Current head of Oregon labor bureau faces primary challenge from agency insider

The latter will happen in the May 19 primary, as there are only two candidates running for the nonpartisan role of commissioner of the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries. Whoever receives more than 50% of the vote in May will be the next state labor commissioner and take office next January.

The agency has since 2023 been helmed by a career employment and civil rights lawyer, Christina Stephenson, who is running for a second term. She’s being challenged by Chris Lynch, a 15-year veteran of the agency who previously managed the bureau’s civil rights division in Portland.

Stephenson, 42, replaced former state labor commissioner and current U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle, from whom she inherited an agency with a backlog of wage theft and discrimination claims that had more than doubled since 2020, according to the agency’s most recent annual report.

Stephenson described the agency she entered as “gutted and really underfunded for decades,” and made tackling the backlog of complaints a priority that she says would continue to be the focus of her second term if reelected.

In 2025, Oregon lawmakers granted her request to increase the agency’s budget by 30% to $81.6 million for 2025 to 2027 so she could hire additional investigators and new technology to tackle the overdue cases. Since then, the backlog for civil rights claims is down nearly 40% and the backlog for wage and hour claims is down 20%, she said.

She further implemented a strategic plan to eliminate the backlog by mid-2029 and said under her leadership the agency has eliminated a compliance backlog for apprenticeship programs, which BOLI also regulates.

In her first term, she hired a team of mediators to undertake “alternative dispute resolution” modeled after a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission program that aims to resolve cases faster than they would otherwise be prosecuted.

And during the most recent legislative session, she was able to get lawmakers to allocate permanent general fund dollars to sustainably fund the agency.

Stephenson largely agreed with criticism from her opponent, Lynch, that BOLI employees are suffering from years of being overworked, and that morale is low.

“There’s no doubt that they were overworked. Just the absolute, sheer volume of complaints far outstripped the ability of staff,” she said of Hoyle’s time. “You had a 208% increase over four years in wage and hour complaints without a commensurate increase in staff. My approach has been to both listen to the staff and then fight really hard to get them what they need.”

Stephenson has faced criticism from Republicans and business groups for enforcing prevailing wage laws — that is a minimum hourly rate and benefits to be paid to workers — on publicly funded construction projects. Critics have said it adds costs to affordable housing developments that in turn slow development and exacerbate housing supply issues in parts of the state.

She has repeatedly pushed back on the critique, saying it’s up to lawmakers to change the law if they believe it’s a problem. Sen. Dick Anderson, a Lincoln City Republican who considered running against her but ultimately chose not to, introduced a bill to limit the use of prevailing wage on affordable housing projects, but it didn’t pass.

“Like anyone else, I recognize the tension between housing costs and and the cost of everything right now for working families, and my job is to enforce the law as it is written,” she said. “I know that the Legislature took a look at this in the short session to consider some exceptions, and they chose not to. So, I’m just going to enforce the law as it was written.”

Lynch started at the labor bureau as an intern in 2005 and worked his way up to lead investigator and manager in the Civil Rights Division Unit in Portland.

But when Hoyle became commissioner in 2019, Lynch said the conditions of the job deteriorated quickly, and he left. He described the period as one in which Hoyle embraced Mark Zuckerberg’s edict to “move fast and break things,” and though he commended her efforts to make it easier for Oregonians to submit complaints to BOLI, he was frustrated she did not in turn hire many more staff to receive them.

“The cumulative effect was always flooding us with work that we didn’t have capacity to handle, and disregarding long-term staff expressing their concerns about the consequences of some of the things that she wanted to change,” Lynch said.

He took a job at the Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division, or Oregon OSHA, and considered running to lead BOLI in 2022, but backed Stephenson instead. When she was elected, he explained, he returned to BOLI eager to work under her, but was dismayed by low morale and leadership he described as “non-existent,” and went back to OSHA where he works today as a compliance specialist.

Lynch acknowledged Stephenson arrived “in the middle of a plane wreck” at the agency, but feels he could do more as BOLI leader to boost morale among employees who he said have been in a “bunker mentality,” surviving and afraid to speak up. He said many of them have offered him their support.

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think the people there were behind it,” he said.

In his first months in office, Lynch said he would host “rolling meetings” across the agency to “identify blockages, do a reset, fix it,” he explained.

Eliminating the agency’s backlog would also be a priority. He said employers should not be left under the umbrella of government investigation for years on end, and Oregonians who experience wage, hour or civil rights violations on the job deserve “a fair and effective and efficient investigation, and to get it resolved quickly.”

BOLI was his first government job, he said. Before that he worked for small employers as a carpenter, legal assistant, delivery driver, bike messenger and roofer.

“I’ve worked for employers that only paid monthly and paid late. I worked for employers that didn’t have active workers comp coverage. When I cut my thumb open with a biscuit joiner, I couldn’t go to the hospital to get treatment because there was no insurance coverage,” he said. “I understand the real world workplaces that Oregonians deal with.”

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