Solidarity, I have learned, is mostly holding somebody else’s thermos in the rain while having opinions about fonts.
PORTLAND, Oregon – The rain turned up before I did, which makes it the most punctual thing in this city, and I stood at the bus shelter with a coffee that tasted faintly of the cup, reading about a strike vote and feeling the particular glow of a woman who owns three laminated signs.
Morning: the number that woke me up
According to OPB’s report on the Portland city worker strike votes, more than 800 City of Portland professional workers voted 93 percent to authorize a strike. These are the financial analysts, the multimedia specialists, the technology staff, the people who keep the city running from a desk you have never seen. Nobody has ever chanted “What do we want? Version control!” but I am prepared to learn.
The city’s final offer is worth about 9.1 million dollars in new spending. The union is asking for about 19.8 million. That is a gap of roughly 10.7 million dollars, which I know because I did the subtraction on the back of a flyer and then did it again on a calculator, because the first answer felt too emotional.
The issues are wages and layoff protections. The city’s labor relations office has said it wants a fair agreement that balances employee contributions with “the city’s financial realities and responsibility to taxpayers.” I read that sentence three times looking for the joke and could not find one, which is how I know it came from an office.
Midday: the zine committee meets
I spent the middle of the day in the back room of the mutual-aid pantry, where six of us are making a one-page zine called What To Bring To A Picket Line. The answer is: a thermos, dry socks, a snack that survives being sat on, and no strong feelings about the font. We had strong feelings about the font.
Dolores, who chairs the zine committee and has never once been late to a vote, moved that we use a typeface that “feels like a union hall in 1937.” Ferdinand, who has opinions about kerning that he describes as political, said that 1937 was a bad year for typography and a worse year for him personally. We moved to a second round. The motion to adjourn for tea was seconded before it had been moved, which I regard as the highest form of procedural efficiency.
- Thermos: seven pledged, one of them a mug with a lid.
- Dry socks: a spreadsheet tab all of its own.
- Position on the font: unresolved, referred to a subcommittee.
- Position on whether solidarity is a noun or a verb: referred to the same subcommittee, which has not agreed to exist.
Back to the news, because the pantry queue does not let you forget it. OPB also reports that about 750 members of Portland City Laborers, the frontline crews in maintenance, community centers, landscaping and bridge repair, are voting this week, with their business manager expecting at least 80 percent support. If they authorize a strike, it could come by the end of December. Two other unions, representing more than 900 workers, are still negotiating. The piece notes that the laborers last walked out for three days in 2023 and went back once the city agreed to slightly higher annual raises. Three days is a very short strike. I have had longer arguments about the milk rota.
Afternoon: a question about insurance
A man in the pantry queue, who works for the city and asked me not to say in what capacity, wanted to know what happens to his health coverage if there is a strike and then a layoff. I did not know. Nobody on the zine committee knew either, though three people said “the thing about healthcare is” with tremendous confidence.
What I could tell him is that open enrollment for marketplace plans is under way until 15 January, and that an AP explainer carried by WCAX on the Affordable Care Act sign-up period says KFF expects average marketplace premiums to rise about 13 percent in 2027. He nodded the way you nod at a weather forecast, and took a bag of rice.
It was around then that somebody in the queue forwarded me a farm.fm report titled Marxists promise every farmer a share of one tractor. I would like to say it is unfair. It is a fairly accurate description of our steering committee: one tractor, fourteen shareholders, no agreed policy on diesel.
Evening: a basement, a band and a bike lane
After the pantry I went to a house show in a basement, where a three-piece called Damp Dialectic played a set that was mostly one chord and a lot of conviction. The drummer, a mild man called Lucian who works days for a software firm, apologized to the room twice for the volume and then hit the snare as though it owed him rent.
I cycled home along the new bike lane, which is a bike lane in the sense that a line has been painted on a road and a delivery van has agreed to respect it in principle. I was soaked through by the second junction. I was happy. I miss the 29 bus and a proper chip shop with a proper vinegar bottle, and I will say so to anyone who lets me, but I have to admit that nobody in Camden ever offered me a thermos at midnight because they thought I looked like I needed one.
I wrote some of this up for the people at Bohiney Magazine, because the editors like a diary that has been rained on. They also keep telling me to read up on the British Onion, and I have decided that if there is a British Onion then Portland is, on its wet days, the American cabbage.
Last thing before bed
I read Marx for twenty minutes in the laundromat while my socks went round, and the one line I took away was that the workers have nothing to lose but their chains. I wrote beside it: and the committee minutes. If you want more of my daily notes, they live at my daily notes at The London Prat, where nobody has yet asked me to choose a font.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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Author: admin
