Labor coalition ends partnership program with City of Portland

Praised a year ago by all parties, the City of Portland's citywide partnership with organized labor - known as the Service Improvement Initiative - is now all but kaput.

On Sept. 27, in response to what they describe as a pattern of slights and affronts from management, the five unions taking part pulled out of the partnership. Unions involved were Local 189 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; Electrical Workers Local 48; Laborers Local 483, Portland Fire Fighters Local 43; and the City of Portland Professional Employees Association. The unions represent more than 2,000 city employees.

The Service Improvement Initiative was supposed to create committees composed of managers and front-line workers who would come up with ideas to cut costs and improve services.

On June 30, 1999 the Portland City Council endorsed the plan, committing each commissioner to involve at least one bureau in the initiative.

Some frontline worker-level joint committees will continue, particularly at agencies such as the Water Bureau, where such committees have existed for years. But the top-level partnership between union heads and bureau chiefs is defunct, owing to union misgivings about a city lawsuit against the Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) and a seven-bureau merger, centralization and budget cut plan about which the unions were not consulted.

"The DCTU [District Council of Trade Unions] felt the city's commitment to the Service Improvement Initiative has kind of wavered," said Jim McEchron, head of Municipal Employees Local 483, a division of the Laborers Union.

The relationship between the union heads and the city was already straining, as evidenced by the falloff of council "informals," informal meetings attended by the bureau heads, the city commissioners, and union leaders. The informals were supposed to take place quarterly, but two quarters passed without one, and council members weren't returning calls, McEchron said.

Then, after having refused its union employees more than a 1.1 percent cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in the 1999 contract negotiations, the city gave its 1,100 non-union employees a 3.7 COLA in July 2000.

The city also joined other cities and counties in a lawsuit to change the way earnings are dispersed within PERS: the local governments want to use PERS' higher-than-expected stock gains to offset their pension contributions over the long term.

Still, the unions' biggest gripe was the recent centralization of administrative services.

In May, the city created a new bureau - the Office of Finance and Administration - and folded into it the bureaus of General Services, Purchasing, and Finance, as well as human resources staff from all bureaus. To head the new bureau, Administrator Tim Grewe was hired at $113,485 a year, with the assignment of monitoring administrative costs and cutting them 10 percent in two years. Grewe has become a de facto city manager, reporting to the council as a whole rather than to an individual commissioner.

After announcing this decision to merge bureaus and institute cuts, McEchron recalls, the city invited union leaders to "review and comment."

"We spent four years in this process trying to get past that," McEchron said.

Union officials believe the City Council is seeking the cuts in order to fund pet projects, such as a trolley line and capping I-405. The city is sitting on substantial reserves, union leaders say.

The scrapped partnership comes just months before bargaining is set to begin on a new contract. The current contract between the city and the DCTU expires June 2001.

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