Biography
Rick Ball was an organizer for Service Employees International Union Local 49 in Portland, Oregon. At the 1993 National Day of Action for Labor Law Reform — when about one hundred people joined Portland Jobs with Justice's sit-in at the National Labor Relations Board offices in the KOIN building to demand real penalties for law-breaking employers and majority sign-up union recognition — Ball was one of only two, with Margaret Butler, who had signed up in advance to risk arrest, and one of the nine arrested when police cleared the lobby. Reconstructed from Margaret Butler's oral history in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, vol. 123 no. 1 (Spring 2022); the disposition of the arrests has not been located.