by Ryan Wisnor ::

September 2018 marks the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the Powell’s Books union campaign and the subsequent formation of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 5. The unrelenting creativity of the booksellers’ work stoppages and street theater captured the imagination of activists and generated a social movement of support for the workers’ cause. Although organized labor experienced a resurgence in the 1990s, the movement’s efforts to unionize some of the nation’s largest big-box retailers, including Wal-Mart and Borders Books, proved either a failure or short-lived. The Powell’s union campaign stood as a point of light on an otherwise dark backdrop of retail organizing defeats nationally and represents an indispensable chapter in Portland’s labor history.

The labor dispute at Powell’s Books, which many Portlanders considered a cultural institution and the living room of the city, compelled the news media and community leaders to publicly choose a side during the dispute in a manner reminiscent of labor conflicts not seen in Portland since the 1950s. The history of the booksellers’ two-year struggle for union recognition and a first contract is told through this multimedia timeline, which features a selection of Local 5’s archived oral histories, documents, and imagery.

The timeline was designed using Knight Lab’s TimelineJS, an open-source tool created by designers at Northwest University that can be used to build timelines using nothing more than a Google spreadsheet. The simplicity of TimelineJS’s construction allows storytellers and historians to remain focused on shaping their narrative and worry less about web coding.

Additionally, the platform makes multimedia inclusion as well as sharing and embedding the final product fairly easy for beginners. It also provides advanced capabilities for those familiar with the lightweight data-interchange format, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). I chose TimeLineJS because it allowed me to deliver a dynamic final product to Local 5 that allows the union’s members to build upon the timeline as they see fit.

The Powell’s Books Union Campaign: 1998-2000 timeline and a companion thesis, “Workers of the Word Unite!: The Powell’s Books Union Organizing Campaign, 1998-2001” were produced in partial fulfillment of the requirements of a Master’s of History in the Public History Program.