AFL-CIO's Witt backed for House post

The appointment of Oregon State Senator Joan Dukes to the Northwest Power Planning Council may pave the way for a top Oregon labor official to become a state legislator.

Brad Witt, longtime secretary-treasurer of the Oregon AFL-CIO, is in the running for an appointment to the Oregon House of Representatives. Witt was endorsed for the position Dec. 17 by the state labor federation’s Committee on Political Education (COPE), which met during a quarterly meeting of the Oregon AFL-CIO Executive Board in Portland.

In November, Governor Ted Kulongoski announced his choice of Dukes, a Democrat from Astoria, to the Northwest Power Planning Council. The Oregon Legislature is expected to confirm the nomination after its 2005 session opens Jan. 10. Because the Northwest Power Planning Council position comes with a government salary, state law requires that Dukes resign her Senate seat.

It would be up to county commissioners from the five counties in her Northwest Oregon district to appoint Dukes’ replacement. State Representative Betsy Johnson, a Democrat from Scappoose, is considered likely to win that appointment. That would leave her seat in the Oregon House of Representatives vacant. Witt lives in Clatskanie, in Johnson’s House District 31.

If Johnson is chosen as Dukes’ replacement, Democratic Party precinct people in House District 31 would then present a slate of nominees to county commissioners in the three counties that House District 31 occupies: Columbia, Clatsop and Multnomah.

If Witt wins the appointment, he would remain at the Oregon AFL-CIO. Like many other lawmakers in Oregon’s biennial Legislature, Witt would take a paid leave of absence while the Legislature is in session, and have his legislator’s salary subtracted from his state labor federation salary.

Witt, originally from Massachusetts, moved to Oregon in the mid 1970s and worked in a sawmill. He has served in a variety of staff capacities at the national AFL-CIO, the Western Council of Industrial Workers (an affiliate of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters) and United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555.

He moved to Clatskanie in 1989.

With a population just over 1,500, Clatskanie is situated in the area where the coast range meets the Columbia River. Witt lives with his wife Donna and their daughter Jessica, 17, a junior at Clatskanie High School. [The two also have an 18-year-old son, Brian, a student at Western Oregon University in Monmouth.]

Witt said their 35-acre farm, a “Noah’s ark” operation captained by his wife, is dedicated to raising horses, llamas and potbellied pigs.

His priority as a state legislator would be to promote family-wage jobs, he said.

House District 31, which follows the Columbia River from Astoria to Scappoose, was hit hard economically by the decline of the timber industry and the closure of the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant.

Witt is known for his long-term commitment to sustainable forestry, worker safety, and the rights of injured and dislocated workers.

He would bring decades of legislative know-how, having spent the last 24 years as a union lobbyist, — first for UFCW, and then for the last 13 years as secretary-treasurer of the Oregon AFL-CIO.

Witt said he sees no contradiction between serving working people and serving the constituents of House District 31: “Labor has a broad range of interests. I think it’s important that people recognize that.”

In other action, COPE unanimously endorsed Labor Commissioner Dan Gardner for re-election to his current position in 2006 – an unusually early endorsement that indicated widespread support for his leadership as the state’s chief administrator and enforcer of wage and hour laws, prevailing wage rates and workplace rights.

In his first two years in office, Gardner led a successful effort to establish rest and meal periods for Oregon’s farm workers, eliminated inequities in the calculation of prevailing wage rates for building trades workers and defended Oregon’s overtime laws from rollbacks by the Bush administration.

“The Bush overtime exemptions stop at the Oregon border,” Gardner told COPE.

� Oregon Labor Press Publishing Co. Inc.