Parking garage workers in the Rose Quarter voted 23 to 1 to unionize with Laborers Local 737 in a tally announced Aug. 1. They have nowhere to go but up. They work for Rip City Management, which was recently acquired together with the Portland Trail Blazers for $4.25 billion by a team of billionaire investors led by Texas subprime auto loan mogul Tom Dundon.
Working part-time, they staff the three garages at the Moda Center and Memorial Coliseum during concerts and games — working as cashiers, directing traffic as flaggers, and patrolling the lots during events to prevent theft.
Attendees pay $37 to park at the events. Parking workers make $19.50 an hour. Workers park their own cars in a gravel lot behind a broken gate next to railroad tracks and a homeless camp.
Coworkers started talking about unionizing in September, reached out to the national AFL-CIO, and ended up referred to Local 737, which represents construction laborers including traffic control flaggers. On June 22, a delegation of seven workers accompanied by several laborers leaders visited company offices to ask management to voluntarily recognize the union. The company declined, so the NLRB scheduled an election.
Unlike most employers these days, Rip City did not hire union-busters to try to talk workers out of unionizing. But it did send them a letter full of the standard anti-union boilerplate. The letter describes union dues as “a real, ongoing cost,” points out that the union can’t guarantee any particular outcome from negotiations, and makes sure workers know that because the union would be representing them, they could no longer negotiate directly with Rip City Management (The letter didn’t comment on well those direct individual negotiations had worked out for workers up to now.)
Why didn’t Rip City try to stomp on the union effort? One possibility: It would have been a bad look at a time when the company has its hand out looking for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to renovate the Moda Center. Management bloodletting may have been another factor. Union supporter Graham Plaxton thinks a manager got wind of the clandestine union campaign, but the manager was terminated along with about 70 others seven weeks after Dundon’s group took over.
“It’s really remarkable when a group of people get together like that and are able to pull off something like this — the level of commitment to helping each other out and the solidarity,” said Local 737 staff organizer Dana MacAuley.
The union contends that 42 workers are eligible for the union, but the company says seven of those are managers, a disagreement that the National Labor Relations Board is expected to resolve.
The two sides are expected to meet in the coming months to discuss a first union contract.
