The Letter of Agreement on economic concessions due to COVID-19 impacts was approved by a vote of the membership and ratified by City Council on June 3.

An FAQ addressing application of the elements of the Agreement is available here. Please review the document as well as resources the City has posted on the Work Share program here.

We encourage all members to follow the instructions provided by the Bureau of Human Resources for enrolling in the State of Oregon Work Share program.  Those instructions were emailed to all employees on Wed., June 3rd. If you are subject to taking furlough hours, you may begin to do so immediately.

Currently, there are additional payments of up to $600 available through the CARES Act for employees subject to a loss of wages and eligible for Work Share or unemployment benefits. The attached FAQ helps outline eligibility, but you should also review the Work Share FAQ and Work Share Handbook on the BHR website. CARES Act dollars are only available for furlough days taken before the week ending July 25, 2020, so don’t delay scheduling your furlough days if you want to take advantage of this program.

Your voice mattered in this process. The member led Task Force that developed a proposal to respond to the City and negotiated on your behalf did so after meeting with hundreds of you in Zoom meetings and reviewing the thoughtful comments you shared in our member survey. Thank you for your participation — keep it up!

If you attended one of our info sessions or any of the many meetings that occurred during negotiations, you will have heard that the City does not yet know the full extent of economic impacts from this pandemic. We agreed to continue to meet regularly with the City and maintain a dialogue about revenue and impacts. It will be critical for our chapter to stay engaged and to carry this momentum into the next fiscal year.

PROTEC17 has been working in coalition with other unions to come to an agreement with the City of Portland to protect your health, safety and livelihoods during the COVID-19 crisis. On March 25, City Council adopted a Letter of Agreement, which includes expanded protections of your wages and benefits, as well as provisional emergency leave benefits, for the duration of the pandemic response.

Below you can find links to the ordinance and LOA, a summary of the benefits in the agreement, and flowcharts that will may help answer any questions you might have. The summary and flowcharts are provided so you don’t have to decipher any of the ordinance or LOA yourself.

Ordinance with the full Letter of Agreement (LOA)
Summary of benefits in COVID-19 LOA
COVID-19 leave flowchart
High risk employees flowchart

Our number one concern is your health and safety, and we know that your wages and healthcare benefits are a part of that. Please contact your Union Representative Rachel Whiteside if you have any additional questions or concerns.

Following interviews with 15 candidates for Portland City Council and Portland Mayor, PROTEC17 has made endorsements for the May 2020 primary. Please visit our Government Affairs page to learn more: https://www.protec17.org/government-affairs/

Thank you to the PROTEC17 interview committee, which was made up of 7 members from across City bureaus who volunteered for this role.

Paul Cone, Portland Chapter President, Bureau of Technology Services
Mary Edin, Portland Chapter Secretary, Bureau of Transportation
Emily Tabachnick, PROTEC17 Trustee, Bureau of Technology Services
Rachel Burlington, Portland Chapter Vice President, Parks Bureau
Dat Nguyen, PROTEC17 member, Bureau of Technology Services
Michael Goins, PROTEC17 member, Water Bureau
Ian Hackett, PROTEC17 member, Bureau of Environmental Services
Emily Wilson,PROTEC17 member, Bureau of Development Services

Under Article 12, Section 2, if an employee has a balance of 100 hours or more of sick leave at the end of the calendar year and has used less than 1/2 their annual sick leave accrual (51 or fewer hours for full-time employees, 25.5 hours for half-time employees) in that calendar year, you are eligible to covert up to 25% of the remaining sick leave accrued in the calendar year to vacation leave. You may request the conversion as soon as the first full pay period in January.