2017 Scrooge of the Year Party

Our deepest gratitude to all those who came out and helped make the 2017 Scrooge of the Year Award Party one of the best holiday parties we’ve had in a long time.

Every holiday season Portland Jobs with Justice comes together to celebrate our community, and to vote for the winner of the not-so-coveted annual Scrooge of the Year Award.

This award is voted on by the community (that’s you!) and is given each year to a boss, a politician, a corporation, or some other deserving institution that has been particularly nasty in the past year.

This year’s winner, and not by a small margin, was Senator Rod Monroe, for being a landlord Democrat who took lobby money from other landlords and then killed renters’ rights legislation during the 2017 Oregon state legislative session.

In addition to almost single-handedly killing tenant rights legislation, Rod Monroe is being sued by one of his tenants for discrimination and for physical injuries resulting from his negligence and failure to make repairs at his rental property.

Tenants and other members of the JwJ community held a rally and attempted to deliver the award to Senator Monroe, but as usual he was nowhere to be found and tenants were once again left #WaitingforMonroe.

In alphabetical order, the nominees for JwJ’s 2017 Scrooge of the Year Award were:
1) AT&T Mobility, for stalling on contract bargaining and negotiating with workers in bad faith for over a year.
2) Freedom Foundation, for pushing anti-worker legislation, and for attacking and harassing local union members.
3) Kay Toran, CEO of Volunteers of America, for paying workers poverty wages while earning over $200k per year, and for refusing to come to the table and negotiate with the newly formed workers’ union.
4) Mondelez-Nabisco, for outsourcing factory jobs to countries with more lenient labor laws where they can avoid union labor and increasingly exploit workers around the world for greater profits.
5) Senator Rod Monroe, for being a landlord Democrat who took landlord lobby money and then effectively killed all renters’ rights legislation during the 2017 Oregon state legislative session.
6) Tom Mears, Chairman of Burgerville Parent Company, The Holland Inc., for being the master of Burgerville’s year and half long anti-union campaign and retaliation against workers for organizing.