Please join OFNHP on Thursday, August 7 th at 6PM at Terry Schrunk Plaza in downtown Portland as we rally behind our 4,000 members who are currently bargaining with Kaiser Permanente! This event coincides with the national bargaining of the Alliance of Health Care Unions being held just a few blocks away, where our leadership will be fighting for a contract that represents not just OFNHP, but over 60,000 union members at Kaiser locations all across the country.   In recent years, our members’ wages have fallen far below the industry standard, further contributing to the healthcare staffing crisis in our workplaces and leaving our members struggling to make ends meet. We’re fighting for a contract that demands safe staffing levels in all areas of care, protection against the cuts to patient care access, and respectable wages that protects the future of our workforce for years to come. “This fight is about patient safety, about dignity on the job, and about ensuring the people who provide care can afford to care for themselves and their families,” said Sarina Roher, President of OFNHP . “Our communities deserve better, and it’s going to take all of us — healthcare workers, unions, and community members — standing together to make it happen.”   We are also sponsoring a Blood Drive at our union hall on Friday, August 8 th from 12-5PM as an excellent end to our week of action! Please see the information below on how to get signed up for a time.   We hope to see you and your members on Thursday, August 7 th at 6PM!     In Solidarity, Hannah Winchester, DPT Political and Community Organizer Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (503) 791-9422

Are you crafty?  Do you have an artsy side hustle? Are you a maker? Is your garden overflowing?     If so, the NW Oregon Labor Council would love to host you at our 2025 Labor Day Picnic, returning this year to Oaks Park for our 125th anniversary as a Central Labor Council.  Last year, we experimented with a craft fair concept, and it was wildly popular, so now we will make it a regular feature of our celebration. Anything you’d like to sell in our crafts fair and farmer’s market feature will be welcome.  Our booth fee is $100 and we do not  require a percentage of sales.   This year’s Labor Day Picnic will take place Monday, September 1st (11 am to 4 pm).   If you are interested or know someone who may be, please pass the word and let us know.  Call (503) 235-9444 for more information or, to secure your booth, use this link:  https://www.zeffy.com/ticketing/2025-labor-day-picnic-and-craft-fair .   As usual, we will be hosting a picnic lunch for $20 (pre-ordering by August 15 is required) as well as live music and the introduction of all pro-labor public officials and candidates.

NO CUTS TO MEDICAID!!!!! Please call your Reps TODAY using this link:     o    https://act.aflcio.org/call_campaigns/call-no-cuts-to-medicaid/ All federated bodies need to overwhelm the phones – share out the info far and wide.  Flier is attached to share. In Solidarity!

Trump Is Following the Project 2025 Playbook to Destroy Workers’ Rights The massive curbs on workers’ rights that have occurred during the first month of the Trump administration signal it’s likely that plenty more will follow during his tenure in office. Lawrence Wittner Feb 23, 2025 Common Dreams 14 Only a month into his second term as president, Donald Trump is well underway toward destroying crucial rights of American workers. Currently, the best known of these threatened rights is probably job security, for the sudden onset of Trump’s mass, indiscriminate firing of more than 200,000 federal government workers has sparked a furor. Employed by the Departments of Education and Veterans Affairs, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Forest Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other vital U.S. agencies, these workers appear to have been simply tossed out of their jobs without honoring the legal requirement of due process, including performance-based evaluations. Trump claimed that the mass firings were necessary to save money and make the government more efficient. But the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley, retorted that the firings were really “about power,” with Trump “gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence.” Thus, if Project 2025 does serve as a guide to Trump administration policies toward workers’ rights, we should expect Trump’s future implementation of Project 2025’s recommendations for remarkably severe federal government measures against workers and their unions. In addition, on January 31, Trump announced plans to nullify contracts recently negotiated and signed with the labor unions representing federal workers. Justifying this action, the president said that the contracts had been negotiated by former President Joe Biden “to harm my administration.” Trump selected an appropriate figure to undermine workers’ rights when he appointed Elon Musk as the head of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency . Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and Trump’s largest campaign contributor, was well known as rabidly anti-labor , and had repeatedly clashed with workers at the giant companies he owned, among them Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter). Indeed, by January 2025, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had 24 open investigations into labor law violations by these three firms, including alleged surveillance of employees at Twitter and interference with union organizing at Tesla. In turn, a day after the NLRB accused Musk’s SpaceX company of retaliating against workers who had dared to criticize his employment practices, SpaceX filed a lawsuit to have the NLRB, established by Congress in 1935, declared unconstitutional and terminated. Not surprisingly, Trump moved quickly to paralyze the activities of the NLRB, a federal agency created to guarantee American workers’ right to union representation. By firing the acting NLRB chair , Gwynne Wilcox, long before her term of office ended in 2026, Trump not only acted illegally, but left the NLRB without the quorum necessary to operate, thus shutting it down. “We’re fighting that tooth and nail,” declared AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler . The firing of Wilcox “did exactly what Trump wanted to do, which was to stymie the one agency that workers rely on when they’re in an organizing drive and taking risks and getting fired. They no longer have the board they need to protect them.” As part of the same attack upon the NLRB, Trump fired Jennifer Abruzzo , the agency’s general counsel, and replaced her with a Republican loyalist. During her tenure, Abruzzo had issued a series of memos that prohibited common anti-labor practices by corporations. These memos banned abusive electronic monitoring and surveillance of workers on the job, captive audience meetings (in which workers were forced to listen to anti-union pep talks), and severance agreements with overly broad non-disparagement and confidentiality sections (which prevented former workers from discussing workplace issues). These pro-worker directives and more were quickly reversed by her Republican successor at the NLRB. The Trump administration also launched a devastating assault on another federal agency established to safeguard workers’ rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to bar workplace discrimination, the EEOC, too, lost the ability to continue operations when Trump quickly fired two of its commissioners. An administration official maintained that the two dismissed EEOC commissioners were “far-left appointees with radical records.” These challenges to the independence and functioning of both agencies are quite extraordinary . The presidential removal of an NLRB board member and of two EEOC commissioners is unprecedented, for none have ever been fired before in the long histories of both agencies. Moreover, by congressional statute, these are independent federal entities, ostensibly shielded from presidential interference. And now, thanks to this interference, they are unable to operate. As these and other curbs on workers’ rights have all occurred during the first month of the Trump administration, it’s likely that plenty more will follow during his tenure in office. And there are numerous indications that that they will. After all, the playbook for much of what the Trump administration has done so far―such as its mass firing of federal workers―is Project 2025 , the Heritage Foundation-developed blueprint for Trump’s second term, and one of its key architects is Russell Vought , appointed by Trump as the new White House budget director. As an Associated Press dispatch notes, this office is “one of the most influential positions in the federal government,” acting “as a nerve center for the White House, developing its budget, policy priorities, and agency rule-making.” Thus, if Project 2025 does serve as a guide to Trump administration policies toward workers’ rights, we should expect Trump’s future implementation of Project 2025’s recommendations for remarkably severe federal government measures against workers and their unions. These include banning public employee unions, as well as empowering the states to ban private sector unions and ignore federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor laws. All told, these developments are forcing American workers to address the old union question: “Which Side Are You On?” .

Today, the AFL-CIO has launched the   Department of People Who Work for a Living (DPWL) , a new campaign to hold Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, accountable and make sure the federal government is responsive to working people and not just to the whims of an unelected CEO like Musk.   In today’s New York Times , reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan note that  “The AFL-CIO campaign is one of the first organized efforts by unions to focus on the people affected by the work force cuts that the Trump administration is proposing. The labor group aims to highlight what Mr. Musk’s department is doing, arguing that its actions — which are opaque and accountable only to Mr. Trump — are potentially dangerous to the public depending on the jobs in question. The group is also seeking to highlight the chasm between Mr. Musk’s wealth and that of the people he has urged to move on from federal jobs.”   “The government can work for billionaires or it can work for working people—but not both,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “Elon is just getting started. And he has already tried to force workers doing essential services—including at the FAA and air traffic controllers even after the tragedy at Washington National Airport—to retire, gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment system with everyone’s private data, and is declaring entire government agencies like USAID shut down and blocking workers from accessing the building and their email. We will hold DOGE and Elon Musk accountable because we are certain that the people who keep our food and medicine safe know more about how to make government efficient than an outsider whose companies benefit from the very agencies he is infiltrating.”   Read the full statement from the AFL-CIO here .     Join the Campaign! Follow DPWL

Oregon Union Membership Growth Third Highest in Nation in 2024 January 29, 2025 | Oregon AFL-CIO “Oregon unions continue to grow despite opposition from employers and their hired union busters along with broken labor laws that don’t reflect the needs of a modern workforce,” said Graham Trainor, Oregon AFL-CIO President. “At the heart of any increase in membership are workers and the absolute courage and tenacity it takes to stand together and call for change on the job.  For some, it’s the need for safer working conditions.  For others, it’s about being compensated fairly.  And for all, it’s about ensuring the dignity and respect at work that we all deserve regardless of who we are or where we work. From healthcare to behavioral health to retail to manufacturing, the Oregon Labor Movement is growing and each new member adds a new voice and new strength to our efforts to build a truly fair and just economy for all.”    Trump's Firing of Labor Officials Shows He 'Could Not Care Less About Rights of Workers' January 29, 2025 | Common Dreams AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler warned in a statement Tuesday that Trump's firing of Wilcox—who, under federal law, cannot be fired on political grounds—"is illegal and will have immediate consequences for working people." "By leaving only two board members in their posts, the president has effectively shut down the National Labor Relations Board's operations, leaving the workers it defends on their own in the face of union-busting and retaliation," said Shuler. "Alongside the firing of NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, these moves will make it easier for bosses to violate the law and trample on workers' legal rights on the job and fundamental freedom to organize."   Lawmakers Will Consider Unemployment Benefits for Striking Workers January 26, 2025 | Willamette Week  Graham Trainor, the Oregon AFL-CIO President says the bill would make labor negotiations more balanced. “Striking workers and their families should not be pushed into poverty for exercising their legally protected right to strike,” Trainor said. “This policy would help level the playing field for workers, put money back into the local economy by giving workers the ability to continue to feed their families during a strike, and will expedite negotiations with employers. When you ask workers why they go out on strike, they will tell you their hands are forced: workers strike because they have to—for economic, safety and community reasons—not because they want to.”   16 million workers were unionized in 2024 January 28, 2025 | Economic Policy Institute Interest in union organizing is surging in the United States. Since 2021, petitions for union elections at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have more than doubled. And public support for unions is near 60-year highs—at 70%. This growing momentum around union organizing—aided by the Biden administration’s support for worker organizing and appointment of strong worker advocates in critical agencies like NLRB—signals a powerful push by workers to improve wages, working conditions, and workplace rights. But despite this groundswell of support, new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveal a puzzling trend: Unionization rates continue to decline.