Parry Center strike continues

Workers at Portland’s Parry Center rang in the new year on a rainy strike picketline.

About 85 members of Service Employees Local 503 are five weeks into a strike in which management has shown no sign of budging, despite interventions from government officials whose budgets pay the center’s bills.

Parry Center, a 24-hour psychiatric residential treatment facility for children, is part of a three-unit network called Trillium Family Services. Trillium’s Waverly Children’s Home and Children’s Farm Home were also unionized by Local 503, but the union found it impossible to get management to agree to a contract, and after years of turnover and alleged firings of union supporters, the union had to withdraw.

Leslie Frane, Local 503 executive director, sees the Parry Center dispute as the continuation of that “union-busting” effort.

In bargaining, Trillium management called for a wage freeze and demanded an open shop, in which there would be no requirement to pay union dues, despite majority support for such a requirement among workers.

After filing a volley of unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, union members went out on strike Nov. 29. Soon thereafter, Trillium management began hiring what it has insisted are permanent replacements of the striking workers.

Since 90 percent of Parry Center’s budget is public money, the union took their case to public officials, denouncing the use of tax dollars in a union-busting effort. They got the support of the Portland City Council, Multomah County Commissioners, and Governor Ted Kulongoski, who has held off renewing a state contract with Parry Center which expired Dec. 31.

In late December, Gary Weeks, head of the Oregon Department of Human Services, set up a meeting between the two sides, but union participants say they saw no change in management’s posture at that meeting.

While strikers say their struggle is principally over their right to have a union, pay is also an issue. Child and adolescent treatment specialists, the classification with the largest number of union members, requires a college degree or equivalent experience, and pays a top wage of $9.28 an hour.

Parry Center’s child and adolescent treatment specialists say such low pay makes it hard to make ends meet AND repay college loans. It also makes it hard for them to stay at Parry Center. They say the resultant high turnover harms the children, who benefit from relationships with experienced caregivers and with caregivers who know them individually.

At a bargaining session Dec. 28, the union agreed to management’s proposal of a 38 cent hourly raise for treatment counselors, but management rejected the union’s position that the raise be extended to other classifications.

Two strikers have been fired on what the union says are trumped up strike misconduct charges.

The union says management is guilty of strike misconduct, including driving agressively through picket lines. Trillium CEO Kim Scott accelerates through the picket line, Sullivan said, and has hit two strikers with his car, including one who was thrown off his feet by the impact. A police report was filed after that incident.