One Half of One Percent

Portland Community College’s two unions walked off the job this morning at 10:30 a.m. This is the first strike in PCC’s history and the first at any community college in Oregon. The Federation of Faculty and Academic Professionals and the Federation of Classified Employees represent 2,300 workers. They bargained for ten months. The college’s final offer, raised to 0.5 percent on Friday, was still a cost-of-living increase the unions rejected. The unions authorized a strike by identical margins: 94 percent.

The administration frames the impasse as a fiscal problem. PCC has cut $14 million from its current budget. It predicts another $21 million deficit in the next biennium. State appropriations are falling, and federal funding is uncertain. None of this is fabricated. But the college increased the president’s office budget by $17 million and directed, in the unions’ accounting, unspecified sums toward administrative priorities the unions dispute. The constraint exists. The priorities that shaped it are a choice.

Community colleges credential, sort, and prepare workers for a labor market that requires trained employees at a price that public subsidy makes possible. The institution’s product is a credentialed workforce. Teaching is the labor that produces it. PCC enrolls more than 50,000 students annually: working adults, first-generation students, immigrants, and people seeking a foothold in an economy that offers fewer and fewer stable paths. The institution’s social function is to reproduce a skilled workforce. The faculty who teach and the classified staff who keep it running — food service workers, IT staff, advisors, and administrative support — make that function possible. The college’s offer tells those workers that their labor, which sustains an institution serving tens of thousands, is worth less than inflation. It is institutional policy.

Oregon’s legislature bears direct responsibility for the conditions that produced this impasse. Decades of disinvestment in public higher education have shifted costs onto institutions, which shift them onto tuition, which shift them onto students, while administrative expenditures at the top of institutional hierarchies have grown. PCC management did not invent this pattern of cost-shifting. It inherited and applied it.

Ben Cushing, president of the faculty union, described workers “pushing back against an entire system that is canceling classes, canceling programs and disinvesting from students and workers while at the same time, PCC is hiring more and more managers.” That is not a complaint about personalities. It is a description of institutional priorities.

Oregon’s Senate Bill 916, which took effect January 1, shifts the balance of risk. The law makes Oregon the first state in the nation to require public employers to pay unemployment benefits to striking workers. PCC, which reimburses the state dollar-for-dollar rather than making ongoing contributions, faces approximately $1.45 million in costs per week if the strike proceeds with full participation. The college opposed the bill. The unions supported it. The law is now the floor beneath the strike—a material reduction in the financial penalty workers pay for refusing bad-faith offers. Management’s insistence that the bill will incentivize more frequent strikes is an admission that the bill works.

The 94 percent authorization vote is a statement, not a tactic. For most of PCC’s history, the workers who staffed the institution either accepted (or did not collectively refuse) the terms on which their labor was purchased. Adjunctification hollowed out the faculty over decades. Classified staff covered workload increases as vacant positions went unfilled. One half of one percent was the offer, even after a last-minute increase on Friday. The unions rejected it. The vote marks the limit of what 2,300 workers will swallow.

The students who rallied at the Cascade Campus last week grasped what the administration’s statements do not acknowledge: the quality of their education is inseparable from the material conditions of the people who provide it. A faculty paid below inflation, a support staff stretched across unfilled positions, an institution that treats instructional labor as the first line to cut: these are not background conditions. They are the education.

PCC will settle this dispute on terms favorable to labor, or it will face a picket line that is already forming. Either outcome is a verdict on what the institution decided its workers were worth. One half of one percent. They are answering. So are we.