Biography
Margaret Butler, born in Portland, Oregon in 1957, was a Communications Workers of America rank-and-file activist and organizer who co-founded the Portland Jobs with Justice coalition in April 1991 and served as its first paid organizer and then director from 1996 until her retirement in 2013, building it into one of the strongest labor-community coalitions in the country. During the 1993 National Day of Action for Labor Law Reform, Portland Jobs with Justice staged a sit-in at the National Labor Relations Board offices in the KOIN building; Butler was one of two who had signed up in advance for arrest, and one of nine arrested when police cleared the lobby. Reconstructed from her oral history in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, vol. 123 no. 1 (Spring 2022); the disposition of the arrests has not been located.