For some union-backed bills — better luck next time

By DON McINTOSH, Associate Editor

The Democratic-controlled Oregon Legislature’s 2009 session was successful overall for organized labor. Lawmakers increased the share of taxes paid by the wealthiest, increased aid to the unemployed, and made it harder for employers to browbeat workers during union campaigns. But other union-backed proposals failed to win passage. Some of those may rise to the top of labor’s priority list next time around.

Reform of the state’s Business Energy Tax Credit (BETC) was one high priority, said Oregon AFL-CIO spokesperson Elana Guiney. BETC gives businesses back 50 cents for every dollar they put into wind or solar energy, and the price tag of that incentive has swelled to over $100 million a year. The Oregon AFL-CIO wanted some accountability added — like wage and benefit standards for the jobs that result from the projects, or even just a report on the number and quality of the jobs. Lawmakers voted to extend the BETC to electric vehicle manufacturing, and curtail it for wind farms. But union proposals for accountability and job standards just didn’t gain traction.

Meanwhile, HB 2831, a collection of union-backed reforms to Oregon’s Public Employee Collective Bargaining Act, passed the House 35 to 21, but failed on a 14-16 vote in the Senate. The bill was intended to undo parts of SB 750, which was passed by a Republican House and Senate in 1995 to weaken labor law for public employees. But this year’s Democratic lawmakers heard from city and county leaders that the reforms would increase costs and make management harder. All 12 Republicans and four Senate Democrats voted against it; the Democrats were Betsy Johnson, Rick Metsger, Martha Schrader, and Joanne Verger.

Building trades unions were unable to win passage of a bill requiring payment of the prevailing wage to construction workers employed by large projects that receive enterprise zone property tax abatements.

And a bill making it easier to get permits to construct pipelines, such as several proposed for liquid natural gas, failed to win approval.

“A lot of pro-worker legislation had a hard time in the Senate,” Guiney said.

The Oregon House has at least half a dozen “labor legislators” who have had direct membership in or involvement with unions, but the Senate has only one — former Communications Workers of America leader Diane Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum pushed hard for a union-backed bill providing a modest benefit for workers who take family leave. Workers would get the benefit after the birth or adoption of a child or to care for a family member with a serious health condition. But that too went nowhere. Business associations opposed it and said, incredibly, that it would hurt working people.

And some perennial proposals backed by some unions never got off the ground, such as:

• Setting minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratios at hospitals;
• Reining in the overuse of part-time no-benefit faculty at community colleges; and
• Narrowing the definition of “disability” under a state program that lets government agencies contract out to non-profits that employ the disabled. [Oregon School Employees Association has argued that some “qualified rehabilitation facilities” are abusing the law by employing people with little or no real disability.]

The Legislature will meet in a limited special session in February 2010, and then face election in November 2010 before the next regular session begins again in January 2011.

Guiney said the Oregon AFL-CIO’s individual ratings of lawmakers will be released in late summer.

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