Workers who bake Chicken in a Biskit are on strike

ABE PROCTOR / PORTLAND COMMUNITY COLLEGE

PRIMER

PANTHER PRIDE: PCC’s Cascade campus in North Portland.

Community Spread

The board of the state’s largest higher-education institution is split on requiring shots.

Portland Community College is approaching a showdown this week over whether to require COVID-19 vaccinations for returning students, faculty and sta .

THE POLICY

On June 21, Portland Community College President Mark Mitsui announced that, unlike all of Oregon’s four-year public universities, PCC would not require COVID shots as a condition for returning to campus.

“Because vaccination access and hesitancy looks different across racial lines, vaccination requirements create a barrier to educational access that will disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC),” the college explained in a statement. “This would not reflect PCC’s institutional values of equity, inclusion and belonging.”

WHO WANTS TO CHANGE IT

At a special PCC board meeting Aug. 10, former Portland City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, proposed that the board reconsider mandating vaccinations. Saltzman’s proposal, first reported by the Portland Tribune, passed by a narrow 4-3 vote.

“We have a moral obligation to protect the health of our employees and students and a global obligation to lean into this pandemic,” says Saltzman, who joined the PCC board in 2019. “I am most concerned about the rapid increase of pediatric [hospital] admissions. A lot of our employees and students have children, and those under 12 years old are sitting ducks.”

WHO RESISTS THE CHANGE

Backing Mitsui’s earlier position, board chair Mohamed Alyajouri, a health care administrator who oversees two clinics for Oregon Health & Science University, led opposition to putting a vaccine mandate on the board agenda. In addition to equity issues, Alyajouri points to a staff report, which found that 85% of returning students will be vaccinated when classes start in the fall, far in excess of Gov. Kate Brown’s goal of 70%. So there may not be much greater efficacy in demanding that people get shots. Alyajouri emphasizes that he and the rest of the board are pro-vaccine; he just thinks a mandate could do more harm than good. “It won’t get us to a higher rate of vaccination,” he says. “It will just push away those who weren’t getting the vaccine anyway.”

WHY IT MATTERS

PCC is the state’s largest higher-education institution, serving 60,000 full- and parttime students. Lane Community College has mandated vaccinations for the fall, and many big city K-12 school districts are doing so as well, as the Delta variant rips through unvaccinated America. Officials at OHSU projected last week that Delta infections would place more than 1,000 COVID-19 patients in hospitals by Labor Day, outstripping the state’s supply of hospital beds by at least 400.

Although the PCC faculty and classified unions have not yet taken a formal position on the issue, Michelle DuBarry, a spokeswoman for the faculty union, says her sense is that employees want PCC to act to protect their health. “We have been hearing strongly from a lot of members who feel strongly about a mandate,” DuBarry says.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

When the board meets Aug. 19, Saltzman says he will push hard to mandate vaccinations by January—it’s too late for the fall. He is working on rallying support from medical experts and other elected o cials. Says Saltzman, “I’m going to take this to the wire.” NIGEL JAQUISS.

Cookie Contract

THE COOKIE CRUMBLES: Mary Vigil at a Nabisco protest.

Oreo makers in North Portland launch a national strike.

Last week, more than 200 Nabisco workers in Northeast Portland walked out of their cookie and cracker factory and onto a picket line—launching a strike that has since gone national.

WHO WENT ON STRIKE

The 200 workers are part of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union Local 364. On Wednesday, about 15 union members held signs that read “Nabisco: Killing America’s Middle Class” and “Oreo is on strike.”

WHAT THEY MAKE

The Nabisco bakery along Northeast Columbia Boulevard—tucked behind several fast-food restaurants at the intersection with Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard—produces Oreo and Chips Ahoy! cookies and Ritz, Premium saltine and Chicken in a Biskit crackers. It occasionally fills the nearby Woodlawn neighborhood with the smell of melting chocolate. It is owned by Chicago snack giant Mondelez International.

Union vice president Mike Burlingham says nothing new is being produced at the bakery during the strike, but cookies and crackers already packaged are still being loaded onto trucks. “At this time, there aren’t any lines running,” Burlingham says.

But Mondelez begs to differ, telling WW it has a contingency plan to produce Oreos during a strike. “We have activated that plan and are committed to continuing to supply our delicious snacks to retailers and consumers,” a company representative said. The company did not share the details of that contingency plan.

WHAT THEY WANT

The workers plan to strike until the company agrees to negotiate a new contract, says Burlingham.

One of the issues is a proposal by Mondelez to eliminate overtime pay for working on the weekends by altering the schedule to incorporate weekends into the 40-hour work week.

Donna Marks has worked at this facility for 17 years in environmental health services. She says after the Nabisco brand was absorbed by Mondelez in 2012 after Kraft Foods split into two entities, one being Mondelez, “the environment changed.”

“I used to enjoy this job, it used to be like a family to me. Now, they want us to work more and pay us less, and everything that we have, we have because we negotiated,” Marks says. “They want to take away what we fought for with no negotiation. They act as if they gave us something.”

WHY IT MATTERS

Portland was the first of Nabisco’s facilities across the country to strike. Since then, workers at a bakery in Richmond, Va., and a sales center in Aurora, Colo., have gone on strike, too. (Other unions in the Portland facility—including the machinists, electricians and operating engineers—are honoring the picket line.)

The labor dispute follows years of Mondelez cutting employee pensions and halving its unionized workforce by closing bakeries in New Jersey and Atlanta. That leaves just three Nabisco bakeries operating in the U.S.: in Portland, Chicago and Richmond.

So what happens on this Northeast Portland sidewalk has significant implications for who will make Ritz crackers in the coming decades.

On Aug. 13, the company fenced o the entire property with orange vinyl fencing, pushing the strikers closer to Columbia Boulevard, a thoroughfare for big trucks and speeding cars.

“It’s definitely an intimidation thing,” says Burlingham. “We’re getting sandblasted on the sidewalk as truckers blow by.” SOPHIE PEEL.