Trouble at Oregon Tradeswomen

Oregon Tradeswomen, one of the most beloved local nonprofits in labor’s orbit, is in serious crisis. Over the last 33 years, Oregon Tradeswomen has helped close to 2,000 women get into life-changing high-wage careers in construction. But since mid-2022, more than half of of its board has departed. In February its executive director quit. In April its fundraising director quit. On Oct. 12, six staff were laid off, a third of its total staff. On Oct. 16, another staff member was fired. Even an outside contractor hired to help with HR quit, on Oct. 3. The group now faces a significant budget shortfall, and it’s looking to vacate its 8,300-square-foot Gresham office and training space by next spring.

Concerned about what was coming, workers at Oregon Tradeswomen unionized with the International Association of Machinists in February. Oregon Tradeswomen responded by bringing in Jeffrey Chicoine, an attorney with the Miller Nash law firm, whose website bio says he helps employers stay “union-free.” On Aug. 3, the union filed a pair of charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), accusing Oregon Tradeswomen of violating federal labor law, saying it has bargained in bad faith and changed terms and conditions of employment without negotiating with the union. The agency hasn’t yet completed its investigation.

All this is at a nonprofit that relies heavily on partnerships with local building trades unions both for funding and for training and placing the women who go through its pre-apprenticeship program. According to a 2022 report to the board, nearly 80% of Oregon Tradeswomen graduates are placed in registered union apprenticeships. But there are signs that the group’s relationships with unions are fraying.

To understand what’s going on at Oregon Tradeswomen, the Labor Press interviewed 19 people in all — current and former staff and board members, and outside union and community partners.  Their accounts of what went wrong don’t match in every respect, but quite a few threads are consistent.

One thing is clear: The staff decision to unionize didn’t cause the turmoil; it was a response to the turmoil.

The conflict seems to have begun at the board, between board members and also between some board members and Kelly Kupcak, who was the group’s executive director until this February.

Kupcak was hired in 2017 to take over from the organization’s founder, Connie Ashbrook, who retired after having led the group since 1989. Ashbrook, a member of Elevator Constructors Local 23, had wooed both the union and nonunion sides of the construction industry. But Kupcak prioritized building relations with the union side. At the suggestion of the group’s communications director, she led the group to drop “Inc.” from its name. (It was formerly Oregon Tradeswomen Inc.) Kupcak also worked to make salaries more competitive to attract and retain talent, and in 2020 she piloted a four-day work week for better work-life balance.

To all appearances, Oregon Tradeswomen was thriving, adding staff and programs. The group’s core is a state-certified 192-hour pre-apprenticeship training program that gets women ready for jobs in the skilled trades. The program teaches basic tool handling and safety and introduces women to apprenticeship programs so they can find a program that might be a good fit. Oregon Tradeswomen even negotiated “direct entry” provisions with several unions, so women who meet the union apprenticeship training programs’ minimum qualifications can skip the line and be admitted directly as union apprentices once they graduate from the pre-apprenticeship training course. Oregon Tradeswomen also got funding to help its enrollees overcome obstacles, like child care or paying their bills while they were training. And it keeps in touch with graduates, helping them get into competitive apprenticeship programs and coaching them as they adjusted to male-dominated workplace cultures. It even developed and prepared to launch a workplace training program that would try to make construction sites more welcoming to women and minorities.

Board conflict

But starting in 2020, Oregon Tradeswomen’s board of directors became a conflict zone, much of it centered on board member Molly Washington. The Labor Press attempted to reach Washington by phone and email to get her perspective, but did not hear back.

When Washington joined the board, she was a deputy city attorney for the City of Portland focused on city procurement practices. In January 2021 she went to work for the Oregon chapter of the National Association of Minority Contractors. Local building trades union leaders have long seen Washington as anti-union, and often found her to be an adversary when they tried to get the City to improve conditions for construction workers on public projects.

Washington identifies as a person of color and on the Oregon Tradeswomen board, she allied with several other board members and began to introduce race as an issue in almost every board discussion. Kupcak and Development Director Lisa Palermo pushed back, and the every-other-month board meetings became tense. When board members disagreed about things, like whether to add male allies to the board for the first time, those disagreeing with Washington would have their race pointed out and be told they weren’t listening to women of color. Meetings went hours over schedule, with voices raised and emotions raw. Agenda items about the budget or evaluating Kupcak would be sometimes be left to the end or tabled.

In mid-2022, an employee quit and criticized Kupcak’s management style in an email to the board. In response, at the suggestion of Washington and others, the board hired Edwards Consulting to conduct a workplace culture survey and interview current and former employees, and facilitate an hours-long listening session in which board members would vent their grievances. In what might have been a sign of her growing alienation from the board, Kupcak declined to participate in the Edwards interview.

At a December 2022 meeting, after almost two years of conflict, some board members proposed to remove Washington from the board. Washington shared the Zoom meeting link with others outside the board, and a parade of her allies from the minority contracting community testified as character witnesses. The proposal to remove Washington failed to win a majority.

Not long after, Kupcak announced she’d be resigning as of February 2023, though she made it known she was willing to continue to serve as executive director for a time.

There are signs that both Washington’s presence on the board and Kupcak’s departure may have harmed Oregon Tradeswomen’s relationship with local unions. None have publicly announced they’re pulling support and funding, but in September, there was noticeable drop-off in support at the group’s annual fundraising event, “Build With Us.” Billed as a “blue collar gala,” the event doubles as an awards ceremony. Last year, the event had half a dozen top-level $20,000 platinum sponsors. This year it had none.

The union arrives

Knowing that Kupcak was on her way out, Oregon Tradeswomen staff were nervous about what might happen next.

“We had no idea what was happening,” Training Director Kate Hibbs told the Labor Press. “We didn’t know when Kelly was leaving. We didn’t know why Kelly was leaving. We didn’t know what the plan was.”

Over the years, staff had several times talked about unionizing. After conversations with the Machinists District Lodge W24, 14 of the 17 staff signed union authorization cards in less than 24 hours.

Machinists District Lodge W24 lead organizer Jessica Deming saw Oregon Tradeswomen as a great match for her union, which includes skilled mechanical trades. When Deming and her sister were girls, their dad brought them to the group’s annual Women in Trades fair. Seeing strong confident women using tools and loving their jobs left a strong impression, and they both eventually went to work at Boeing as skilled machinists.

Given Oregon Tradeswomen’s close ties to unions as funders and training partners, Deming thought negotiating a contract would be straightforward.

That’s not what happened.

Tension with the union began from the moment board member Donna Hammond arrived to serve as interim executive director.

Kupcak had voluntarily recognized the union on Valentine’s Day 2023, after an official from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service verified that the cards were authentic. She also gave workers permission to meet during the day in the organization’s conference room. Deming and Machinists District Lodge W24’s top officer — Brandon Bryant — were about ready to start a meeting when, according to multiple sources, Hammond came into the room and sat down. She stayed even after being told it was a meeting for union members and said she was just there to observe. Bryant and Deming ended the meeting.

As a Black woman who’d overcome open hostility to succeed as a union electrician, Hammond had been a founding member of Oregon Tradeswomen and a longtime mentor to women in the trades. To help the group in its moment of transition, she took a leave of absence from her job as union business representative at IBEW Local 48 and agreed to work without pay at first.

But by all accounts, relations with her staff got off on the wrong foot right away. Hammond said she believes staff unionized because they heard a Black woman was coming in as executive director. Multiple workers interviewed for this story said that was not the case, and that they didn’t even know who would be leading the organization when they signed union cards.

Some of the tension between Hammond and the staff could be chalked up to a personality clash. Hammond comes from a union of hourly workers who pride themselves on putting in eight hours work for eight hours pay. The idea of office workers working just four days a week for a full-time salary didn’t sit well with her. She’s also used to the roughness and directness of construction culture, and she has what might be described as an aggressive sense of humor, delivered with the deadpan of a poker player. It’s a personal style that didn’t go over well. She’d respond to, “Good morning,” with a frown and ask, “What’s good about it!?” At meetings, she’d freak out the staff with ominous and cryptic statements like, “changes are coming.” And she’d often tell staff that Oregon Tradeswomen was in serious financial trouble, though without specifics. At one meeting, she pitched the idea of a bake sale fundraiser and started trying to get staff to sign up for baked goods. At another, she announced a scheme for staff to contribute money to buy lottery tickets and use the winnings to save the organization. Asked by the Labor Press about these plans, she says she wasn’t serious.

“I know they don’t like my humor,” Hammond said.

But staff interviewed for this story said they thought she was serious.

Behind the scenes, Hammond was panicking at what she was learning.

Problems with the books

Hammond says one of the first things she did when she came on as interim executive director was get help, asking two former leaders of the group to come out of retirement: Ashbrook, the founding executive director, and Madelyn Elder, a former part-time chief financial officer.

Elder told the Labor Press she immediately found problems with the books. Spending had jumped significantly in 2022, and Oregon Tradeswomen was in the hole and playing catchup. Twice the group had made payroll only with the help of private loans, later repaid. And worse yet, restricted grant funds were moved around to pay for unrestricted expenses. Money from a State of Oregon workforce grant was spent before the program it was supposed to fund started.

At least one employee had used the previous year’s workplace culture survey to blow the whistle on troubling practices related to grant funds, but the board didn’t see the results of the survey until Dec. 19, 2022, and had yet to act on that information when Kupcak resigned. Hammond had pleaded with Kupcak to stay, but now felt betrayed by Kupcak for the state she’d left the organization in.

Elder estimated that Oregon Tradeswomen would need to cut $50,000 a month in expenses in order to stay solvent. In an Oct. 17 statement emailed to the Labor Press, Hammond said the group is working to close an $800,000 budget gap.

Budget woes are the rationale for the Oct. 6 layoffs of six staff. The layoffs included Hibbs — the group’s pre-apprenticeship training director — and one of its three training instructors.

The following week, on Oct. 16, Hammond fired another training staffperson, who was also the union shop steward. That leaves one trainer on staff, at an organization that’s primarily about pre-apprenticeship training. And the firing came the day a new class of 23 women began.

Reacting to the rapid staff reductions, numerous staff members interviewed for this story said they think whatever financial problems Hammond inherited were made worse by a focus on blaming Kupcak while neglecting fundraising and grant writing. Oregon Tradeswomen has yet to replace Development Director (fundraiser) Lisa Palermo, and instead hired a temporary contractor to organize this year’s gala.

One way or another, expenses will eventually match income.

“I come from a union background,” Hammond said, “but my number one priority is to make sure that the organization stays afloat.”

Hammond told the Labor Press the wages and workplace rules at Oregon Tradeswomen are unsustainable. Besides the four-day, 32-hour work week launched as a pilot project at the height of the pandemic, Kupcak had also set up a policy where staff can take up to a month paid “wellness” leave per year, no questions asked. Hammond said the union bargaining unit wrongly includes managers, that the Machinists union is a poor fit because it doesn’t represent non-profit office workers, and that the Feb. 14 union recognition was improper because Kupcak was no longer executive director when she signed the papers.

Deming, the Machinists organizer, says those are surprising points for a longtime union rep to make. Deming says the supposed managers don’t have the ability to hire, fire, and discipline, and don’t want it. They’re more akin to team leads or foremen, which labor law recognizes have the right to be in a union.

As for the work week: “They might work four-fifths of the workweek, but they do 100% of the work,” Deming said.

“The workers haven’t done anything wrong,” Deming said. “They understand that there’s a financial aspect to negotiations. But they’re being treated poorly. And they’re being treated like they’ve done something to the organization, when all they’re trying to do is get a fair union contract.”

“We need accountability from our community — for our board and the executive director,” said Hibbs, the training director and union bargaining team member who was laid off Oct. 6. “We’ve been in this nightmare, and we haven’t been able to tell anybody about it. So we want the community to know.”

Hibbs was one of two union bargaining committee members laid off Oct. 6. To be clear, when Hammond asked for volunteers to be laid off, they volunteered.

But bargaining continues. Despite the tensions, both Hammond and Deming think union and management will eventually get a deal.

“I’ve never been management before…” Hammond said. “I’m probably one of the most pro-union managers that you can ever work with.”

“What we’re going through right now is normal contentious bargaining,” she added.

One thing everyone involved agrees on: They want Oregon Tradeswoman to recover. The mission is too important.

CORRECTION 10/29/23: A photo caption in an earlier version of this story incorrectly named the organization’s annual fundraiser. It’s Build With Us.