here to bargain for every single Local 555 union-represented employee. That includes everyone in Oregon and Washington, everyone in the Meat, Grocery and Non-Foods contracts and everyone at Fred Meyer and QFC, including the newly organized units in Grants Pass and Springfield.

Up until today, the employer said they were here to bargain only for Portland and Bend, Meat and Grocery contracts, at Fred Meyer and QFC. Today, the employer changed their position – instead of being here to bargain for more of our members, they went back on their word and said they are here to bargain for even less – by putting forward a proposal that now excludes all of QFC, stating they will not bargain QFC until their contracts expire.

The employer’s proposal included yet another step backward: to freeze all new hires who are hired above the bottom step of the apprentice bracket, until they work the hours needed to continue to advance up the wage scale. This means that a new hire could be made to work almost 4 years without seeing a raise.

The employer’s proposal includes absolutely nothing to improve your pension – despite what Todd Kammeyer, President of Fred Meyer, said to you all in his robocall. They say one thing, and then do another. It now makes sense why they have no problem violating your rights under the National Labor Relations Act.

All of this is Kroger spitting in your face. They sent the message loud and clear: they do not care about you, they do not care about our communities, and they do not even care enough to pretend that they do. They have no problem misleading you and going back on their word.

Kroger continues their disrespectful proposal to take the money you need to secure your family’s healthcare to pay for one-time bonuses, and wage increases that leave you well behind grocery workers up and down the West Coast.

Your Bargaining Committee made our outrage very clear: we will not tolerate Kroger going backwards on their deals with us. As a result of their regressive proposal, Local 555 will be filing Unfair Labor Practice charges for bargaining in bad faith. We will continue to take all legal actions to hold them accountable to their commitments and the law.

We will be bargaining with them next week on August 29 and August 30. We will update you all then. If you have any questions in the meantime, please contact your Union Representative.

UFCW Local 555 ends dispute with Kaiser

 From the Northwest Labor Press---Article by Don McIntosh

HOLDING THE LINE: UFCW Local 555 member Marquialla Trump, a 

pharmacy tech at a Kaiser Permanente facility on NE 138th Ave., Portland, 

did her strike picket duty right up to the final minute of the strike, which ended 3 p.m.

 Nov. 18. | PHOTO BY DON McINTOSH

About 950 Kaiser Permanente pharmacy and imaging department workers in Oregon and Southwest Washington have new union contracts at last. As of April 13, five months after a strike by workers in the two units, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555 members ratified new four-year collective bargaining agreements with the health system.

The pharmacy tech and warehouse agreement runs Oct. 1, 2023 to Sept. 30, 2027, and the imaging services agreement runs Nov. 1, 2023 to Oct. 31, 2027.

Local 555’s contract settlement means an end to the company’s listing as an “unfair” employer. Oregon AFL-CIO and Northwest Oregon Labor Council designated Kaiser as unfair last October and discouraged unions from entering into new health care agreements or renewing existing agreements with Kaiser until Local 555 members ratified a new contract. Local 555’s joint union-employer health trust itself dropped Kaiser Permanente as a health care option for about 10,000 of its members. Meanwhile, DropKP.org — a website the union created Oct. 18 to encourage patients to drop Kaiser — has been taken down.

The agreement is the first in decades to be negotiated by Local 555 on its own. Starting in the late 1990s, Local 555 members at Kaiser bargained as part of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, but in 2018, 22 locals — including Local 555 and 10 other UFCW locals — left and formed a separate coalition called the Alliance for Health Care Unions. Local 555 left that breakaway alliance in 2020 and rejoined the original coalition, only to leave it again in October 2024.

The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions then waged the largest-ever health care strike in the United States Oct. 4-6, with nearly 75,000 workers, and ended the strike with new contracts that provide 21% raises over four years. That settlement includes 4,140 members of Portland-based SEIU Local 49.

By email, Local 555 spokesperson Miles Eshaia said members at Kaiser approved the new agreements near-unanimously. Eshaia said Local 555 does not typically share details of its contracts publicly.

“These agreements will help ensure we remain a best place to work and receive care,” said Kaiser Permanente in an emailed statement. “We look forward to working with UFCW 555 to advance our mission of providing high-quality, affordable health care services and improving the health of our members and the communities we serve.”

Who is on strike, who is bringing home wins, and negotiations we need to be watching

This from the AFL-CIO:

Writers Guild of America East (WGAE) members at Onion Inc., ratified a new contract with parent company G/O Media. The Onion Inc. Union, the 36-member bargaining unit representing the creative staff at The Onion, The A.V. Club, Deadspin and The Takeout, voted to authorize a strike if a new deal could not be reached. The new three-year agreement includes raising the minimum starting salary by $10,000 to $60,000 in the first year of the contract, and up to $64,000 in the final year of the contract, 3% raises in each subsequent year of the contract, a minimum of 12 weeks severance pay with no cap in the event of layoffs, successorship language that allows workers to receive full severance if their employment is terminated in the event of a sale or within 30 days of working with the new entity, the establishment of a policy on the use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) within 12 months, a gender-neutral increase in parental leave, WPATH standard of care in health benefits, and increased guaranteed holidays. Read more here.

From the Chicago Teachers Union:

It is day three of a strike for the schools students deserve at Instituto del Progreso Latino. Progress at the bargaining table has come at a snail’s pace. This strike was completely avoidable by the charter school operator, but regrettably Instituto’s school leaders and board of directors have failed to put the interests the community they committed to serve first.

Educators took a stand to make sure Instituto del Progreso Latino fulfills its mission to provide immigrant students an education. Currently, the school has 10 vacancies in core subject areas, zero special education teachers, and lacks bilingual education services. It took 2 years for Instituto’s management to reach an agreement with the union on sanctuary protections for students and staff. Management can do the right thing and agree to a staffing and compensation package that will recruit and retain educators, provide needed student services and stabilize our schools. Read more here.

From the Culinary Workers union in Las Vegas:

The union has announced a nuber of impressive victories in Las Vegas and more are coming. Sunday the union annpounced that "The Culinary Union is pleased to announce that a tentative agreement on a new 5-year contract was just reached with the Downtown Grand Hotel & Casino for nearly 200 hospitality workers and we congratulate workers on winning the best contract ever." Follow the union's progress here.

UFCW Local 3000 has more good news. The Local recently announced a "Hard Fought Wins After Historic 9-Day ULP Strike and Consumer Boycott Campaign that followed a historic 3 day ULP strike over Black Friday Weekend" at Macy's. 

IATSE won a great victory in British Columbia and voluntary union recognition at Minneapolis’ Children’s Theatre Company.

Building trades workers in San Diego won a big victory when the City Council there unanimously passed a blanket project labor agreement (PLA) last week.

The Communications Workers of America UPTE-CWA Local 9119 optometrists who work at the University of California (UC) walked off the job this week in response to unfair labor practices by the university and "(O)ver 200 members of the NewsGuild-CWA, working for Tribune Publishing, staged a one-day walkout last week to protest the company’s refusal to pay journalists, designers and editors a fair wage and management’s threat to take away the 401(k) match benefit. Workers from the Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Virginian-Pilot, Morning Call, Suburban Chicago Tribune, Design and Production Studios, and Tribune Content Agency participated in the walkout—the single largest coordinated action journalists at the company have taken against Alden Global Capital since the hedge fund purchased Tribune Publishing in 2021." 

Photo from The NewsGuild

And we're watching: The IATSE and the Hollywood Basic Crafts, which includes Teamsters Local 399, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 40 (IBEW), Laborers International Union of North America Local 724 (LiUNA!), United Association Plumbers Local 78 (UA) and Operating Plasterers & Cement Masons International Association (OPCMIA) Local 755, have announced that they will be jointly bargaining their shared Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plan proposals in the 2024 bargaining cycle with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Studios (AMPTP). See this. IATSE is following negotians between the American Federation of Musicians and the AMPTP and has declared support for the Musicians.

Move The Grocery, Farm, and Food Worker Stabilization Act In Oregon---And Let's Get To An Industrial Policy & A Green New Deal

The AFL-CIO posted the following press release today. If I am reading this correctly, and if  the proposal is as it is is described, this will be a great help to food supply chain workers here in Oregon, and would particularly help people here in the Mid-Willamette Valley. A press release from Senator Sherrod Brown's office says that "In 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) created the Farm and Food Workers Relief (FFWR) Grant Program to help farm, grocery, and meatpacking workers with pandemic-related health and safety costs. The first of its kind, the FFWR Grant Program distributed nearly $680 million in competitive grant funding to meat processing, grocery store, and farm workers for expenses incurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, FFWR was a one-time grant program. This legislation would make a similar program permanently available during disasters, including natural disasters."

I hope that unions, consumer groups, and progressive organizations here in Oregon get behind this proposal and push hard for it. We need this. Reports from the Oregon Food Bank and the Oregon Center for Public Policy talk about hunger in Oregon and how difficult it is for food banks to keep up with the needs of the people. 

That said, I am also concerned that we have a pro-labor President who is fighting an uphill battle, justifiable worries about inflation, and simple corporate greed pushing up prices and pulling back on services---and we have no industrial policy, no unitary plan in place to rein in wild profiteering and make the necessities of life like housing and healthcare and food and education and public safety affordable. We're talking about human rights here, not luxuries. I'll grant that the economic picture is mixed at the current moment (see here and here and here) but working-class people are still running from crisis to crisis and we're not feeling the impact of the good news that is out there regarding overall wage gains and slowing inflation. The reports mentioned above are real talk. This is having a negative impact on the Democrats and is making it harder to win legislative victories that benefit working-class people in the first place.

We need a forward-looking plan that gets us to well-paying union jobs in a green economy and that builds in equality and equity, housing, healthcare, food, education and public safety as undeniable human rights. As I see it, the present debate over industrial policy is being held captive by the far-right and the enemies of organized labor. We need to recapture that debate and own it. I believe that we would be in a much better place if we were debating how to best implement a national economic plan or policy that represented working-class needs than trying to affect discreet sectors of the economy one by one. And that said, let's get The Grocery, Farm, and Food Worker Stabilization Act passed!    

Here is the AFL-CIO press release:

The Grocery, Farm, and Food Worker Stabilization Act, proposed early last week by Sens. Sherrod Brown and Kirsten Gillibrand, and Rep. Nikki Budzinski, aims to provide support to food supply chain workers during emergencies like natural disasters. The legislation, if passed, would establish a permanent grant program and authorize the appropriation of $50 million to help cover disaster-related health and safety costs for front-line workers critical in efforts to keep food on tables across the country.

During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, grocery and meatpacking workers—many represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)—were absolutely essential to keeping the rest of the country fed, just like they do when hurricanes and snowstorms strike. UFCW International President Marc Perrone applauded the bill and said in a press release that this dedicated fund would “provide critical funding for essential work during times of crisis and strengthen America’s food supply chain over the long run.”

Another reason to enjoy Ben & Jerry's!

 

Some unions have joined incarcerated workers and local community partners in demanding justice. Let's all do it.

Certain unions took a huge step yesterday and I hope that more unions and the AFL-CIO will follow their lead and undertake similar initiatives in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

The AFL-CIO has announced that "(O)n Tuesday, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union-UFCW (RWDSU-UFCW) and the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), who are members of SEIU, joined incarcerated workers and local community partners to file a class-action lawsuit in response to the systemic exploitation and forced labor of Alabama’s incarcerated population. The suit, strongly supported by the AFL-CIO, outlines how the Alabama Department of Corrections denies Black Alabamians parole at twice the rate of their White counterparts in order to maintain a cheap labor force through wrongful detention. And though Black Alabamians are only a quarter of the state’s residents, they make up over 50% of the incarcerated population."

The AFL-CIO announcement went on to say that "Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and state Attorney General Steve Marshall are named as defendants in the lawsuit and are accused of acting as knowing architects of a “modern-day form of slavery” scheme that generates $450 million annually for the state, all on the backs of unpaid incarcerated workers. In a virtual press conference, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond said, 'Fighting to abolish forced labor is a priority for the AFL-CIO and the American labor movement. And we won’t rest until this corrupt, immoral scheme ends for good.'"

For generations the AFL-CIO and most of mainstream labor has supported the construction of more prisons, even when construction was not viable and exploited prisoners and their families and the communities the prisons were built in. We have tended to look at jails, prisons and other forms of incarceration only through the eyes of corrections and probation officers, construction workers who want the work building prisons and and jails, sometimes as part of our fight against privatization. We have not analyzed or come to grips with some other realities.

The incarcerated are mostly working-class people. Their numbers include many union members who were putting in a full day of work but still living from paycheck to paycheck and trying to get by in a system in which the odds are stacked against them. We have union members who are houseless, members who are veterans who face certain risks that others do not face and a lack of social supports to help them, Black members who are more likely than whites to be singled out for scrutiny and harassment by the police and others, many young members who come from cultures that are at odds with law enforcement, and many members who have been hurt on the job and who have been prescribed painkillers and have become addicted and who self-medicate. All of these union siblings can end up in jails or prisons quite easily.

The numbers of the incarcerated are growing, their plight and the exploitation they experience is getting worse, these are working-class people, there is a disproportionate effect here on communities of color, and mass incarceration and exploitation and racism work against building a strong labor movement.

Many unions have connections to service programs for our union siblings before they end up in jails or prisons or psych wards, and these program do great work, but I am not aware of any unions using our resources to defend or support our members while they are incarcerated or support their families. The question of the civil rights of the incarcerated does not touch our unions in positive ways. We took a big step a few years ago when a few building trades unions began helping some incarcerated union siblings be apprenticeship-ready when leaving prison. For that matter, when we are a part of CTEC and other programs in the schools we are building a school-to-union or school-to-democracy pipeline and not aiding and abetting the school-to-prison pipeline so many young people get stuck in. All of those programs are potentially part of a map for us.

If the announcement above is accurate, and if Labor doesn't drop the ball, a great step is being taken here, and one that we should build on and link to our good programs that help some of the incarcerated enter apprenticeships and that aid our members before they end up in the prison pipeline. We need one unified approach that helps everyone more forward.

Image taken from a report by Mansa Musa that appeared on The Real News

 Network on September 5, 2022.

(These are not the opinions of the Marion-Polk-Yamhill Central Labor Chapter or the Oregon AFL-CIO.)