Portland wage subsidy at PGE Park rankles DCTU


It's right that workers at Portland's newly-renovated baseball stadium, PGE Park, should earn a living wage, say union leaders at the City of Portland. But the money should have come from the city's stadium business partner Portland Family Entertainment (PFE), not the city treasury.

"We support of course any worker getting paid a decent wage," said Yvonne Martinez, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Oregon Council 75 representative and head of the District Council of Trade Unions (DCTU), which bargains contracts with the city of Portland, "but it shows where their priorities are when you look at the kind of money they're willing to spend on the stadium, the Convention Center, the trolley, the Chinese Garden, the Esplanade, but not on their own workers."

Portland City Council voted 4-1 April 25 to subsidize the wages of the stadium's 300 to 500 janitors, ticketsellers and concessionaires to bring them up to $9.50 an hour from the $6.50 or $7.50 they would otherwise have made. The wage subsidy will cost the city as much as $270,000 a year - money from the city's stadium proceeds that could have funded other public purposes.

Martinez and Laborers Local 483 Business Manager Jim McEchron said some of the city's own employees, including seasonal workers classed as "recreation leaders" in the Parks Bureau, continue to make Oregon's legal minimum wage of $6.50 an hour.

And in current negotiations with the four unions that make up the DCTU, the city is calling for workers to give up previous gains on seniority and work rules, provisions for contracting out, and out-of-pocket medical expenses. Union contracts covering the city workers represented by the DCTU expire June 30.

This difference - between the city's public posture of supporting a living wage and its private stance of hardball negotiations with its own workers - has union members riled.

Joe Rastetter, a former ballbark concession worker who was active in the Jobs With Justice campaign to raise wages there, argued that the city should have gotten its partner PFE to commit to its Fair Wage Ordinance two years ago when the stadium management deal was being negotiated.

Under that deal, the city-owned stadium was renovated with $5.5 million in PFE money and $33 million in city money from a bond measure. The city then gets a cut of ticket sales and other stadium proceeds, for an expected $2 million to $3 million a year. The money the city committed for stadium worker raises will come from those proceeds.

Since the proceeds also must repay the city's bond measure and pay for a number of parking and transit mitigation plans, city spectator facilities manager John Acker doesn't expect the city to make any real money on the deal.

Meanwhile, stadium watchers see the deal as enormously lucrative for PFE, given the prices of tickets and concessions, revenue from advertising, $8 million from PGE for naming rights (it used to be Civic Stadium), and the $40,000 to $60,000 a year companies are paying for luxury suites at the stadium.

And, for those PFE workers who accept the city-subsidized wage increase, the company rescinded its fringe benefit of a hot dog dinner and two game tickets for each shift worked. In disgust, Rastetter has taken to calling the stadium "Piggy Park."

"I'm glad they're going to pay the stadium people decently," said McEchron, "but I think the expectation was they were going to tell the employer to pay them. Instead, we're going to subsidize them. If that's their position, I would also expect the city to pay its own people commensurate wages."


May 18, 2001 issue

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