Members of Roofers Local 49 voted June 18 to ratify a new master agreement with 13 union-signatory roofing contractors in the Portland metro area.
The agreement will raise compensation $10.28 an hour over the contract’s four-year term. It’s expected that $3 of that increase will go toward maintaining health coverage.
The first-year increase, $3.65 an hour, took effect July 1 and brought the hourly wage for a journeyman roofer to $47.01 an hour plus $23.83 an hour for fringe benefits.
Each year, members will decide together how to divide up the increase between wages and benefits.
The new agreement also restricts the extent to which employers can use rear-facing cameras to surveil workers in work vehicles. Such technology is advancing, and some employers had already installed cameras hoping to get a break on vehicle insurance premiums. The new contract mandates that employers notify workers 90 days before installing cameras. It also requires that the camera’s focus be limited to hands and eyes; in the event of an accident, cameras footage could be used to determine if the employee was at fault. Local 49 business manager Travis Hopkins credited Plumbers Local 290 for crafting the model contract language that Local 49 borrowed in its proposal.
The agreement also codifies $1.36 an hour in contributions to a newly established “market recovery fund.” Building trades unions sometimes create such funds to strategically subsidize union contractors to help secure work by outbidding lower-wage non-union contractors. Local 49 started its fund two years ago when members approved a voluntary assessment of 4 cents an hour, which later grew to 14 cents.
The agreement also offers greater protection to workers who step forward to serve as union shop stewards: They’ll have first right of refusal for new work opportunities that they’re qualified for. In other words, an employer can’t tell a steward that work has dried up for them while continuing to deploy other workers.
Hopkins said it helped that the union bargaining team came in prepared thanks to training from Mark Brenner and Sabrina Gordon of the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center.
The Portland-area agreement covers about 80% of Local 49’s roughly 600 members; the rest are covered under local agreements for the Salem and Eugene areas.
The agreement runs through June 30, 2030.
