Parry Center won’t budge on wage hikes

After five months of working without a union contract, about 100 workers went on strike Nov. 29 at the Parry Center for Children, 3415 SE Powell Blvd., in Portland.

Wages were the number-one issue: Most workers in the unit make around $9 an hour, and management is insisting on a wage freeze.

Parry Center is a 24-hour psychiatric residential treatment facility, an alternative to psychiatric hospitalization for children ages 5 through 12 who suffer from schizophrenia, severe depression, anxiety and bipolar disorders. Workers there joined Service Employees International Union Local 503 in 1997. In 1998, Parry Center merged with Childrens Farm Home in Corvallis and Waverly Children’s Home in Portland to form a new non-profit — Trillium Family Services. Parry Center is the only unionized unit in the network.

Jobs working with the children require a college degree or equivalent experience. Starting wages are $8.86 an hour and top out at $9.28.

Workers agreed to a wage freeze in the 2003-2004 budget year, and now management is demanding the wage freeze be extended three years.

The union is calling for across-the-board annual raises of 45 cents an hour.

Parry Center management says it can’t afford the raise, though union leaders counter that Trillium spent more than $3 million on property and equipment in recent years.

Trillium spokesperson Chris Bouneff said the property improvements were paid from a capital fund. Trillium gets 90 percent of its funding from the State of Oregon, Bouneff said, and the state has frozen funding for the last few years. For that reason, Bouneff said, Trillium is unable to give raises.

Union members aren’t persuaded, and point to other management positions that appear to be anti-union, like the insistence — after seven years of “agency shop” — that Parry Center become an “open shop,” where union dues would be voluntary.

“They’re looking to break up our union,” said striker Josh Casey, a child and adolescent treatment specialist.

Bouneff said calling for open shop was a way to get the union to deal with a group of about a dozen of the unit’s highest-paid workers who don’t want to be in the union.

That explanation is contradicted by management’s bargaining behavior, says Mischa Novick, the SEIU staffperson assigned to the unit. “They quite clearly have an ideological bent,” Novick said. He recalls that when introducing management’s open-shop proposal at the bargaining table, Trillium attorney Richard Alli Jr. of Bullard Korshoj Smith & Jernstedt said “this will be a stake in the union’s heart.”

And when the union offered a deal — a one-time “opt-out” to workers that claim philosophical opposition to union membership, in exchange for continued agency shop for those who remained — management said “no.”

As an alternative to the strike, the union called for binding arbitration, a position supported by a letter signed by all five Multnomah County Commissioners. [State dollars pass through Multnomah County before they are assigned to Trillium’s two Portland facilities.]

Bouneff said Trillium doesn’t support binding arbitration because “one side might be unhappy with the outcome,” and that would jeopardize labor-management harmony.

Parry Center remained open during the strike, staffed by managers and non-union workers from the other facilities, plus several workers in the striking unit who crossed the picket line.

© Oregon Labor Press Publishing Co. Inc.