Legacy Advanced Practice Providers at Legacy Emanuel and Good Samaritan went on strike for 29 days to secure a first contract. Credit: Photo by Aurora Biggers
At least 372 people died in Multnomah County while homeless in 2024, based on an annual report from the county.
That news should ring an alarm for working class Oregonians.
"Last month in Oregon labor" is a monthly installment by Aurora Biggers covering all things Oregon labor.
Most Americans are one emergency or major life change away from homelessness. Studies show more than half of households don’t have sufficient savings to cover a $400 to $1,000 expense, like a medical bill or rent increase. As long as our survival is predicated on our labor and as long as a living wage is not guaranteed, working class people will always struggle for economic stability.
Whether homeless, housed, working or unemployed: in the broadest sense, we are all working class because we share a mutual struggle for survival in a capitalist system. Learning that nearly 400 working class people died due to symptoms of poverty should shock, outrage and activate you.
The labor movement has always played a key role in homelessness prevention, but even as unions strive to create job security and increase wages for all, unabated rent increases, health care inequality and inflation outpace our efforts. The Renters’ State of Emergency is akin to a flood, according to Donovan Scribes’ recent column for the Portland Mercury, and it’s hitting Oregon like a “government and corporate-made monsoon.”
Unions must step beyond the bounds of collective bargaining and join the fight for affordable housing and renters’ rights. Across the U.S., we’re seeing tenants apply labor organizing to tenant unions. In 2024, Brooklyn neighborhood tenants in Portland organized to address property management issues after one of the tenants, Hunter Buen, a Musicians’ Union Local 99 organizer, decided to organize his neighbors.
Similar efforts are happening around the country, according to an article in Jacobin published around the same time Buen and his neighbors were organizing. The article praised the Chicago Teachers Union bargaining for the Board of Education to create affordable housing units, unions supporting Los Angeles’ mansion tax ballot measure, United Food and Commercial Workers’ Local 555 organizing around a ban on cold-weather and school-year evictions, unions campaigning to pass collective bargaining rights for San Francisco tenants and rent-control in Minnesota and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, Local 3299 in California fighting to divest pension funds from rent-gouging corporate landlords.
But even as labor rises out of its corner, we are seeing massive steps backward in Oregon’s budgets and policies that protect working class people’s housing. Oregon is experiencing historically high eviction levels while lawmakers slashed the Eviction Prevention Package by 75%. While the Service Employees International Union Local 503 was vocal in opposing the cuts during the session, labor was otherwise largely absent in the fight.
This summer, Oregon unions passed a resolution at the Oregon AFL-CIO convention requiring the state labor federation to adopt stronger rent control and tenant protections as a continued coalition priority in the 2027 legislative session.
How many more thousands of working class Oregonians will be evicted in the coming years? Landlords evicted nearly 2,400 Oregonians per month in 2025.
As I think about social justice work’s frequent failure to make concrete progress, our penchant to insulate ourselves in our little corners of expertise or even the pervasive apathy we experience from an onslaught of bad news, representatives that fail to represent and bureaucracies that kneecap advancement, I want to ask union leaders, staff and members: aren’t you tired of waiting?
I think of Langston Hughes’ poem, “Tired”:
I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two—
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
Taking a knife to our system won’t come from the top. We are in an emergency, a class war, a monsoon of rot that is spreading in every direction. We cannot afford industry divisions and jurisdiction squabbles. Every issue is a labor issue, and it is beyond foolish to pretend otherwise. We must push our unions, our leaders and our fellow members to demand more and better from our organizing.
Come, let us take the knife together — housed, unhoused, employed, unemployed, unionized, ununionized — and carve a better world for all.
New campaigns and elections
Staff at Youth Rights & Justice in Portland, a legal advocacy nonprofit, filed with the National Labor Relations Board, or the NLRB, on Dec. 1 to join the Oregon American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 75.
Amid an ongoing Starbucks Workers United national unfair labor practice strike and first contract campaign, baristas and shift supervisors at the Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard location voted 12-5 to join the union. On Dec. 23, another Portland area location also filed for an election.
On Dec. 10, technical employees at the Providence Portland Medical Center joined the continuing wave of health care unionizing and filed to join the Oregon Nurses Association, or ONA.
News producers, digital producers and assignment desk workers at KGW are aiming to join an established unit with directors and broadcast technicians at the news station. On Dec. 10, the workers filed for an election to be folded into the unit represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 48.
Rounding out the month, two groups of workers submitted filings on Dec. 29, including sales workers at Southern Glazer's Wine Distributors of Oregon in Wilsonville, who filed to join the Teamsters Joint Council No. 37, and outpatient infusion nurses at the St. Charles Bend Medical Center, who are organizing with ONA.
The winter holiday season can produce a dip in organizing, but given the prolonged closure of the NLRB during the government shutdown, I’m pleased to see that Oregon workers’ organizing efforts are ramping up.
Labor Actions
December was a history-making month for unionized Oregonians, with Starbucks workers continuing their first indefinite strike, Legacy advanced practice providers hitting the picket lines, and New Seasons workers averting a strike by finally securing a first contract after nearly three years.
Entering December, Starbucks workers at nearly a dozen locations across Oregon remained on strike after the nationwide unfair labor practice campaign kicked off Nov. 13. As the strike continued to gain traction, locations in Portland, Eugene, Hillsboro and Salem joined the action.
Starbucks Workers United has been in bargaining with the company since February 2024. Starbucks CEO Brian Niccols has yet to offer raises that exceed 1% per year, despite earning himself approximately 6,666 times what the average Starbucks worker made in 2024 in just 120 days.
As of Dec. 31, workers remained on strike.
After unionizing in late 2023, advanced practice providers at Legacy Health’s Emanuel and Good Samaritan locations in Portland went on strike Dec. 2, demanding a fair first contract. A little over a week later, 80 Legacy Go Health clinics and Legacy Pediatrics advanced practitioners notified the health care system that they would be joining the 140 providers already on strike. On Dec. 21, the providers made good on their notice and hit the picket lines.
In the last two weeks of the month, ONA and Legacy reached a tentative agreement, but on Dec. 27, the union announced that their members “resoundingly rejected the tentative agreement,” citing “Legacy’s bad-faith bargaining, disrespect for their profession, uncompetitive wages, and bloated executive pay.”
In a final push to reach an agreement before the new year, ONA announced a second tentative agreement on Dec. 30. Among its provisions, the proposed contract agreement included across-the-board wage increases and clearer pay scales, cost-of-living adjustments, increased extra-shift pay, enhanced compensation for night and extended shifts, just-cause protections and a new Labor–Management Committee. On Jan. 2, the union announced that providers overwhelmingly voted to ratify the contract, ending a 29-day strike.
On Dec. 16, the New Seasons Labor Union announced that 98% of members voted in the union’s first contract — a historic victory for the scrappy union that started as independent and affiliated with the United Electrical Workers just a few months ago. Wages were a primary concern for New Seasons workers, and according to the union, workers will see significant increases over the life of the contract, with the lowest-paid members seeing an immediate raise of 16.5%. A new base wage starts at $19 per hour — according to reporting from the Northwest Labor Press, Fred Meyer employees currently sit at a base wage of approximately $18 per hour.
New Seasons workers say the median union worker will earn $23.37 per hour, and more than 95% of members will make over $20 per hour. Workers will also see annual cost of living adjustments.
On Dec. 18, the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, or PCUN, Oregon’s farmworker union, held the first in a series of economic boycott and general strike days called “Day Without an Immigrant.”
PCUN called on immigrants and allies to stay home from work, school and stores to show the immense economic power immigrants hold in Oregon as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents continue to detain hundreds of Oregonians amid President Trump’s white supremacist agenda to remove immigrants and people of color from the United States.
The union held protests throughout the state, including in Woodburn and Salem.
These actions will continue once a month until International Workers’ Day, also known as “May Day,” including on Jan. 19, Feb. 16, March 16, April 1, and May 1.
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