Portland Jobs with Justice

The most wonderful time of the year is right around the corner. That’s right, Portland Jobs With Justice SCROOGE OF THE YEAR IS BACK! Click here for tickets!

Every holiday season Portland JwJ comes together to celebrate our community, and to bestow this not-so-coveted award. This award is given to a boss, politician, corporation, or some other deserving institution that has been particularly Scroogey over the past year.

Congratulations to our 3 Scrooge of the Year FINALISTS!

• I.A.T.S.E. Local 28 nominated METRO for contracting out their AV workers.
• AFT-Oregon nominated Portland State University Administration.
• OFNHP nominated Mary Mongrain from Peacehealth Southwest.

On Thursday, December 8th at 6:30pm at Taborspace we will vote for one of these bosses to be named Portland’s Scrooge of Year.

Our 3 finalists will write and perform a 7-10 minute entertaining skit demonstrating why we should vote for their nominee. Then we all vote for our favorite/most hated Scrooge.
As we know, votes cost money. So, the nominee who sells the most votes wins the award!
Votes are the tickets to the party. Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Each ticket sold is worth 20 votes to put toward your Scrooge nominee. Participants can make additional donations to get more votes for your nominee. More money, more votes!

Share the link below and event flyer with any and everyone!
Ticket donation link: https://bit.ly/3zYTW2z

Thank you to everyone who attended, donated, volunteered, and worked the JwJ Annual Dinner on Thursday, October 6th! It was an amazing and powerful evening, and we couldn’t have done it without you!

Huge shout out to the fantastic band, Lorna Baxter Trio – proud members of American Federation of Musicians Local 99, and the talented A/V team at People’s AV & I.A.T.S.E. Local 28.

If you couldn’t make the event but want to donate to the cause, click here for a direct donation site.

Thank you again and see you soon!!

In case you missed it, tickets for the dinner are officially SOLD OUT at capacity! Thank you! We’re overwhelmed by your support!

If you wish to be added to the waitlist for tickets, please send a message to Amanda@jwjpdx.org! We will let you know as soon as tickets become available. If your organization will not be filling all of your reserved seats, and would like to donate tickets back to the pool so that low wage, unemployed or striking workers can attend, please also contact Amanda!

We look forward to celebrating our movement’s 30th Year and recognizing local leaders in Portland and our special guests from Staten Island, ALU’s Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer! Their efforts to create change at Amazon, one of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations, have been nothing short of historic!

If you’d like to support us but can’t attend the event, a donation to our silent auction, wine table, or financial contribution would be welcome! On behalf of everyone at Portland Jobs with Justice “J with J,” your support makes our work possible, your fight is our fight, and thank you!

Portland Jobs with Justice Annual Dinner is back. We are thrilled to announce the return of this event along with our keynote speakers, Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls and Chair of Organizing Derrick Palmer! RSVP by Thursday, September 22nd. Seating is limited to 248 attendees. If your organization is interested in purchasing a table but unable to fill all the seats, please consider sharing your table by donating those seats to our scholarship fund.

Please use our Action Network payment link or contact Amanda – amanda@jwjpdx.org- for a digital copy of the sponsorship packet and for any other questions.

Can you help make it a success? JWJ is seeking in-kind donations of art, theatre tickets, and gift certificates for our evening’s silent auction, and wine for the wine wall! Donations can be by the bottle, any varietal, and any price range.

We are looking forward to coming together in solidarity October 6th. Click Here to Secure Your Seats!

On Tuesday, July 26th, on the Postal Service’s 247th birthday, JWJ called for investments in career Postal jobs, as good jobs = great service. Postal workers, and community, united, also called to fulfill the vision of postal unions: that the Postal Service be a vital hub for community services, with delivery powered by union-made electric vehicles!

Rev. David Wheeler of JWJ’s Faith Labor Committee gave a strong opening. It was inviting and humorous, citing real life experience many communities, especially rural, share. The postal service is a hub for public life! Twitter thread.

Video and excerpt below:

Excerpt of Rev. David Wheeler’s speech to Postal Workers.

“Efficiency is having workers who know what they’re doing, have a long tenure on their jobs, and who care about those jobs.”

(Audible “Amen” from the crowd!)

“I’m a Baptist and that’s a dirty word in a lot of places of our culture now, because that’s a word associated with the religious right and reactionary forces. But I’m a Martin Luther King Jr Baptist. I’m a Rep. John Lewis Good Trouble Baptist. I’m a follower of Jesus when he made Good Trouble on Earth, and his most faithful disciples continue to make Good Trouble. He talked about a vein of God that was Shalom and Respect.

When we support Workers Rights, we support the Divine Reign of Shalom. Here’s why that’s important. Sometimes bad ideas, misguided people, just plain bad people seem to have all the power. Sometimes our struggles for justice, for caring, for opportunity, for fairness, seem futile. But as MLK Jr said a long time ago, “the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice. We are not perfect but we are on the right side. I want you, I want us, to be encouraged. I want you to know that in the long run, that one step at a time, one rally at a time, one contract negotiation at a time, one conversation with supervisors at a time. Step by step by step in the long run we are on the right side. Be of good courage. I’m fascinated that this is a birthday celebration. We celebrated the birthday of our poor, fractured, threatened, union called the United States of America 246th birthday just a few weeks ago. but the USPS, going all the way back to the initiative of Benjamin Franklin is 247 years old. And from what I understand, 247 years later, Benjamin Franklin is going to put in an appearance today. Man am I stoked about that. But these things can happen. Once at First Baptist church downtown, we had a live debate between Martin Luther and the Pope. So I know these things can happen. What do we look for in a US Postal Service? Yes we look for efficiencies if they’re fair. Yes we look for good equipment and we want to keep it and enhance it rather than mothball it. Yes we want good transportation. We want American made electric vehicles instead of gas guzzlers. We look for efficiencies, we aren’t immune to business sense. But first and last and foremost, the United States Postal Service is Service. My parents grew up in a couple small towns in KY 8 miles apart. The post office was the hub of the community. We know that’s still the case in places in rural Oregon, but it could be so much more. Not only a place to meet. A place to pick up your mail. A place to do your banking. A place to access social services. These initiatives which are part of what the postal unions want are further steps toward the Shalom of God. I grew up in a city, Kentucky, Louisville. My neighborhood post office is a place where folks met. It was a service to the community and that is what we want, .And in the long run, step by step by step, we are on the right side. And we shall prevail. Thank you very much God Bless You all!”

Hot weather is here, and here is what you need to know! New rules in Oregon are now in effect to protect workers, including the right to more breaks, water, and shade!

Know your rights! Go here for information:
https://osha.oregon.gov/workers/Pages/Worker-rights-and-responsibilities.aspx

After a year and a half of rulemaking, collaboration, and advocacy by workers and environmental, health, small business, and labor activists, the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) adopted and published permanent rules to protect Oregon’s frontline workers from the increasingly frequent and extreme conditions being driven by climate change today. 

They are the strongest of their kind in the nation! Let’s break it down:

The Good:

Access to shade, cool drinking water, and increased paid breaks at 80F and 90F. 

Additional high heat protections at 90F, which include a buddy system, increased communication between employers, supervisors, and employees, and a requirement for employers to measure heat and humidity levels in indoor structures.

Employers must provide annual training, an acclimatization plan, heat illness prevention plan, and emergency medical plan. 

Employers to provide emergency N95 respirators for voluntary use at 101 AQI (“unhealthy for sensitive groups.”)

Feasible administrative or engineering controls be implemented at the workplace to reduce the level of smoke to below 101 AQI (“unhealthy for sensitive groups.”) (e.g. changing work locations, using HVAC system to filter smoke.) 

Mandatory respirator use at 251 AQI. A complete respiratory protection program is required at 500 AQI (“hazardous”)

The Bad:

The tiered rest/work schedules in high heat are confusing, hard to implement, and give employers too much discretion on when workers can rest. The rules provide three charts / choices which could potentially lead to difficulty in enforcement, and to workers knowing their rights.

The weakest of the tiered rest/work schedules does not consider whether a worker is exposed to direct sun.  

The heat protections in labor housing remain incomplete, and OR OSHA plans to fully address these protections in another separate rulemaking.

How workers voices made the difference:

Dozens of people provided testimony and hundreds of public comments were delivered asking OSHA to protect people from climate change. See the joint press release here.

Climate Jobs/Jobs with Justice helped broaden the scope, helped organize unions to weigh in during OSHA’s rulemaking process. Many union leaders signed on to extensive letters directed to OSHA from the stakeholder coalition detailing workers needs, what needed to be changed in the various OSHA drafts. 

Bus drivers in the ATU, warehouse workers in the Teamsters, hazardous waste facility workers in AFSCME, cooks in Doughnut Workers United, Letter Carriers, workers from IATSE, and more testified to OSHA before and during the public comment period. This testimony from workers was absolutely critical in getting improvements in the draft rules. A number of workers also submitted letters to the editor of Portland and Salem newspapers and a number were published.

These final rules were truly a team effort between JWJ, JWJ’s Climate Jobs and partners PCUN, Northwest Workers Justice Project, Oregon Environmental Council, Main Street Alliance, Oregon Law Center, Oregon AFL-CIO, and all of the workers who weighed in!