Laborers Local 737 celebrated the 10th anniversary of its creation Oct. 18 with a party at its hall and training center at 17230 NE Sacramento St. Members and their families turned out to enjoy union-hosted food trucks, face painting, pumpkin decorating, and a little bit of union history.
Based in Portland, Local 737 represents laborers in construction, in road construction and maintenance, and at the Portland shipyard. It also includes several hundred public works employees in over a dozen small cities and counties around Oregon. In fact, Laborers union members do an extraordinary range of work, from demolition and asbestos abatement to material handling and hod carrying for other crafts. They also work as flaggers, mitigate rock fall, and on road crews.
Local 737 was created in 2015 with the merger of Local 296, Local 320, and Local 121. The new local’s number wasn’t a nod to the Boeing 737; it’s what you get when you add up the three numbers of the merging unions.
The merger meant the end of their separate identities as locals, but members gained greater economic security because they can access work in a bigger geographic area and across more scopes of work. For example, highway laborers can get a crack at working on a high-rise construction project, and construction laborers might get to work laying a pipeline.
It’s been quite a decade since Local 737 received its charter, with the disruption of pandemic, a strike by members at an asphalt roof shingle company, and a master contract that is raising wages $9.25 an hour over three years.
Local 737 has also picked up members since its founding. It started with over 2,415 members, dipped to 2,138 in 2017, and rebounded to where it stands today at over 2,900.
As the sum of three other unions, Local 737 inherited over a century of history when it formed. The oldest of the three was Local 296, chartered April 7, 1910 as the “Hod Carriers, Building Laborers, Shipyard and Marine Shop Laborers.” Later on, Local 320 — a “Construction and General Laborers” local — got its start March 25, 1936 representing workers at the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency that put Americans back to work building iconic monuments like Timberline Lodge and Rocky Butte. Local 320 later came to specialize in road and highway construction. Local 121, meanwhile, was established Oct. 1, 1987, with the merger of several Eastern Oregon Laborers locals.
Minutes, meeting attendance records, and other historical records from the three unions fill cardboard boxes and shelves in a locked area of the mezzanine above the union’s training space and meeting hall. To see if some of those records can tell the story of the local and its ancestors, Business Manager Zack Culver has plans to bring in a historian who specializes in union histories.
