Tom Gunn

In a letter to DCU members, PPS director of labor relations Thomas Gunn reminded DCU members that if they strike the District has contingency plans to do their work.Gunn said the District would stop paying health and vacation benefits, scheduled vacations would be canceled, and members of other School District unions would be forbidden by law from honoring their picket lines.

Tom Gunn, a former grievance director for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555 and a business agent for Oregon Council 75 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has been hired as director of labor relations for Portland Public Schools.

Tom Gunn, a former grievance director for United Food and Commercial Workers.

When the Association filed an Unfair Labor Practice Complaint over the County's refusal to bargain, in an impressive performance of doublespeak, the County's negotiator, Thomas Gunn, a former AFSCME business agent, denied that the County had ever refused to bargain.

Tom Gunn, a former grievance director for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555 and a business agent for Oregon Council 75 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has been hired as director of labor relations for Portland Public Schools.

Gunn worked for AFSCME during the 1980s, leaving in 1991 to accept a governor's appointment to the Oregon Workers Compensation Board.He served there until 1996.He then joined the Local 555 staff before leaving to take a job as employment relations manager for Marion County in Salem.

Gunn has a full agenda at the school district, where the 15-union District Council of Unions has been working under the terms of a contract that expired in 2006.Negotiations also are ongoing with classified employees and cafeteria workers.The Oregon Education Association contract doesn't open until 2008, and bargaining has yet to begin for school custodians, who were reinstated last year by order of the Oregon Supreme Court.

"People at the School District are interested in solving problems, not creating them," Gunn said.