City services, including some emergency services, may be impacted next week after city leadership failed to reach an agreement on a labor contract with Portland city workers.
Roughly 800 city workers represented by City of Portland Professional Workers Union (CPPW) are preparing to strike starting Monday, November 9, following 10 months of unsuccessful bargaining on a new contract. Formed in 2023, the union represents analysts and specialists, community-facing engagement for city programs, and other positions in all the city’s bureaus.
“We call ourselves the glue that holds the city together, because it is a lot of behind the scenes work,” Kari Koch, CPPW president, told the Mercury Thursday.
The city workers are demanding cost-of-living adjustments (COLA), standard wage increases, and layoff protections on par with other union contracts. The union estimates it would cost the city an additional $9.3 million over the next two fiscal years to implement the financial packages they’re seeking, which is on par with other labor contracts.
There is one last opportunity to avoid a strike if an additional bargaining session, joined by state mediators this Sunday, leads to a successful deal.
Koch said CPPW is headed into Sunday’s negotiation with “eyes wide open,” ready to bargain. However, she said Mayor Keith Wilson appears to have “dug in his heels” in the face of serious impacts to community services.
If the contract isn’t settled, the workers will begin their strike when the clock strikes midnight, and picket at City Hall starting at 8 am Monday. Koch said other city labor unions and other unions across the city are joining in solidarity.
While Mayor Wilson is not at the bargaining table, he is the executive in charge of making decisions, and mandates how the bargaining team is allowed to negotiate.
City spokesperson Alison Perkins said Thursday that the city remains committed to a fair agreement that “recognizes employees’ contributions,” while balancing the city’s financial realities and use of taxpayer dollars. She said the main difference between the parties’ proposals is compensation, and the current contract already gave employees a 2.4 percent COLA, a 2 percent wage increase, and a $1,000 bonus.
The union is seeking additional wage increases beyond the COLAs. Koch argued that the city should demonstrate how to be a model employer, by paying employees enough to live in the city where they work.
“We are supposed to be setting a standard, that having labor peace at the city helps the mayor and everyone else build the Portland that we’re trying to build right now—build the Portland prosperity, build the Portland renaissance.” Koch said. “This is all a part of it. We’re actually on the same team, and we should be moving in that same direction.”
A strike is expected to impact a host of city services, including public records requests, vehicle maintenance, payroll for thousands of other city workers, collection of city revenue, and on-call responses for victims of serious crimes. It could also affect 911 operations, as well as emergency response, communications, and maintenance within public safety and public works bureaus. Call operators for 911 are not CPPW members, and the public can still call 911 in the case of an emergency. But like other city services in their purview, if a malfunction happens, CPPW members would be the staff to fix it.
Mike Grimm, an emergency management coordinator and CPPW member, said in a press release that he is responsible for keeping 911 operations, including a backup call center, ready to take calls.
“If a strike happens, equipment that breaks down would take longer to get repaired,” Grimm said.
Glenn Devitt, a duty officer and community resilience coordinator and CPPW member, said in the press release that five of nine people in that position are CPPW members. That role sits within the city’s Bureau of Emergency Management, which includes organizing and training community members and city workers for emergency responses.
“If we walk off the job, managers would have to cover every shift while also coordinating our strike response,” Devitt said.
Devitt added that Portland students—a cohort of 50 native Spanish-speaking volunteers—could have a first responder training opportunity disrupted if the strike process lags on.
The two parties have been in negotiations for a full 10 months, due to a 2025 contract agreement that they would renegotiate certain parts of the contract in January 2026. But the city declared an impasse in September, leading to its final offer and a 30-day cooling off period. CPPW members voted with 93 percent in favor of a strike, and the union notified the city it would begin November 9 if they could not reach an agreement.
Alongside 16 other city staff bargaining units, the CPPW union has been hit hard in recent months. The city is currently undergoing a “core realignment” process to reorganize roughly 1,000 staff positions to better fit under the fledgling voter-approved government structure implemented in 2025. During the budget cycle this past summer, Wilson proposed cutting an array of jobs across the city, many of which supported city services. Koch, the union president, warned at the time that the layoffs could be problematic, and costly.
In late June, Councilors Candace Avalos, Mitch Green, and Angelita Morillo proposed a budget amendment seeking to pause layoffs for 103 positions—many of them CPPW positions. Six city councilors voted against the proposal, and it failed. In July, dueling proposals to amend the budget came to Council through an ordinance. One from five progressive councilors would have saved 55 jobs, but failed after Wilson used his first tie-breaking vote to tank it. (The mayor can break ties on ordinances, and is not allowed to break ties on amendments.)
But a compromise ordinance proposed by Councilors Olivia Clark, Steve Novick, Elana Pirtle-Guiney and Loretta Smith, passed in a 10-2 vote later that day, pausing 30 layoffs. Avalos and Tiffany Koyama Lane voted no, citing the failure to sufficiently protect jobs and a poor process to protect the services Wilson cut.
