As a little girl, Pat Riggs-Henson always wanted to see her father’s shovel. He was a shovel operator at an iron ore mine near Virginia, Minnesota, and a “pure union” man. When Riggs-Henson was eight or nine, she accompanied him to the mines for the first time.
The late 1950s were a tumultuous time for U.S. mine workers. Strikes were common.
“Every Christmas, the mines went on strike,” Riggs-Henson recalled.
Standing before his massive earth-mover, Riggs-Henson heard someone call her father’s name.
“Give us a song,” the man shouted. She watched, disbelieving, as her normally stoic father broke into a rendition of “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am.”
That visit was days before a strike, and Riggs-Henson realizes now that her father and his fellow worker were “picking themselves up,” preparing for another difficult fight. Still, what she remembers most wasn’t the hardship, but the camaraderie.
“The minute anything went wrong, the whole neighborhood came together,” Riggs-Henson recalled. Families would convene to make homemade Christmas presents, and workers would go hunting and share the meat with the whole neighborhood.
“You always felt like somebody had your back,” she said. This feeling, the protection of community solidarity, would become central to Riggs-Henson’s life.
Born Patricia Mitchell in 1951, Riggs-Henson remembers being a rebellious child in contrast to her older sister.
“She’d go out in a white dress and come home in a white dress,” Riggs-Henson said. “They didn’t even try to put me in a white dress.”
Instead, she’d wear pants under her skirt, due to her fondness for climbing her family’s crab-apple tree and hanging upside down.
In the mid-1970s, Riggs-Henson moved from Minnesota to Springfield, Oregon. The mines around her hometown had begun to close, and as the U.S. economy stagnated, work was hard to come by. Through a friend, she eventually got a job working for Lane County.
“It was fate,” Riggs-Henson said.
At first she worked part time for a federally funded job-training and employment program. Soon, Riggs-Henson became a full-time career advisor for a county program helping job-seekers.
“For 25 years, it was the most amazing job of my life,” she said. She helped people get work, connected them with scholarships and training, helped them with childcare, clothing, and utilities.
“I was Santa,” she recalls.
Once, while shopping at Costco, a man approached her. She didn’t recognize him, but he knew her. Years earlier, he had come to her office looking for work.
“You have no idea how much you changed my life,” she remembered him saying, “I felt like all I was was a dad who was unable to feed my children, and now I know I’m worth so much more.” Riggs-Henson’s response was: “Don’t make me cry in Costco.”
Riggs-Henson joined AFSCME Local 2831 as soon as she became a full-time county employee.
Early in her career, when her daughter was sick, she took official sick leave in order to care for her. But her supervisor threatened to fire her if she continued missing work.
Riggs-Henson was scared. She needed this job to support her family, but now she was being forced to choose between caring for her daughter and keeping her income. She was approached by Stefan Ostrach, her AFSCME representative and eventual mentor. When Riggs-Henson explained the situation, Ostrach didn’t miss a beat. “Watch me make that go away,” he said.
It was a crystallizing moment for Riggs-Henson.
“I realized that I could be empowered,” she said. “That’s what this (a union) is about … protecting people.”
She realized she wanted to be more than just a member.
“He started teaching me to be a union steward right then,” she said. “They created a monster.”
Riggs-Henson has spent the rest of her life since then as a tireless advocate for workers. She became a member of her AFSCME local executive board in 1985, and eventually served as its president and chief steward.
The first time she chaired a union meeting, she did so using a gavel that belonged to her father. He had passed away years before, in 1971, of emphysema, a condition she believes was the result of his years of work, unprotected, in the mines.
“This one’s for you, Dad,” she thought, as she wielded the gavel for the first time.
In 1998, she became the first woman ever elected as secretary-treasurer of the Lane County Labor Chapter. She also served on the Oregon AFL-CIO Executive Board.
Back in 1985, a few of her union friends in decided that Rick Henson, a member of her local at the time, might one day be a good match for her. They played a trick. Ahead of a union meeting, they told her that Henson had plans to take over control of their local.
“Not in this lifetime,” Riggs-Henson thought. “It was fire and ice from the second he walked in,” she recalled.
Henson was tall, six foot five, with a long pony tail. Riggs Henson stood at five foot four and a half.
“The half counts,” she said.
After the two of them went back and forth during the meeting, somebody joked to them that they might end up dating. “I don’t date long haired hippies,” Riggs-Henson said. “I’m not a long haired hippie, I’m an LA longhair,” Henson replied. “What the hell is an LA longhair?” she snapped back. “Hippies are peace and love,” he said, “I’m sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” The room was silent, “and then we cracked up,” Riggs-Henson said.
It was a few years before they started dating, but they’ve been together ever since. They married in 1994, and she added his Henson to her married name Riggs. He became a full-time union rep at AFSCME. She built community as a guiding light of the Lane County Labor Council.
“We’ve been on a lot of picket lines,” she said. “We’ve travelled a long way.”
Labor organizing is a family affair for Riggs-Henson, who has four children, four grandchildren, and seven great grandchildren. One of her granddaughters was born during the Morgan-Nicolai door factory strike.
“She walked her first picket line at the age of three days old,” Riggs-Henson said. A few years later, that granddaughter and her brother, attended a march and carried hand signs in support of farm workers. Later that day, after a now-forgortten disagreement with their mother, the two children grabbed their signs and began to march up and down the sidewalk in front of their house shouting “Sí, se puede.”
Over her career, Riggs-Henson served on numerous local and state boards including those for Lane Community College and Northwest Youth Corps, and received multiple awards for her dedication to community service.
When Riggs-Henson retired from her job with Lane County in 2009, her involvement with organized labor barely slowed. She joined the Oregon AFSCME retiree chapter, was elected to their statewide board and has served as chair since 2017. This year, she was voted Lane County Labor Chapter “president emeritus.”
“I am not going to stop being a part of the labor movement,” Riggs-Henson said, though she adds that it’s time for a new generation to take over.
“I’m looking at these young people,” she continued, “[and] I’m going like ‘this is the future of labor.’”
Her message to the architects of that future is a simple one: “Fight … keep going forward.” Riggs-Henson said. “But there’s never a reason to burn every bridge … because you have to have that bridge to come back and rescue the people you left behind.”
