Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 114 union members at Franz Bakery have voted to accept a new labor contract, ending 20 days of striking that began on Oct. 31. Union members were striking at Franz’s Eugene-Springfield location.

The workers began their strike seeking better working conditions and pay. Workers also said that the bakery was understaffed, which meant employees were being overworked.

Rick Ryland, a union member interviewed during the strike, said, “I am doing two to three people’s jobs every day, for lack of staffing.”

Workers also reported few off days and at times working 12 hours a day, six days a week.

The new three-year contract, which was approved on the evening of Nov. 20, includes a wage increase, retroactive pay, retirement improvements and the maintenance of health benefits, according to a statement by BCTGM International.

This is a developing story, stay with us for updates.

On Nov. 7, approximately 40 employees picketed in front of Franz’s Eugene-Springfield location as their strike concluded its seventh day. Approximately 180 workers are taking part in the strike.

Steve Dade is the Union Executive Board Vice President and has worked at Franz for 28 years.

Dade said the Bakers Union 114 is on strike because of Unfair Labor Practices, including Oregon Occupational Safety and Health violations, safety hazards, unfair treatment, harassment of union members and poor quality of life.

“There’s a lot of six days a week, 12-hour shifts for months. You don’t get to see your family,” Dade said. “I’ve had a daughter who has grown up, and I missed a lot of events for her growing up.”

Brad Currier, the business agent and executive board recorder for Local 114, said that management does a poor job of training staff, creating serious safety hazards.

“I could take you in there right now and show you a safety exit on a proof box that has a release. I pointed out years ago that it does not function, it can trap you in there, and to this day, I guarantee you it does not open,” said Currier.

Dade added that because of faulty equipment and poor training, employees are at risk of losing a limb. 

“Nobody can unlock the engaging power of that machine,” Dade said. “They don’t teach you to do that. They just say, ‘cut the power,’ but it is actually still engaged, and you lose a limb or something.”

Local 144 Business Agent David Gettman said that Franz employees are overworked and understaffed. 

“They [management] refused to add enough staff to give them time off… and now they are removing all of their ability to take personal time off for their child’s birthdays for weddings, any of that denied even six months in advance notice,” said Gettman.

Gettman added that at times, employees will show up ready for their shift, and minutes before they will have their shift canceled and have to make up that shift on their day off. 

Union member Rick Ryland said that most of the time, employees do the work of two or three people.

“I am responsible for running the line, distributing products, unloading and loading trucks, all at the same time. That is my job,” Ryland said. “I am doing two to three people’s jobs every day, for lack of staffing.”

Ryland said that Local 114 members at Franz have received less than $3 in raises over the past 10 years and a gift card in compensation. 

“A $50 gift card to Domino’s pizza, gas or Bi-Mart,” Ryland said. “50 bucks for showing up during a national pandemic.”

Gettman emphasized that Local 114 union members are asking management to “be treated like human beings in this company.”

The post Franz Bakery workers strike against unsafe working conditions appeared first on Daily Emerald.

There are 28 days until the Nov. 5 2024 general election. For some Oregonians, this election will be one of their first times voting or first time voting
from a new address. Here is some information on how to register to vote in Oregon.

For Oregon residents who recently moved to Oregon from out of state, there are two ways to register to vote: online and via voter registration card.

Residents looking to register online must show a valid Oregon drivers license, permit or ID card issued by the DMV.

If a resident does not have any of these forms of identification they can still use an online voter registration application. Upon entering the requested information, which includes an Oregon address and the last four digits of one’s social security number, applicants must print out their form and deliver it to their county elections office.

For those in Eugene, this would be at the Lane County Elections office at 275 W 10th Ave in downtown Eugene.

For those who do not wish to register online, they may pick up a voter registration form from the Lane County Elections office, and then return it upon completion. They also may mail their form in.

Any legal citizen over the age of 16 is permitted to register to vote in the State of Oregon. However they must be 18 years of age or older to receive a
ballot. The deadline to become a registered voter in Oregon is Oct. 15.

For voters who are already registered to vote in Oregon, but want to register at a new address, they have until 8 p.m. on Election Day (Nov. 5) to change their registration and cast a ballot.

However, if a resident is updating their registration close to an election, they may have to request their ballot at the Lane County Elections office, as
they will not be receiving it in the mail.

For voters who are in Eugene but want to vote in their home state — some of the over 11,000 out-of-state students attending the University of Oregon, for example — they may request an absentee ballot. Individuals requesting absentee ballots should fill out an Absentee Ballot Request Form and return it to the Lane County Elections office.

Residents can check to make sure their voter registration is up to date and track the status of their ballot with the Oregon Secretary of State’s site, My Vote.

On Oct. 16, the day after the Oregon voter registration deadline, ballots will begin to be mailed to voters. They will continue to be mailed out to all approximately three million registered Oregon voters until Oct. 22.

The last day to mail in an absentee or replacement ballot is Oct. 31, on Halloween.

Nov. 5 is election day. Voters will have until 8 p.m. on election day to either drop off their ballot at an official dropbox or have their ballot in the mail and postmarked.

Any ballots received after this date and time will be excluded from the count.

Nine miles north of Eugene, a project that could affect the future of farming and solar energy production in the Willamette Valley is taking place.

The South Korean company Hanwha Qcells is petitioning the Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council to build the “Muddy Creek Energy Park,” but local citizens and farmers have serious concerns about its environmental impact and the future of the Willamette Valley.

If completed, the park would be the largest solar farm in Oregon, encompassing a proposed 1,588 acres along Gap Road between Brownsville and Harrisburg. According to Qcells’ website, the Muddy Creek solar farm has the potential to supply green energy to up to 34,000 homes and bring in 100 union construction jobs.

However, some local farmers and residents are resistant to the proposal. They say that the project will substantially hurt the environment and ruin the rare and valuable farmland on which it is projected to be built.

David Rogers is the spokesperson for “Friends of Gap Road,” a community group that formed in opposition to the project. Rogers said that if the project succeeded, the land would be irreversibly altered and could never be valuable farmland again, should the site be decommissioned.

“They are going to have to pour concrete pilings for the panels. And to do this, they’re going to have to dig up and mix the clay with the topsoil,” Rogers said. “Once it’s mixed, you can never, you can never separate it. So this is never going to go back to it will never go back to farmland once this happens.”

In the first and currently only Muddy Creek Public Information Meeting hosted by the Oregon Department of Energy in July 2023, Assistant Director for Siting at Oregon Department of Energy Todd Cornett addressed a portion of this issue.

“In their [Qcells’] application they have to submit to us how they’re gonna decommission the facility,” Cornett said. “This application will also include a bond fully-funded by Qcells of how much decommissioning will cost, so that when the time comes the money is there to ensure that happens.”

Cornett also said that there will also be a “condition that says at the end of the useful life of the facility they [Qcells] will return the site to a useful non-hazardous state.”

One of the concerns expressed by Rogers and Friends of Gap Road is that the decision on whether the project will proceed does not lie in the hands of local elected officials, but rather in that of the Oregon’s Energy Facility Siting Council, appointed by the governor.

Should the Muddy Creek project be eventually approved by the Siting Council, it could set a precedent in Oregon of converting high-value farmland into industrial solar farms.

For farmers such as Rogers, who farms 750 acres of land just 4 miles north of the proposed project site, that sounds like a nightmare.

“I’ve been here 50 years so I watched what happened to my beloved Northern California,” Rogers said. “If this project goes through, and they’re able to make this go through, I’m afraid we’re going to see this [industrial solar farms] all the way up the valley from here to Portland.”

The Muddy Creek site is currently being leased to Qcells by what Rogers said is “a lot of absentee landowners.” Before any application can be submitted to the Siting Council, a two-year study mandated by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife must take place.

“We get hundreds of thousands of ducks and geese migrating through this area,” said Rogers. “Annual ryegrass [which grows on the planned project site] is one of the reasons ODFW wants to do a study, because a threatened species called the [Streaked] Horned Lark…loves to nest in annual ryegrass fields.”

Rogers wants to make it abundantly clear that neither he, nor the Friends of Gap Road, are against solar energy. Rogers said, “We [Friends of Gap Road] are absolutely not against solar power, not against changing over to solar. Our rub is it shouldn’t be done on farmland.”

The next time the public will get to speak on the Muddy Creek project will be after the Siting Council accepts the application, which does not seem to be anytime soon as first the two-year study must be completed.

In the meantime, Rogers said that the Friends of Gap Road intends to lobby the Oregon State legislature in the upcoming 2025 session to shift the decision away from the Siting Council’s jurisdiction, and back to that of the Land Conservation and Development Commission. This would make approval of the project on such a large swath of land more difficult. A 2019 amendment shifted the decision away from LCDC and to the Siting Council.

The next meeting of the Friends of Gap Road will be after the “fall harvest gets in,” according to Rogers. “As you know, a lot of our members are farmers.” Rogers said this would most likely be within the next five weeks.

The Emerald reached out to Hanwha Qcells repeatedly for this story, but did not receive any response.

On Sept. 24, the Oregon Secretary of State’s office and the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles announced that they had identified a total of 1,259 possible non-citizens that had been mistakenly registered to vote. 

This comes nearly two weeks after the Oregon Secretary of State’s office announced that they had identified 306 people who had been similarly improperly registered. The state said that these people had been improperly registered due to clerical errors by DMV staff.

Ever since January of 2016, US-Citizens who are also Oregon residents have been automatically registered to vote in the state upon being issued a driver’s license — this was known as the Oregon Motor Voter law.

In 2021, Democratic lawmakers passed a law that permitted undocumented immigrants to obtain a driver’s license without proof of legal residence. It is suspected that DMV staff mistakenly registered foreign passports and birth certificates as U.S. identification, thus allowing for the error to take place. 

State officials said that the 2021 law created an opportunity in the system for non-citizens to become registered voters.

35 of the non-citizens registered to vote were eligible to vote in Lane County. After an audit, Lane County Elections confirmed that one mistakenly registered non-citizen voted in Lane County.

The DMV and Oregon Secretary of State’s office are taking action to fix the error. They have deactivated all of the identified improperly registered voters and alerted them of the error. The DMV will not require a more thorough identification process be completed when applying for a driver’s license in addition to other process changes aimed at preventing future errors.

Oregon Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade said that the error will have no impact on the 2024 general election.

As fall term at the University of Oregon approaches, students from all over the country are coming to Eugene. Many of these students will be renting for the first time, in a city whose renter protection laws may be unfamiliar to them. 

Kevin Cronin, a board member of the Springfield Eugene Tenant Association, has for years successfully lobbied the City of Eugene to pass Phase I and Phase II renter protections. These protections provide a myriad of support services for renters, including relocation assistance and a cap on application fees. 

“[As a result of Phase I renter protections], landlords actually have to provide some basic information about your rights as a renter, and that should come with your lease paperwork,” Cronin said.

Cronin also said that the Springfield Eugene Tenant Association has a hotline for renters, which they can call to troubleshoot any issues they’re facing with a knowledgeable person. 

“It’s good to have a conversation with someone who has been through that before, and has had conversations with hundreds of other students who have faced similar problems,” Cronin said. “We don’t really have that in other cities, and so that’s one of the big advantages of coming to the UO — is that you have strong renter protections in the city of Eugene.”

Wesley Krier, a rising sophomore at UO, said that he didn’t know about some of the services provided by the Eugene Springfield Tenant Association. 

“I wouldn’t say a lot of renters, including myself, knew about that kind of service. But I think it is helpful for renters to be able to chat with people who are a third party,” Krier said.

Krier also mentioned that when he was signing his lease paperwork, there was a page with renters’ rights and protections detailed. This was something that came about as a result of Eugene’s Phase I renter protections.

One of the main issues that Cronin wanted students to be aware of was not only their rights as renters, but also of the assistance available to them.

“If you have a broken window, or a door wont lock, or your heat won’t work, those are all issues that need to be addressed [legally] within 48 hours,” said Cornin. “If you can’t pay your rent…there is help available for students. Start to make a plan to find rent assistance. The last thing we want is for any students to end up homeless because they can’t afford their rent.”

Additionally, Cronin pointed out that Associated Students of the University of Oregon legal services can be incredibly helpful for students attempting to navigate landlord-tenant laws.

Approximately 8% of undergraduate college students in the United States are experiencing homelessness. In a city such as Eugene where the average apartment price is over $1,200 for a studio apartment, it is vitally important for all renters, and especially students, to be aware of help available to them.

On the morning of August 6, approximately one dozen protesters gathered outside the Eugene Municipal Courthouse, demonstrating against the city’s policy of sweeping homeless camps.

The catalyst for the demonstration was the arraignment of three homeless activists who had been arrested for disrupting a July 22 Eugene City Council meeting. 

Jetty Etty, one of the activists who’s arraignment took place that day, is facing seven charges including obstructing government officials, disorderly conduct and criminal trespass.

Not all of the pending charges are related to the July 22 disruption.

Etty said that her choice to protest at the city council meeting was in response to the Union Pacific Railroad in conjunction with Eugene Police Department sweeping homeless camps in mid-July, an action that Jetty alleges displaced approximately 200 people.

After unhoused individuals had been removed, Etty said she then helped them up camp on a nearby piece of Bureau of Land Management land, which she said they were legally permitted to camp on for 14 days. Etty said the city served them with a 72 hour notice to vacate, but then returned 23 hours later and said everyone had 15 minutes to leave.

“I was pissed because they had taken all of these people’s things, and were just like targeting them. And so we went to city council,” she said.

Etty claims that security at the council meeting was in the back corner when they entered the council chamber, and one person even opened the door for them to enter the chamber.

“I think one of the reasons why they are pushing these charges so hard is because like ‘You stupid idiots just got caught in the back, not doing your job, not protecting city council. And we went past and you’re going to make it seem like we were violent, and like we went in in this crazy manner when we didn’t.’”

Nick Drake, another demonstrator who was putting up signs outside of the courthouse, said that the city isn’t doing enough to stem the issue of homelessness.

“The city really doesn’t have a solution other than criminalizing homelessness,” Drake said. “Even the CSS Hut sites would be a real solution, but only 260 of them at 60% occupancy, that’s less than 200 [people]. The point in time count was perhaps 3,000 unhoused people, so we’d need to have at least that many hut sites, and that’s not really housing either because they don’t have an address and they have limited access to electricity there.”

CSS, or Community Supported Shelters, are micro-homes built for unhoused people in sites designated by the city. Drake said he believes that while microsites are beneficial for the unhoused community, there are not enough of them nor do they provide an adequate substitute for permanent housing.

The 2024 Lane County Point in Time Count recorded 3,085 unhoused people in Lane County during the night of January 31, 2024.

Drake, who himself was homeless as a teen in Eugene during the 1990s, said he feels that the bar for new renters in Eugene is far too high.

“I was a homeless teen here in the ‘90s and could not get housing,” Drake said. “Arresting everyone and putting them in the court system is A: very expensive and B: not a solution.

I think if the people of Eugene knew what the police were up to against the poor people of our city, they would probably freak out.”

A recording of the July 22 council meeting disruption can be found on the city’s YouTube channel at the timestamp of 47:23.