oregonlive.com
Complaint charges Portland teachers’ union with prolonging 2023 strike, seeks $100 million for families
Updated: Apr. 18, 2024, 11:06 p.m.|Published: Apr. 18, 2024, 3:04 p.m.
By

Julia Silverman | The Oregonian/OregonLive

The Portland Association of Teachers unnecessarily prolonged the strike that shut down schools for 11 days in November by trying to bargain over topics that the school district was not legally obligated to discuss, a complaint filed Thursday on behalf of four parents alleges.

The complaint, which seeks relief from an administrative law judge for the state Employment Labor Relations Board, asks for $100 million in damages for families around the district lost academic, social and work time due to the lengthy school closures. The complaint also asks the judge to void the contract that teachers and the district eventually agreed upon.

The suit was filed by Chicago-based firm Hughes & Suhr, which has filed similar complaints in other states where there have been educator strikes, including Illinois, New Jersey and Kentucky; a judge recently dismissed a similar lawsuit from the same firm in Massachusetts. One of the partners in the firm, Daniel Suhr, is a former policy director for former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who was nationally known for his fight against collective bargaining for teachers’ unions there. The local counsel is Jeff Eager, a Republican political consultant and attorney who is the former mayor of Bend.

A representative for both the Portland Association of Teachers and its umbrella union, the Oregon Education Association, said neither group would comment on the complaint.

AT&T has finally confirmed it is impacted by a data breach affecting 73 million current and former customers after initially denying the leaked data originated from them.

This comes after AT&T has repeatedly denied for the past two weeks that a massive trove of leaked customer data originated from them and or that their systems had been breached.

While the company continues to say there is no indication their systems were breached, it has now confirmed that the leaked data belongs to 73 million current and former customers.