Kulongoski appoints Hallock a senior policy adviser


Governor-elect Ted Kulongoski has appointed Margaret Hallock as a senior policy adviser on his staff.

Hallock is a former director of the Labor Education and Research Center of the University of Oregon and and a former economist with Service Employees Local 503, Oregon Public Employees Union.

Hallock will advise the governor on major policy initiatives including labor, economic development and human services. She is currently the director of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon.

She earned her undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Southern California and her master's and Ph.D. in economics from Claremont Graduate School.

"She'll have a high profile in my administration. She will bring the voice of labor to me," Kulongoski said at a luncheon Dec. 13 hosted by the Oregon AFL-CIO Executive Board.

Kulongoski said he's known Hallock for more than 30 years and remembers the days when she invited him to speak at her economics classes at UofO.

"She's as energized about this as I am," Kulongoski said.

The Democratic governor-elect told the state labor federation that economic development will be at the top of his agenda for the next four years.

"Providing jobs for Oregonians is the issue," he said.

The former attorney general and Supreme Court justice wants to expand bonding authority to repair roads and bridges "so that we can quickly stimulate business activity and create new family wage jobs" and provide more "shovel-ready" land for industrial development.

"If we can't provide jobs, we'll never have the resources we need (to fund programs)," he said. On Dec. 9, about 1,200 state leaders gathered in Portland for an "economic summit."

Their view of the state's economy and their prescriptions for Oregon's future, said the Oregon AFL-CIO, seemed focused on the top of the economic pyramid - at entrepreneurs, investors and high-paid "knowledge workers," with little attention paid to the vast majority of the workers in professional, technical and service jobs, who comprise 85 percent of Oregon's workforce.

Worse, their proposal for solving the fiscal crisis in Oregon's new economy was the old-fashioned idea of a retail sales tax, the state labor federation said in its Weekly Update.

The conference, organized by the Oregon Business Council (OBC), heard an analysis of Oregon's economy in the new age of globalization from economist Joe Cortright, who echoed labor's call for high-skill, high-wage economic development policies when he described "a choice between two futures:"

"An Oregon defined by thriving businesses that lead their industries in ideas, innovation and design, market reach and staying power�(with) well paying jobs that resist migration and sustain local economies and communities" or an Oregon that "becomes strictly a regional consumer market and a branch-office outpost for industries �(and) a commodity producer whose industries pay average or low wages and are always vulnerable to cheaper sources of labor and supply elsewhere."

Oregon AFL-CIO President Tim Nesbitt send there is common ground to be found on a number of OBC proposals, including support for an increase in vehicle registration fees and gas taxes to fund much-needed repairs to roads and bridges, and a more aggressive and creative "Brand Oregon" program to promote Oregon products.


December 20, 2002 issue

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