Christina Stephenson
Candidate for:
Labor Commissioner
What drives me to seek an elected position
I’m a mom, a former small business owner and a civil rights attorney who spent my career fighting for workers whose wages were stolen and whose rights were violated on the job. I’ve seen up close what happens when people don’t have anyone in their corner, and I’ve seen what changes when they do.
Voters elected me to fix a broken state agency, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’ve returned $17M back to Oregon workers. We passed legislation to protect kids by closing a loophole in child labor law. We cut backlogs that had been building for decades. And we built real resources for small businesses trying to treat their employees fairly.
But we’re not finished. I’m running again because the backlogs aren’t fully cleared, the systems we’re building need time to mature, and Oregon workers can’t afford to lose momentum now. I want to finish what we started.
This is why I’ve been endorsed by Senator Jeff Merkley, Basic Rights Oregon, Oregon Nurses Association, Oregon State Firefighters Council, SEIU Oregon, the Oregon Education Association and many more organizations and leaders dedicated to representing the rights of working people and all Oregonians.
The first three priorities or issues I want to tackle
Clearing the backlogs. I’ll clear the decades-old civil rights intake backlog by the end of 2026, the wage and hour intake backlog by mid-2027, and wage and hour investigations backlog by mid-2029. Every day a worker waits is a day without the paycheck they earned or the justice they’re owed. Multnomah County Democrats believe government should deliver for working people, and that starts with an agency that actually works.
Expanding apprenticeships, workforce training and living wages. College isn’t for everyone, and it shouldn’t have to be. I’ll keep growing registered apprenticeship programs so every Oregonian has a real pathway to a family-wage career, especially in communities that have been locked out of the skilled trades for generations. With a skyrocketing cost of living, workers need family-wage jobs.
Protecting every worker, no matter who they are. I’ll keep enforcing Oregon’s workplace protections regardless of a worker’s immigration status or zip code, and I’ll keep defending civil rights protections for workers of color, women, LGBTQ+ Oregonians and workers with disabilities. At a moment when the federal government is pulling back, Oregon has to hold the line.
The experiences and insights I will bring to the office
I bring the only combination this job requires: enforcement experience and small business experience.
Before becoming Labor Commissioner, I was a civil rights attorney representing workers whose wages were stolen and whose rights were violated. I also owned and operated my own small business, so I understand compliance from the employer side too. I know what it takes to follow the law and how workers and employers suffer when the rules aren’t clear.
That’s why I’ve built both stronger enforcement and a bigger Employer Assistance Division that helps responsible businesses get it right before problems start. When I saw most civil rights claims we received were disability-related, I didn’t just direct more enforcement. I had the team build a compliance toolkit so employers could prevent violations in the first place.
I also know how to tell the truth about a problem and build the plan to fix it. That’s how we secured the largest staffing investment in BOLI’s history and started delivering results.
What being a Democrat in Multnomah County means to me
Being a Democrat in Multnomah County means believing that government can actually work for the people it’s supposed to serve and then doing the work to make it happen. Democratic leaders across the country are under a microscope as critics look for mismanagement and waste. We have made tremendous progress on fixing an agency that has been underfunded for decades.
It means standing up for workers, for civil rights, for working families, for immigrants, for LGBTQ+ Oregonians, for people with disabilities and for anyone the system has left behind. It means refusing to accept that a broken agency is just the way things are, and instead rolling up your sleeves to fix it.
Multnomah County Democrats are the engine of progressive Oregon, leading on paid family leave, on worker protections, on civil rights, on reproductive freedom. Those wins didn’t happen by accident. They happened because Democrats organized, voted and held their leaders accountable to deliver.
I’m proud to be one of those leaders. And I’m proud that when Multnomah County Democrats sent me to BOLI, we delivered.