What started as a paycheck to support a new baby came full circle this June, when union representative Darrin Boyce helped bargain a pair of first contracts with the HVAC company that first got him into sheet metal.
Boyce started working non-union at a Gensco distribution center in North Portland in 2006 after his girlfriend got pregnant — just a job to pay the bills as he started a family. But pulling products and delivering orders, he learned about sheet metal and eventually joined a non-union sheet metal apprenticeship program.
Gensco subsidiary Columbia Manufacturing is a union employer at its sheet metal fabrication shop in Fife, Washington, but Gensco’s distribution centers then and now are non-union.
In the non-union apprenticeship, Boyce heard only negative things about joining a union. He trusted those messages at first, but began having more questions as he saw coworkers leave for union positions and dealt with the whiplash of going from prevailing wage projects to standard non-union rates on other projects. Boyce moved to another non-union company but eventually got fed up with his boss claiming he couldn’t afford to give him raises he’d already promised, while the boss’s wife showed up to the office in a shiny new SUV.
At Buster’s Barbeque in Gresham, where Boyce’s then-wife was bartending, he met two union sheet metal workers who were working at Intel. One conversation was all it took to convince Boyce to join the union after years of hearing anti-union rhetoric.
“We have a saying that the best organizer is actually the newly organized member, and that was me,” Boyce said. “I was just frustrated and pissed that I had been lied to for so many years.”
Not only was he earning more money and better benefits, but the way he was talked to by union employers was better.
Boyce showed up to union meetings and volunteered with the organizing department. In 2018, he was hired as a staff organizer for SMART 16. In 2023, he became a union representative.
That meant he was the one helping negotiate a first contract when Gensco’s Columbia Manufacturing subsidiary decided to open a new fabrication shop at 4710 Mill Creek Dr. SE in Salem.
Boyce said Gensco’s strong working relationship with SMART Local 66 in Washington was crucial in getting the company to site their new facility in Oregon and negotiate a pair of agreements with Local 16, one covering off-the-shelf products and the other covering custom-made products.
Currently the Salem facility employs just five production workers, but it expects to ramp up to 100 over the next three to five years to supply sheet metal products to Oregon, California, Idaho, and Utah.
Boyce said the new contracts are a win for Local 16, the sheet metal industry, and Gensco. But on a personal level, the contract is a moment to reflect on the past two decades. If 19 years ago a friend hadn’t told Boyce — unemployed and with a baby on the way — that Gensco was hiring, he might not be a Sheet Metal union representative now.
