Uncategorized
Today’s Teamster News For September 20, 2016
TEAMSTERS
Teamsters Win Court Decision Against Amerijet Teamster.org …A three-judge panel for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that Amerijet must follow a district court order to arbitrate labor disputes with Teamsters who are temporarily based in the Caribbean. This decision is the latest in a series of legal wins for the Teamsters against Amerijet…
BLET fights industry effort to reduce air brake inspections BLE-T.org …The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) is taking a stand against a rail industry effort to nearly double the distance freight trains can travel between mandatory air brake inspections. “Reducing the frequency of safety-sensitive air brake inspections would degrade safety and would put the lives of our members and the public at risk,” BLET National President Dennis R. Pierce said…
Behind the Scenes with Teamsters Local 817 and the union’s essential role to TV and film production Crain’s NY …The New York Teamsters division—Local 817 represents 1,200 New York motion picture and television drivers, casting directors, casting associates, commercial location managers and scouts. Two-thirds are New York state-based. While O’Donnell has Teamsters in his blood, he says he didn’t set out to become a Teamster…
XPO drivers, warehouse workers file for Teamster representation CCJ …The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has seemingly turned its attention to XPO Logistics of late with the announcement by the union that truck drivers at XPO in Aurora, Ill., have filed for representation. Before XPO purchased Con-way for $3 billion last October, the Teamsters’ sights were set on Con-way employees…
GLOBAL LABOR & TRADE
Brazilian Bank Workers’ Strike in its Third Week Prensa Latina …The national bank workers’ strike enters today its third week with no light at the end of the tunnel, after patrons denied to satisfy the demands of this sector”s workers. Over 12 thousand 600 agencies and 49 administrative workers were kept inactive until last Friday, after the eighth round of negotiations without even announcing the date for the next round…
G.M. and Union Avoid Strike by 3,900 Canadian Workers New York Times …General Motors and a union narrowly averted a strike by 3,900 Canadian workers on Tuesday in a deal that the union hopes could serve as a model for preserving dwindling auto jobs in Canada. Under a tentative pact reached as a midnight Monday deadline expired, G.M. will close one of two assembly lines at its Oshawa, Ontario, plant, its largest in Canada, according to Jerry Dias, the leader of Canada’s Unifor, the country’s largest private sector union…
Vietnam set to delay vote on TPP pact as U.S. election nears Chicago Tribune …Vietnam is set to delay ratifying a massive U.S.-led Pacific trade pact until next year, as anxiety rises over the fate of the deal in Congress with America’s presidential election campaign exacerbating an anti-free trade mood. Ha Ngoc Chien, head of a parliamentary committee, suggested the National Assembly hold off on a vote on the 12-nation deal during the next session starting Oct. 20, “because many countries in the world haven’t approved it so we shouldn’t take the lead”…
TiSA Leaks: Trade Deal Would Put Paris Climate Deal in ‘Straight Jacket’ Sputnik News …The top secret Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), currently being negotiated behind closed doors by 50 countries around the world, would put last year’s Paris climate change deal in a “straight jacket” and play into the hands of big business, critics have said following the release of fresh leaks…
Free-Trade Deals Are Making It Much Harder to Fight AIDS The Nation … The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the currently stalled trade agreement that the Obama administration pushes as the cornerstone of its trade agenda, offers multinationals tremendous intellectual-property giveaways. So the corporations that control access to many crucial medicines for both chronic and infectious diseases would be allowed to undermine access to generic medicines under the TPP’s proposed patent policies…
Hanjin bankruptcy is the tip of the iceberg for flailing shippers LA Times …The supply of ships and their capacity is completely out of whack with demand. The industry is no longer under the delusion that it can grow its way out of trouble. That became clear with the Aug. 31 bankruptcy of South Korea’s Hanjin Shipping Co., the world’s seventh-largest shipper, which temporarily marooned $14 billion of goods as ships were denied access to ports from Shanghai to Los Angeles…
Labor Leaders: We Must Protect Refugees’ Rights (opinion) TIME …In the coming days, leaders from across the globe will meet in New York to determine the future of millions of vulnerable people. What happens there should not be lost in the noise of a presidential election. Governments are not meeting their obligation to uphold fundamental labor standards. Initial language on the “Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration” compact calls for the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies…
STATE & LIVING WAGE BATTLES
Bevin Hopes to Pass “Right to Work” Legislation WKMS …Governor Matt Bevin is laying out a conservative legislative agenda he hopes to see accomplished during the next General Assembly. The first-term Republican is backing several proposals that have previously passed the GOP-led Senate, but not the Democratic-controlled House. Bevin says one of his top economic priorities is passing a measure supporters call “right to work”…
South Dakota wants to decrease minimum wage Business Insider …In most states, politicians are debating whether to increase the minimum wage to as high as $15 per hour. In South Dakota, it’s the other way around. Two years ago, South Dakotans raised their state minimum wage to $8.55. The home of Mount Rushmore joined more than half of states that have increased hourly pay above the federal minimum of $7.25…
These 5 states will vote on increasing the minimum wage this election Mic …The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, but many states have raised that floor, including Massachusetts and California, which have a minimum wage of $10 an hour. In November, five more states will vote to raise the minimum wage for working Americans. Maine has a minimum wage of $7.50 an hour, just a quarter above the national minimum wage…
Why The Dot-Com Bubble Is Key To Understanding California’s Growing Public Employee Pension Debt Capital Public Radio …California faces a mounting public employee pension debt. In his State of the State address, Gov. Jerry Brown said the liabilities are “so massive that it’s tempting to ignore them,” but he said people in the state can’t turn away from these obligations promised years ago. To figure out how California got in this situation, it’s helpful to rewind the clock to the late 1990s, back to the days of the dot-com bubble…
Supreme Cover-Up: How the Wisconsin Justice System Failed in the Walker John Doe PR Watch …Recent elections have turned the Wisconsin Supreme Court from “one of the nation’s most respected state tribunals into a disgraceful mess,” wrote noted author on the courts Lincoln Caplan in 2015. The dysfunction is on full display in the documents revealed by the Guardian this week in its expose on the “John Doe” investigation into potentially illegal coordination between Scott Walker and dark money groups that were supposed to operate independently of his campaign…
U.S. LABOR
Allina, nurses contest each other’s resolve as strike enters third week Star Tribune …Allina Health and its striking nurses challenged each other’s staying power on Monday as the nurses’ walkout reached its third week without a deal — or further talks — in sight. Allina reported that more than 500 of the 4,800 union nurses have called to say they want to return to work at the five affected hospitals…
Janitors who clean hundreds of Boston-area buildings may go on strike Boston Globe …Janitors who clean more than 2,000 office buildings in Greater Boston are expected to decide Saturday whether to authorize a strike if a contract agreement is not reached before the end of the month. The union representing about 13,000 janitors is currently in contract negotiations and pushing for wage increases, as well as for more full-time jobs in the heavily part-time industry, so more members will have access to employer-paid health care…
USW: Europtec’s Liability for Back Wages Passes $200,000 Ten Weeks into Illegal Clarksburg Lockout PR Newswire …The United Steelworkers (USW) today said that the illegal lockout at Europtec USA, Inc.’s Clarksburg glass processing plant could cost the company more than $200,000 in back wages owed to 29 members of Local 567 over the last ten weeks. Region 6 of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) determined last month that the company broke federal labor laws on July 11, 2016, when it locked the gates on union workers…
NLRB Trial Against CHS to Hold Hearing with Focus on Violations at Greenbrier Valley Medical Center NNU …The National Labor Relations Board has scheduled a public hearing on labor violations at Greenbrier Valley Medical Center in Ronceverte, W.Va. beginning Monday, Sept. 19 in Lewisburg, W.Va. This hearing is part of a multi-state trial prosecuted by the NLRB’s General Counsel in response to charges brought by registered nurses affiliated with National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United (NNOC/NNU) for multiple and repeated alleged labor violations at seven hospitals…
In building boom, immigrant workers face exploitation Boston Globe …A Globe investigation found that these workers, eager for a paycheck, are often paid below the prevailing wage and illegally, in cash. They are also the most likely to be subjected to unsafe work conditions, without insurance to cover medical bills or lost pay if they get hurt. And the unscrupulous contractors who employ them are too seldom caught and penalized…
Fully Autonomous Robots: The Warehouse Workers of the Near Future Wall Street Journal …For retailers, the objective in automating warehouses is controlling the three big costs of conventional human-staffed distribution centers—labor, time and real estate—to meet the demand of the high-cost, low-margin industry. “Every project we look at, we look at automation as a potential part of it,” said Frank Bruni, Kroger Co.’s vice president of supply-chain operations. The grocer has bought warehouse-automation systems from Germany’s Witron Logistik + Informatik GmbH…
Why Prisoners Across the Country Have Gone on Strike Mother Jones …Following a call for a nationwide prison strike that began September 9, inmates in at least three states have organized work stoppages or staged protests in support of improving their wages and working conditions. The strike’s organizers had originally expected prisoners in 21 states to participate. So far, they say that prisoners in at least 29 prisons in 12 states have launched strikes and more than 24,000 prisoners have missed work…
SOCIAL JUSTICE & OTHER NEWS
Getting Immigrants Out of Detention Is Very Profitable Mother Jones …Since launching in 2013, Libre by Nexus has seen its business explode, in part because of the recent surge of Central American migrants and a push by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to raise detainees’ bonds as a deterrent to further migration. An ever-worsening backlog in federal immigration courts means that detainees who can’t afford to post the required collateral can face months, even years, in detention. That’s where Libre by Nexus comes in…
Trump’s latest diatribe against immigrants might’ve been his ugliest yet Think Progress …Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump clamped down hard on his anti-refugee, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant rhetoric on Monday following three suspected acts of terrorism over the weekend in New Jersey, New York, and Minnesota. Trump has often invoked heinous criminal acts committed by undocumented immigrants to shore up support to build a border wall along the southern U.S. border…
A Trump Empire Built on Inside Connections and $885 Million in Tax Breaks New York Times …While it is impossible to assess how much Mr. Trump pays in personal or corporate income taxes, because he has refused to release his tax returns, an examination of his record as a New York developer shows how aggressively he has fought to lower the taxes on his projects. Mr. Trump successfully sued the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch after being denied a tax break for Trump Tower…
Paul Ryan would give nearly all of his tax cuts to the richest 1 percent Think Progress …Paul Ryan (WI), Republican Speaker of the House, has lately fashioned himself as a crusader for the poor, apologizing for saying those on government assistance are “takers” and rolling out policy planks that he says offer “a new direction.” But the tax plan that he unveiled in June would give so much to the richest Americans that barely anything would be left over for the poorest…