Gloria Schiewe, who spent decades working to elect union-endorsed candidates from the 1960s to the 1990s, died Sept. 21, 2024, at age 94.
Union political campaigning in the age before personal computing meant enormous quantities of patient hard committee work. Leading teams of volunteers, Schiewe checked union membership lists against voter rolls to find members who were not registered, and followed up with letters and phone calls to get them registered. She and her volunteers stuffed political literature envelopes by the thousand, and — long before vote-by-mail — even drove union members to the polls. Schiewe was deeply involved in the local labor movement, and her name appears over 100 times in the digital archives of this newspaper from that era.
Born Gloria Corporon on March 18, 1930, in Ritzville, Washington, south of Spokane, she moved frequently as a child. She caught the bug of politics from her father Frank Corporon, who was a Democrat and county commissioner in Okanogan County, Washington. She married Keith Schiewe in 1947 and took his name.
In 1962 she went to work as a secretary for the Oregon AFL-CIO, which then had its offices at the Portland Labor Temple — across the street from Portland City Hall. The work involved typing and filing for the federation’s political and research directors and using a mimeograph machine to copy letters for mass distribution. She stayed until the organization moved its headquarters to Salem in 1966. After working part time for the Committee on Political Education (COPE) office of the Multnomah County Labor Council, she was hired in 1968 to be the committee’s director. (Multnomah County Labor Council was the predecessor to today’s Northwest Oregon Labor Council.)
In the 1970s, Schiewe led COPE’s women’s activities committee. Back then wives and children would stuff envelopes while male union members attended labor council meetings. Later, she led COPE’s Volunteers in Politics (VIP) effort. Over the years she helped get out the vote for Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and Bill Clinton as well as innumerable state and local candidates, including Oregon’s late U.S. Senator Wayne Morse, who she greatly admired for his early stance against the Vietnam War.
A 31-year member of Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 11, Schiewe served as one of its delegates to the labor council and to state AFL-CIO conventions. For more than two decades she worked at the convention registration table. Over her years at the labor council, she was elected to serve as a reading clerk and sergeant-at-arms. She was also on the supervisory and credit committees of the Office Employees #11 Credit Union (it later merged into IBEW and United Workers Credit Union). She also helped United Way, setting up talks at union meetings to raise money for its charitable work.
After retiring in 1993, she moved to the coastal town of Wheeler, Oregon, where she became a member of the local planning commission and the city council and served as treasurer of the Tillamook County Democratic Central Committee. She also served as a trustee of the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association and volunteered to lobby for the AARP at the Oregon Legislature.
She is survived by daughter Shirley Alhadeff, six grandchildren, and eight great grandchildren.
