Cement Masons Local 555 business manager Geoff Kossak retired Dec. 27. The local appointed business agent José Ávalos Guzmán to serve the two years remaining on his elected term.
Kossak, 50, has been a member of the union since 1994, following the trade — and the trade union — of his father Gilbert Kossak and grandfather George Meyers. Growing up in Southeast Portland, Geoff Kossak attended union picnics as a kid, and remembers his dad trying to stretch his hands at the dinner table after a day of intense work.
“You saw how hard he worked. And it was rewarding. He was really proud to be a cement mason,” Geoff Kossak said.
After Franklin High School, Geoff Kossak completed a two-year apprenticeship working for Hoffman Structures. Later, he worked for other contractors alongside his dad. And like his father, who was a vice president of Local 555, Geoff got involved in the union. He was elected to the Executive Board in 1999, vice president in 2002, and president in 2006, and then went to work as a full-time business agent of the union in 2012. In 2017, he was appointed business manager when his predecessor Brett Hinsley went to work for the international union.
Since Kossak became business manager, Local 555 has grown from 530 members to 670. Seeing work coming to southern Idaho, Kossak hired a business agent responsible for that area. (Local 555’s jurisdiction includes Oregon, Clark and Skamania counties in Washington, and southern Idaho.) Local 555 members have worked on new nuclear facilities for Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls and are now at work on the massive Micron semiconductor plant going up in Boise.
Being a cement mason is physically demanding, and union members become eligible for pension benefits after 30 years. But retiring from Local 555 doesn’t mean Kossak will be idle. On Jan. 27 he’ll start a new job — as a TriMet bus operator, and a member of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 757.
“It’s a nice change, but I’ll always remain a cement mason. That’s very important to me,” Kossak said. “I’m just grateful to be part of this organization, and proud to be a cement mason.”
Ávalos, 32, started as business manager Dec. 30. He’ll have training and support from former Local 555 business manager Brett Hinsley, who is now a representative for the International union.
Ávalos immigrated to the United States from Michoacán, Mexico, in 2002 at age 10. He and his family lived in the Gresham area, near where his father did nursery work. After Reynolds High School, he enrolled in a dental assistant training program at Clark College, but while playing soccer for the school, he heard about the cement masonry trade from a teammate who was an apprentice. He signed up too. Soon he was earning more as an apprentice cement mason than he would as a dental assistant. He made the choice to stay.
Ávalos was often asked to translate into Spanish for the union, and as soon as he completed his 5,000-hour apprenticeship, he was asked to become a full-time organizer for the union. The job took guts: It involved walking onto non-union work sites and trying to recruit the workers there. Other times, it meant meeting with contractors to promote the value of signing on with the union to get access to benefits, training, and skilled labor.
Years later, some of the members he recruited still call him to thank him for giving them a start in the union.
“It feels amazing how they see life now,” Ávalos tells the Labor Press. “A lot of the recruits I got from the nonunion world, they own homes now.” His younger brother was one of the recruits.
As business manager, Ávalos will oversee Local 555 staff and promote the wellbeing of nearly 700 fellow members.
Local 555 also has a new dispatcher, Ricardo Dominguez. Dominguez replaces Liz Nichols, who returned to work in the trade.
Ávalos says he plans to hire an organizer after he gets settled.
But his first and biggest priority will be bargaining a new area master agreement. The existing agreement expires May 31, and negotiations are set to start in March.
