Bing Wong says 'Count me in'
Medical Technologist helps elect fellow AFT member

Bing Wong remembers a time when he and the other laboratory professionals he worked with didn’t have contracts. That’s part of why he’s been so politically active.

Another reason is that Wong, a medical technologist at a Kaiser Permanente regional laboratory in Portland, Ore., is concerned about funding for state healthcare and education programs, including tuition at public colleges and a “rainy day fund” for the state treasury.

This past fall, the member of the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (OFNHP) renewed his “Count Me In” credentials in a big way. Over the years, he has ramped up his political activism from the precinct to the state level, serving as a delegate to the past four Democratic national conventions. He’s done everything: canvassed for individual candidates and for the coordinated campaign of Oregon, worked phone banks and distributed fliers to union stewards.

“We worked really hard to get a steward for every 10 members,” says Wong, who downplays his own contribution in getting out the vote, crediting instead the many members who lent a hand. “Our local just had to stuff manila envelopes and send them to the stewards.”

In point of fact, Wong was “super, super active,” attests Helen Lee, organizing director for OFNHP. “He volunteered an enormous amount of time.”

Last November, all that work on behalf of the OFNHP and the AFL-CIO helped pull off an 86 percent voter turnout among AFT locals in Oregon and the election of a worker-friendly Legislature. Larry Galizio, a member of the Portland Community College Faculty Federation, won his second term in the state House (see www.pccff.org/politics.htm). “He needed our help to let people know what he stood for,” Wong says, including reversing cuts in state education funding. In addition, AFT members helped defeat two revenue-draining measures. And although the GOP speaker of the House managed to get re-elected, she will have no leadership role because Democrats won both chambers of the state Legislature after more than a dozen years of Republican control.

The hardest thing about this election cycle, Wong says, was worrying about voter turnout. He worked particularly hard on getting weak, marginal or occasional voters to the polls. Statewide, AFT locals produced 100 volunteers—twice as many as the AFL-CIO campaign had hoped for. Although the campaign reached “a good majority” of union households, Wong says, lots of members weren’t home when OFNHP members knocked on their doors each weekend, so by November, union activists were canvassing neighborhoods on weekday evenings as well.

And the most fun? “Having a goal and then finally seeing it come to fruition was very nice.”