For the first time in decades, Portland municipal workers involved in wastewater treatment and from park and road maintenance have gone on strike.

Portland is Oregon’s most populous city, with a metropolitan area of more than 2 million people. It is a major river port on the Willamette River, 100 km from the northern Pacific coast of the United States and 300 km south of Seattle.

There were 600 workers who took to the fight, organized in the Laborers’ Local 483 union. On December 14, the City of Portland and the union had reached a tentative agreement, but the city administration immediately disregarded it, refusing to implement the planned wage increases. This led to new unsuccessful negotiations and the proclamation of a strike.

The municipality reacted by proclaiming a state of emergency so that it could hire temporary contract workers to replace the strikers. It also attempted to file a series of legal injunctions to criminalize the strike and target individual workers who would strike. While unsuccessful, this legal action still had an intimidating purpose.

In preparation for the strike, Laborers’ Local 483 organized a demonstration on Saturday, January 28, which was attended by about 100 workers. Our comrades there distributed, in addition to The Communist Party newspaper (link to the latest issue) the first of three leaflets translated and published below, which denounced the employers’ attempts to criminalize the strike and linked them to the state repression of the recent national railroad strike.

On Wednesday, February 1, it was clear that no agreement would be reached. The union therefore called a second demonstration for late in the evening at the city’s water treatment plant in preparation for the strike to begin at midnight the same day.

The plant is a vital city facility, the largest water treatment facility between Seattle and San Francisco, a 1,300-mile stretch of coastline. For the duration of the pandemic from Ovid 19, workers were considered "essential" and forced to work, with no compensation for additional risk and fatigue.

More than 300 workers were present at the demonstration. There was immediately a great spirit of solidarity, with workers from various unions such as AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), Teamsters, SEIU (Service Employees Industrial Union) and others participating.

Workers were confident that scabs would be of little use. Several recounted that it had taken them years to learn how to operate the plant and equipment, which was built in the 1950s and was constantly breaking down.

Since the night the strike began, solidarity from other workers has shown itself even more strongly. Workers from the "Local 209" section of the Steam Fitters Union (installation and maintenance of heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems) who were working inside the building refused to continue working. The water treatment plant requires numerous trucks in and out to remove sludge every day, or the entire plant will break down. The picket worked to block or slow the flow of trucks. One engineer stopped the train in front of the main entrance to the plant, blocking it for a long time, then pulling out when forced as slowly as possible. Word of the strike spread among railway workers who repeated the same action in the following days. Workers and union activists from other companies, such as UPS and the nearby logistics warehouse of a beer company, participated in the picket line. Many trucks turned around never to return, with drivers expressing solidarity with the struggle and interest in organizing at their workplaces.

Our comrades participated in the picket lines, helping the workers to strengthen them and supporting those among the most combative who wanted to make them more effective, a fact recognized and appreciated by the workers, several of whom also expressed agreement with the party’s union direction expressed in the leaflets distributed. This conduct, of course, did not please at all the militants of the opportunist parties present, in the unions and on the picket lines, especially those of the Democratic Socialists of America, who in the following days tried, to no avail, to intimidate our comrades.

On Friday, as a heavy rainstorm loomed, the City Council tried desperately to end the strike, as sewage overflow seemed imminent. It began issuing statements to local media creating a scare campaign about the "violence" of workers on the picket lines. He doubled the police presence at the picket lines.

Forces spread over four picket lines were concentrated by workers in front of the water treatment plant. On Saturday, workers gathered from 6 a.m. and held another large demonstration to block trucks from entering the plant. Our comrades drafted and distributed a second leaflet, posted below. Police began threatening to arrest workers who blocked the trucks. Union leaders began to impose a strike discipline of blocking the trucks for as little as thirty seconds, as allowed by law.

The strike ended that evening, Sunday, February 5, at 1 a.m., with a compromise in which most of the workers’ wage demands were met, with a 13 percent wage increase retroactive to July 2022.

Local 483 ended the strike with a demonstration in which almost all workers expressed a positive evaluation towards the agreement. Our comrades distributed a third short leaflet noting the value of these days of struggle, which demonstrated the workers’ instinct to unite above divisions between companies and categories and the correctness of the party’s union direction in this regard.

Portland municipal workers Fighting for freedom to strike (Saturday, Jan. 28)

In the face of Portland’s bourgeois municipal administration trying to criminalize a potential strike, it is time for workers to unite in struggle and organize in a united union front to make it clear to our class enemies that their attacks on the freedom to strike will no longer stand!

On December 14, Portland City Hall and the municipal workers’ union had signed an agreement. Not even a month later, the local government took it back. Portland City Hall is refusing to implement the agreed wages, placing workers in the wrong qualifications and with a different step increase than the one negotiated. Thus the 5% wage increase as agreed upon is not applied.

Global inflation continues to rise, reducing the purchasing power and thus the real wages of workers around the world. Capitalists’ profits skyrocket as preparations for war continue. Because the capitalist class is always working to deprive workers of as much wages as possible in order to increase their profits, workers are driven by necessity to act.

The local capitalist class is frightened by the strength of the city’s workers because the prospect of the wastewater treatment plant closing and the roads freezing threatens the profit-oriented activities taking place in the city.

From the recent intervention of the federal government to ban the railroad workers’ strike to the threatened injunction by Portland City Hall to criminalize municipal workers’ strikes, it is clear that it is the capitalist class that decides what is and what is not illegal, depending on what suits it best. In reality, we live in a perpetual state of class struggle, which makes it all the more necessary for workers of all categories to join forces in a class-based Single Trade Union Front.

Portland: End capitalism’s violent campaign of intimidation against municipal workers (Friday, Feb. 3)

With only a few days to go before more than 600 municipal workers go on strike, the city’s ruling class is panicking over the prospect of a disaster in the sewer system. With the arrival of rain, with an inactive sewage treatment plant, the bosses may be forced to strike a deal with the workers to avoid facing far worse consequences.

Thanks to the declaration of a "state of emergency", the city administration was able to call for more workers, scabs, who, not caring about the strike, went to work. However, this action seems to have been unsuccessful thanks to the tenacity of the striking workers with their picket lines and also thanks to the solidarity of workers throughout the city. A condition, the latter, that will be increasingly essential to defend the collective interests of the working class.

In response, the city’s capitalist administration, through the mayor’s office, issued statements dutifully disseminated by bourgeois media to perpetuate a campaign of vilification toward the workers and create a situation to justify state repression. Like the Willamette River, the bosses and their media cover themselves in excrement.

Not to be outdone is the left wing of capital, the Democratic Party, which, through its elected advisers, has sided against the workers. Nationally, Biden and "democratic socialist" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have effectively crushed the railroad workers’ strike. The goal of local Democrats is the same.

To avoid becoming the next Detroit, start-ups on the Silicon Valley model and skilled workers have been encouraged to move to Portland in recent years. But, for the first time since the 1980s, Portland’s population is declining.

As the global capitalist system has entered an ever-deepening economic crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty and decay have emerged in several neighborhoods in the city, the result of an increasingly decadent capital economy that destroys social relations by making true human community impossible. The bourgeois illusion of being able to "make money" in Portland has definitely vanished.

Moreover, the deepening crisis has made the ruling class less and less willing to give wage increases to municipal workers. During the pandemic, workers who kept "critical" infrastructure running and produced the goods we all need to live were forced to work and labeled "essential workers", effectively sacrificed for the "greater good" of the nation. Hundreds of thousands of workers died, a scenario that effectively created a labor shortage. Now since this pandemic crisis has abated, the "we are all in the same boat" propaganda is momentarily shelved. But reviving the economy has meant intensifying the employers’ attack on workers’ wages and stubbornly refusing to negotiate. Wherever possible, they are pushing workers and fighting unions to the brink, with the ultimate goal of breaking any sincere collective defense body in order to reduce labor market costs.

The current actions in the city of Portland are but one piece of evidence that the entire bourgeois order is in essence an "organized and criminal association against the working class". It exists to extort surplus value from the wage-earning class, which if it does not accept the scraps offered will be violently attacked.

Workers have been educated to believe the lie that the government of capital is "democratic", "for and of the people", founded in the "land of the free". The truth sees workers fighting tooth and nail for their daily bread against state violence.

This government is nothing but one of the expressions of capitalism, and the "two parties" (Democrats and Republicans) serve the same class interests as the regime of capital. Why should labor unions support the political party that stabs them in the back?

We call for workers around the world to unite in a single class union front, free from the political maneuvers of capitalism, which can conduct its own defensive struggles, in its own interest.

However, workers’ defensive struggles will one day have to shift to a revolutionary proletarian counteroffensive, led by a centralized party to abolish class society for good.

The Portland municipal workers’ strike is over (Sunday, Feb. 5)

Machinists blocking entrances to the water treatment plant with incredibly long and slow trains. A sludge truck driver honoring the picket line and going home to join the union so that sludge overflows from the plant. Workers from various other sectors who went to the picket line before and after going to work, to put their bodies between trucks and scab vans while being threatened with arrest by police. Municipal workers themselves who finally took the risk of going on strike in defense of their living conditions. The Portland municipal workers’ strike demonstrated the strength of a united class.

Some workers were surprised to see how city institutions regard workers and how they want to exploit them as much and more than private companies do. But this is the experience of all workers internationally in every sector.

It is only through the uniting of arms above sectors and borders that the working class can truly struggle to end its exploitative condition under capitalism and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. We must organize as a class to coordinate struggle activities. Harm to one is harm to all.

 

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