Members of Laborers Local 483 elected officers in July. Ryan Sotomayor, the incumbent business manager and financial secretary, was unopposed for re-election.
Local 483 is a public sector local of the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA). It represents 1,172 workers at the City of Portland, Oregon Metro, the Oregon Zoo, the City of Silverton, the City of Mt. Angel, and at airport and marine facilities of the Port of Portland.
Sotomayor was appointed in 2022 to fill a vacancy and in July 2023 was elected to a full three-year term. His tenure as business manager got off to a high-stakes start with a three-day strike in February 2023 by 600 members at Portland’s transportation, parks, and wastewater treatment bureaus. Members ended the strike with a 8% retroactive wage increase, well above the 6% the city had been offering after the COVID era of high inflation.
Sotomayor says the local is still feeling the effects of the strike more three years later in ways both positive and negative. On the plus side, the transformative power of a strike left members bonded more tightly together in the union and proud of what they achieved.
“For anyone who was involved in the strike, is was a life-changing, or at least life-altering experience,” Sotomayor told the Labor Press.
The downside, Sotomayor says, is that Local 483 has had to deal with some city bureau managers who seemed to take it personally.
“There’s managers that have hurt feelings. There’s supervisors that have hurt feelings. There’s city bureaucrats that have hurt feelings.”
The two sides are back in contract negotiations now, but the bargaining is bogging down over the city’s reluctance to agree to cost-of-living increases. On Aug. 12, Local 483 members joined with members of AFSCME Local 189, Protec17, and the City of Portland Professional Workers Union for a rally outside Portland City Hall calling for fair contracts. If agreement is not reached in the coming months, Local 483 members may be bringing strike picket signs out of storage.
There’s some sign that the newly created 12-member city council may be more willing to intervene in union bargaining than the old five-person council in which members had direct oversight of city bureaus. It’s an election year for six of the 12 city council positions, and Local 483 has issued early endorsements to three incumbent city council members: Angelita Morillo, Mitch Green, and Tiffany Koyama Lane. Sotomayor said those three have visited Local 483 work sites multiple times and have taken the time to understand the union’s concerns. More endorsements may come as the November election gets closer.
Sotomayor says the local has been growing both internally and externally in the last few years. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision, public sector unions exist under a “right-to-work” arrangement in which union dues are strictly voluntary for individuals. That means unions must work to locate and sign up every new hire and maintain that support over time. Local 483 members and staff have put in the work, and as a result the local counts more than 90% of represented workers as members. But Sotomayor says it’s sometimes been a challenge to get accurate employee records from the City of Portland.
“We’ve had growth because the members are engaged and talking about workplace issues,” Sotomayor said. “And the goal is for each member to become more empowered to have a better contract than they did the last contract.”
Local 483 has been investing effort to recruit and train union stewards in the workplace, and now holds advanced steward training sessions quarterly. And to increase internal cohesion, executive board members are visiting the work sites of other units.
Local 483 recently organized workers at the Portland Japanese Garden, and may expand organizing in the coming years. LIUNA has set a goal of increasing its membership to 1 million workers, up from 600,000.
Besides Sotomayor, members also elected:
- President Jamie Doscher
- Vice President Jeremy Baurer
- Recording Secretary Daniel March
- Executive Board Josh Lapierre, Steve Delong, and Shelby Phillips
- Auditors Will Zeigler, Troy Morgan, and Eric Payne
Candidates for all positions except vice president and auditor ran unopposed. Their new terms of office began Aug. 1.
