Everywhere he goes, Kevin Landreth scans for signs of roofers at work. If they’re non-union, he wants to have a word with them.
Landreth is a full-time union organizer. His mission is to unionize the local roofing industry, inviting workers to join together with the 600 members of Portland-based Roofers Local 49 to set standards for pay, benefits, skill and and safety.
Arriving uninvited and solo at a work site, he walks up to fellow roofers with a smile and a positive attitude, hands out union wage sheets, and tries to engage them in conversation about the benefits of being union.
Far too often, he finds nonunion roofers working unsafely, in violation of OSHA rules that require them to be tied off with fall arrest systems when they work at heights above 6 feet. First he takes pictures using a binocular attachment to his smart phone. Those will go into an evidence file to be available for later use. Then he approaches the workers to talk with them.
“‘Hey, I noticed you guys are not tied off,” he’ll tell them. “What gives? What are you doing?’”
Landreth says they usually brush him off, but the encounter is a chance to pitch the idea that they could come over to the union, learn about safety, and get a big increase in pay.
If it seems like a job that takes considerable chutzpah, it helps that Landreth spent years working security at a rock club while working his way through his roofing apprenticeship at Local 11 in Chicago.
Landreth, 38, knows the union difference first-hand. After two years of nonunion shingling, he joined Roofers Local 11 at age 20 and found a sense of belonging.
“Chicago is a union city. It is a blue collar town. Solidarity goes deep,” Landreth said
In Chicago, Landreth attended meetings and got involved. So when he and his wife moved to Portland in 2020 to follow a job opportunity for her at Intel, he transferred his union membership to Local 49 and did the same. He attended meetings and got to know the local. And during the rainy season when roofers are off work, he worked part-time at the union training center teaching classes on how to put up single ply and shingles. When a position as an organizer opened at the beginning of 2024, he applied and got the job.
He’s got his work cut out for him. While Local 49 has 13 signatory contractors, so far Landreth has tracked more than 60 nonunion shops in his database. Some day, maybe, they’ll be union.
As an organizer, Landreth encourages individual members to join Local 49, but he also wants to be ready to support workers if and when they are prepared to unionize the workplaces they’re in now.
“Luck,” he says, quoting the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca, “is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
