The Oregon Labor Dispatch is a weekly email and blog series designed to keep Oregon’s workers informed of the latest news about unions, worker power, and much more. Each week, we bring you a curated selection of news stories, graphics, and information about upcoming events and actions. When Oregon’s Labor Movement is connected, updated and informed we are able to be stronger advocates for all working Oregonians.
If you have a news story, event or action you’d like to see featured in the Oregon Labor Dispatch please email us at communications@oraflcio.org.
🗓️ UPCOMING EVENTS
Pacific Northwest Labor History Association Labor History Conference
April 25 & 26
“Labor in a Hostile Political Environment: What Can Labor History Teach Us?”
NECA/IBEW Electrical Training Center, 16021 NE Airport Way, Portland
📣 TAKE ACTION
Elon Musk and his unaccountable DOGE are threatening vital programs across the government, politicizing the federal workforce that keeps our country running, and violating Americans’ rights by seizing our private data.
The AFL-CIO is collecting stories from workers and working families who are affected by the Trump administration’s new policies.
🛠️ RESOURCES
The Oregon AFL-CIO’s compendium of resources to address federal threats against workers from immigration to LGBTQIA+ rights.
📖 MUST READ
March 6, 2025 | Oregon AFL-CIO
SB 916, which would lift the prohibition against striking workers applying for Unemployment Insurance, passed out of the Senate Committee on Labor and Business and is headed to a full vote of the Oregon Senate. After Senate passage, the bill will go to committee in the Oregon House of Representatives.
March 4, 2025 | National Partnership for Women & Families
Amid a barrage of harmful Executive Orders, confirmation hearings for dangerous and unqualified political nominees, unprecedented firing of federal employees along with restructuring or near elimination of federal agencies, Court decisions and more, the Administration is abusing its power to turn back the clock on rights and protections for hundreds of millions of people.
🏔️ OREGON LABOR
March 5, 2025 | NW Labor Press
Dayne Galash spent the summer of 2024 fighting Eastern Oregon forest fires with hand tools and hoses, driving engines through the smoke, one fire after another for months, sometimes 16 hours a day. And yet late in the afternoon Feb. 14, 2025, he got a call from a supervisor at the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).
March 5, 2025 | KLCC
Faculty and student workers at the University of Oregon could vote this month to authorize their unions to strike.
March 3, 2025 | Labor Notes
After 46 days on the picket line, nurses walked back into eight Providence hospitals across Oregon in good spirits after ratifying a new contract with their employer February 26. Their effort was bolstered by striking doctors, nurse practitioners, and other hospitalists at Providence St. Vincent’s, and doctors, nurses, and midwives at the Providence Women’s Clinics.
March 5, 2025 | The Oregonian
Federal officials appeared poised to push more than 1 million square feet into Portland’s already ailing office market and sell off government buildings across the state as the Trump administration continues to hunt for costs to cut.
March 5, 2025 | NW Labor Press
A unit of 114 laboratory scientists and technicians working at Providence Portland hospital voted Feb. 19 to unionize. The tally was 79-23 in favor of joining Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (OFNHP). They were formerly Providence employees, and they work at the Providence facility on 4400 NE Halsey St. But in 2023, the Catholic health chain outsourced diagnostic lab operations and leased their workplace to a giant for-profit company, Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, known as LabCorp.
🏛️POLITICS
March 5, 2025 | AP
A president’s speech to Congress — even without the formal gloss of a State of the Union address — is typically a time for a call to national unity and predictable claims about the country being strong. But that wasn’t President Donald Trump’s plan. His speech on Tuesday night was relentlessly partisan, boasting about his election victory and criticizing Democrats for failing to recognize his accomplishments.
March 4, 2025 | USA Today
The first few weeks of President Donald Trump's second term has focused on efforts to reshape the federal government largely through mass firings of federal workers. But he rarely mentioned them in his address to Congress Tuesday night.
March 6, 2025 | The Guardian
A federal court ruled that Donald Trump’s abrupt firing of a former senior official at the top US labor watchdog was illegal, and ordered that she be reinstated.
⚠️FEDERAL ATTACKS
March 1, 2025 | The Washington Post
The Trump administration is requesting data from all federal agencies about government resources devoted to union matters, potentially setting the stage for a showdown between the White House and federal unions.
February 28, 2025 | CNN
The Trump administration has its government-shrinking sights set on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where around 800 employees have been tapped for termination, according to two sources close to the agency. More layoffs are possible Friday, one of the sources said, potentially costing the weather, climate and environmental agency more than a thousand employees by the end of the week.
February 28, 2025 | The Washington Post
Agencies across the federal government are dismantling offices that enforce civil rights and antidiscrimination laws under a Trump administration push to shrink the workforce, weakening the government’s ability to deliver on legal obligations to protect workers’ rights.
February 28, 2025 | The New York Times
Education Department employees received an email on Friday offering buyouts ahead of what were described as “very significant” layoffs.
Trump has implemented many Project 2025 proposals, but there’s more he could do. Here’s a breakdown.
March 3, 2025 | Boston Globe
Since taking office, President Trump has signed a wave of executive orders that align closely with Project 2025, a detailed conservative blueprint from the Heritage Foundation for governing in a second Trump term. The initiative calls for gutting the federal workforce, rolling back diversity and LGBTQ programs, and ramping up immigration enforcement, among other moves.
🚨ATTACKS ON IMMIGRANTS
March 6, 2025 | Reuters
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is planning to revoke temporary legal status for some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the conflict with Russia, a senior Trump official and three sources familiar with the matter said, potentially putting them on a fast-track to deportation.
February 27, 2025 | Immigration Impact
The new wave of cruelty includes plans that plainly violate existing law. Many of these attacks seem designed to tee up court battles intended to weaken the rights and wellbeing of children in the United States.
🫱🏼🫲🏽 THE LABOR MOVEMENT
March 03, 2025 | Labor Notes
The Washington Post broke the news February 20 that Trump was on the verge of issuing an executive order to dissolve the independent leadership of USPS and move it into the executive branch under the Department of Commerce, now led by enthusiastic privatizer Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street banker. Trump confirmed the next day that he was “looking at” this option.
📣 STRIKES & COLLECTIVE BARGAINING
March 4, 2025 | Becker’s Hospital Review
The union and hospital began negotiating a new contract in November, according to NYSNA. Union members voted to authorize a strike in February. In a statement shared with Becker's, the hospital said that management aims "to reach an agreement that continues to provide our valued nurses with competitive compensation, benefits and a safe, supportive working environment." The union contends that management has failed to agree to a fair labor deal that retains enough experienced nurses to provide safe patient care to patients.
March 3, 2025 | The Advocate
Around 40 union workers protested outside the terminal on Florida and N. 22nd Street early Monday morning, marking the beginning of a bus worker strike that has already brought down multiple bus routes. Capital Area Transit System workers with the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1546 chanted "We move this city!" and cheered as cars, semi-trucks and emergency vehicles drove by, many honking in support.
March 3, 2025 | UCSD Guardian
Over 4,000 UC San Diego employees participated in a series of strikes between Feb. 26 to 28 as part of a statewide unfair labor practice strike organized by two labor unions: the University Professional and Technical Employees CWA Local 9119 union and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Local 3299 union. Across all University of California campuses, over 20,000 healthcare, research, technical, and service professionals participated in the strike.
📊 THE ECONOMY
March 4, 2025 | The Washington Post
The Trump administration is suggesting a change in the way economic growth is measured, just as the economy appears poised to notch its worst performance since the pandemic-era shutdowns. On Monday, an economic growth model from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta forecast a steep decline for the first three months of this year — a 2.8 percent contraction in economic growth, after nearly three years of solid growth.
👥 ORGANIZING
March 3, 2025 | Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work
That is the topic of “We Are the Union,” the new book by Eric Blanc, an activist and professor of Labor studies at Rutgers. Blanc’s book focuses on worker-to-worker organizing, a (wildly successful!) method of building and growing unions from the ground up, not from the top down.
🖼️ GRAPHICS TO SHARE
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