At a July 18 party at their union hall, members and contractors of Plasterers Local 82 gathered to celebrate the local’s 125th anniversary.
When Local 82 first received its charter from Operative Plasterers and Cement Masons International Union on Aug. 23, 1901, Portland was a town of 90,000 with two wooden bridges, a network of electric streetcars, and a downtown full of cast iron buildings fronted with ornate plasterwork. Local 82 was created in order to unify skilled craftsmen and thereby build a better life. At first it included cement masons too, but they left in 1946 and formed today’s Local 555.
At Local 82’s Portland union hall, a small second floor room serves as a repository of artifacts from a century and a quarter of the local’s existence — boxes of photographs, news clippings, and business records. The local’s official proceedings are recorded in dozens of bound volumes of minutes, handwritten in fountain pen or pencil — today covered in a thin layer of fine plaster dust.
In the first few decades, members met weekly, typically for about half an hour, and voted on every aspect of their union — from whether to accept applicants into membership to how much to pay in dues to what wages to demand from employers. On July 6, 1921, someone proposed that the business agent be laid off. The vote was 19 for and 22 against; he survived.
Delegations from other unions would sometimes attend — bakers, tobacco workers, broom makers, school teachers. So would leaders of the Oregon Federation of Labor.
In 1921, members voted to complete the plastering on the downtown Portland Labor Temple and accept half cash and half in bonds for pay.
Around the holidays, members might vote to assess themselves $20 each to buy needy union men a Christmas dinner.
Other times, members would vote to discipline and fine fellow members who were discovered to have worked non-union and thus undermined the union wage scale. Apprentices, too, could be cited to appear and explain themselves before the executive board if they missed apprenticeship classes.
Local 82’s minutes seldom give evidence of involvement in politics. But in 1939, the local earned the gratitude of a woman named Lillian Keegan when it backed her candidacy for queen of the Red Head Roundup in Taft, Oregon.
By the second half of the 20th century, today’s Local 82 starts to come into focus. Under the leadership of business agent Bob Stanfill, the union established benefit plans that continue to this day: a health and welfare benefit in 1956, a vacation plan in 1958, and a pension plan in 1962.
In 1908, Local 82 members made $5.50 a day. Today they make $483.12 a day at the union wage of $41.16 per hour plus $19.23 for benefits. That progress — and five generations of fellowship — are something to celebrate.
