Roughly 800 city workers are on strike after the city and an employee union failed to reach an 11th-hour agreement over the weekend.
The City of Portland Professional Workers (CPPW) labor union held a picket in intermittent rain showers Monday, November 9, outside Portland City Hall. Roughly 100 people also rallied outside the city’s wastewater treatment plant at 5:30 am Monday—a normal start time for their shift. There, Teamsters union members on the job also declined to cross the picket line, according to Kari Koch, CPPW president.
The union has been in negotiations with the city for 10 months, but reached an impasse in late September, leading to the strike. A main sticking point in ongoing negotiations is compensation for CPPW employees who received some increases in 2025 and are seeking compensation for 2026-2027. As part of CPPW’s 2025 agreement, the labor contract was scheduled to reopen in early January 2026 for the two parties to renegotiate specific parts of the contract.
Attempts between the two parties to mediate over the weekend to avert a strike were unsuccessful. State mediators offered the city and the union a chance to meet for a check-in this Friday. That’s not soon enough for Koch, who said the union wants to settle as soon as possible so members can get back to work. The city also appears open to meeting sooner.
“Our union takes this strike very seriously,” Koch said. “This is not a joke to us. This is extremely serious. We take our role as public sector employees, as public servants, as a calling, as a career, and we work for the city because we want to work for the city. The fact that we are not able to do our job of providing services to Portlanders is extremely difficult for us.”
The city, for its part, says employees serving in management and supervisory roles are covering for rank-and-file employees while they’re off the job.
The represented employees work in all areas of the city, including revenue collection and the payroll department for the city’s roughly 8,000 employees. CPPW also represents all Bureau of Emergency Management employees—those who handle maintenance for public safety and public works bureaus, including maintenance for 911 operations and emergency response.
The city says it is prepared to cover the public safety, infrastructure, and other services Portlanders rely on.
“We haven’t seen any issues so far,” city spokesperson Alison Perkins said. “It’s only been one day, and we will be updating our website with any impacts that might affect Portlanders.”
But losing 10 percent of the city’s unionized workforce doesn’t come without impacts. The Mercury received notification Monday that two public records requests filed in September and October related to litigation would be delayed “due to a labor-related work stoppage.”
The union says the two parties’ offers are not far apart, while the city asserts that the costs of the workers’ demands are too high. Koch said moving to strike over a standard wage increase is “unusual,” because typically the types of increases they’re asking for are within the realm of agreement.
“It feels like this contract is about Mayor Wilson trying to do union busting at the city of Portland,” Koch said.
