From Evan Bowman, HELU Vice Chair and Delegate from AFSCME Local 328 Oregon
Out here in Oregon we have pretty much acknowledged that federal funding for higher education is a non-starter. Chronic underfunding of our public institutions has and continues to degrade the ability to perform our work. Therefore, organizing has begun for an in-person summit in summer 2025 to bring union pressure to make a change. Specifically, we want to focus on the Oregon state legislature to pass a bill to increase state taxes to not just fill in for federal funding, but fully fund higher education. Tentatively called A Millionaire’s Tax for Higher Ed Labor Oregon, the funding would make it possible to hire workers, pay salaries, adapt physical plants to climate change and maintain infrastructure.
The idea sprung from a conversation at the HELU founding convention in May 2024 with Oregon AFT President Ariana Jacob. I am a rank and file AFSCME activist and board member at Local 328 at OHSU. We are both HELU Delegates and between the two of us, we know a lot about the crisis facing faculty, staff and other workers across higher ed and are also in a position to take action in Oregon. A few months later, with HELU’s “wall to wall” mission in mind, we brought out a speaker from the Massachusetts Teachers Association, a state where a millionaires’ tax for higher education and transportation had passed, gathered a group to attend and decided to try the same thing for Oregon.
That was October 2024. Oregon higher ed has been operating under austerity for decades, but in 2025 the Trump administration’s direct attacks on higher ed are as sweeping as the attacks on federal workers and programs. As these attacks increase, many unions are turning inwards, absorbed in their own fights about protecting their own people. Not surprisingly, as we plan this summit, we are seeing that it is a challenge to get people to show solidarity for someone else’s fight. A coalition requires unions to reverse this and turn outward instead. But it’s not a transactional thing. You don’t show solidarity with someone because you expect something later on. You do it because it is the right thing now.
HELU is playing a “hub” role here, establishing a center around which labor unions and labor-friendly organizations can relate to each other. In January, Ian Gavigan, HELU’s National Director, came out to facilitate this coalition-building. HELU is also doing this in other states like Arizona, Michigan and Minnesota, around different goals.
Oregon’s University system includes seven public universities (Eastern Oregon University, Oregon Institute of Technology, Oregon State University, Portland State University, Southern Oregon University, the University of Oregon and Western Oregon University) and one public academic health center (Oregon Health & Science University). There are different local unions at each one of these. In addition, Oregon has 17 community colleges, some of which are represented by the Oregon Education Association and some by Oregon AFT. The faculty at private non-profit colleges are not unionized. A tax increase to fully fund higher ed by the State of Oregon (rather than depending on federal funds at all) would be shared across all of these and benefit thousands of workers, to say nothing of students and the general public. Our challenge is to bring all of these, their locals and their constituencies, into a coalition.