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Today’s Teamster News For October 28, 2016
TEAMSTERS
Teamster Pilots at ABX Air Seek Single Carrier Determination Teamster.org …The International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Airline Division formally requested that the National Mediation Board initiate an investigation to determine if two subsidiaries of Air Transport Services Group (ATSG) should be considered a single transportation system. ATSG owns ABX Air, Inc. (ABX) and Air Transport International, Inc. (ATI), two cargo carriers that together employ an estimated 400 pilots…
900 Public School Bus Drivers And Attendants Could Go On Strike Next Week Gothamist …Drivers and attendants with two of the city’s largest school bus companies voted 85 percent in favor to authorize a strike on Wednesday night. According to the drivers, who are represented by Teamsters Local 553, management has proposed slashing five paid holidays and putting an unfair percentage of their hourly wages towards healthcare…
Across the U.S., workers vote to join the Teamsters People’s World …From California to Connecticut, the workers in four locations recently voted to join the Teamsters union. Two of the groups aren’t over-the-road truckers: one is a unit of firefighters and another a unit of school bus drivers. The common themes in all four wins were the demands of the workers for fair wages, decent health insurance and respect on the job…
Workers protest low wages at UOP in Stockton KCRA …Union trade workers at the University of the Pacific-Stockton protested Thursday night in front of the campus, asking for fair wages. About 125 custodians, groundskeepers and trade employees with Teamsters Local 439 claim they are the lowest paid in the country. “The gardeners, groundskeepers, custodians, they are the ones who work hard day in and day out in rain, heat, fog making this university shine. Nobody realizes these workers are starting out at $12.94 — it’s a shame,” Teamster Greg Rangel said…
CA Port Workers Walk Off Go By Truck …On Tuesday, Teamster-backed port truck drivers and warehouse workers from two leading logistics companies went on strike for the 14th time in three years to protest violations of U.S. labor laws, violation of their employee rights under the National Labor Relations Act and unsafe working conditions. Wednesday morning, drivers from Container Freight/California Cartage walked off the job and joined the picket lines at the company yard…
Metro unions: Workers don’t feel safe on track; will follow rules WTOP …In a statement announcing what the unions call a “Safety Solidarity Surge,” Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 said shop stewards and more senior union leaders from their union, OPEIU Local 2, and Teamsters Local 922, will gather Monday in Forestville, Maryland, for “refresher training on all of the SOPs that Metro requires of its workforce”…
GLOBAL LABOR & TRADE
UK: Fujitsu workers to strike in Manchester The Register …Up to 300 workers at Japanese IT godzilla Fujitsu are to strike over pay and pensions next week in Manchester. The Unite union members claim that the company has been cutting pay rates for years, despite healthy profits and increases to senior management pay. The union also accused Fujitsu of failing to address a significant gender pay gap…
Iceland’s Pirate Party Opposes EU-US TTIP Deal Over Lack of Transparency Sputnik News …The Pirate Party, which is on track to win Iceland’s parliamentary elections, is strongly against the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free-trade deal as it lacks transparency and has misleading goals. The TTIP, negotiations on which have been ongoing since 2013, seeks to establish a free trade zone between the two sides of Atlantic…
Organizing to oppose lame-duck TPP, call-in day is Nov. 16 The Stand …Advocates for trade policies that bolster people and not just profits have successfully stalled a vote on the Trans-Pacific Partnership for more than a year and a half, but TPP proponents have pledged an all-out last ditch fight in the post-election lame-duck session of Congress. Momentum to reject and renegotiate the TPP is growing both nationally with both presidential candidates’ outspoken opposition to the secretly negotiated deal…
Froman goes country to sell TPP pact Politico …Many pundits are writing off the TPP as all but dead after a brutal election campaign, but don’t tell that to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, who is hanging out in Nashville today with country-western songwriters and whiskey distillers to gin up support for the pact…
Right And Wrong Reasons For Opposing The Toxic TPP (opinion) Huffington Post …Opposition to the corporate-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has steadily grown across the political spectrum this year. The labor and environmental movements have joined together with millions of hard-working Americans, thousands of civil society organizations, economists, and elected leaders to speak out against this toxic trade deal…
Make the peso great again — for US workers’ sake (opinion) Boston Globe …When NAFTA became law at the beginning of 1994, a peso was equivalent to 32 cents. Today, it’s about a nickel. That decline has been hard on everyday Mexicans, who watch the value of their savings erode year after year. But the devaluation lowers the cost of goods made in Mexico, so it’s great for companies — including American ones — that manufacture and export from there…
Clothing Keeps Getting Cheaper, and Factory Workers Are Paying the Price Bloomberg …Factories in Bangladesh have improved, completing more than 60 percent of fixes required by the inspectors sent by clothing brands. Still, of some 1,600 factories covered by the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a major inspection program run by the brands, more than 80 percent are behind schedule on improvements…
New U.N. Report Shows Just How Awful Globalization and Informal Employment Are for Workers In These Times …Freedom of peaceful assembly and association, says a new United Nations report, “are essential to human dignity, economic empowerment, sustainable development and democracy. But these rights are being jeopardized by the recent dramatic rise in the power of large multinational corporations and their dependence on global supply chains and the growing informal and migrant workforce…
STATE & LIVING WAGE BATTLES
Kansas Ends Bad Economic News by Not Reporting It Bloomberg …Brownback, despite promising to measure the results of a “real life experiment” in cutting taxes, has decided to cancel a quarterly report on the status of the state’s economy. Although Brownback’s spokeswoman said “a lot of people were confused by the report,” no one has been fooled. The problem was that the reports didn’t match the governor’s predictions…
Ohio: new report shows renewables could create hundreds of thousands of jobs Think Progress …Adding a mix of energy efficiency and renewable energy could add hundreds of thousands of jobs in Ohio, as well as giving the state billions in added payroll and savings stemming from health care costs, a new report finds. Commissioned by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature Conservancy, the report comes as Ohio lawmakers are evaluating whether to intervene as the state’s two-year freeze on its renewable energy standard is set to lapse in 2017…
Illinois: Cook County approves $13 hourly minimum wage affecting suburbs Chicago Tribune …Suburban Cook County has joined Chicago in adopting a $13 hourly minimum wage, a move critics say is better left to the state but proponents contend is a response to the state’s inaction. The Cook County Board voted Wednesday to gradually raise the minimum wage to $13 by July 2020, following the legislation’s approval Tuesday by the board’s Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs Committee…
California Rules About Violence Against Health Workers Could Become A Model NPR …Regulators within the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health approved a rule last Thursday that would require hospitals and other employers of health professionals to develop violence prevention protocols and involve workers in the process. The standard now will be reviewed by the Office of Administrative Law, which proponents expect will approve the new rules…
New York City pushes legislation to add paid sick leave for domestic violence victims NY Daily News …Domestic violence victims will be able to take paid time off for things like counseling and court appearances under a new City Council proposal, city officials announced on Wednesday. City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras-Copeland and the de Blasio administration are crafting legislation to add domestic violence onto existing paid sick leave laws…
The Election is Rigged After All — Against African Americans American Prospect …As early voting gets under way in states around the country, the election is starting to look rigged after all—against voters of color. From Georgia to Texas and Wisconsin, election officials are asking voters for IDs where none are required, failing to process thousands of voter registrations, and limiting early voting so drastically that voters are standing in line for hours…
U.S. LABOR
Schnucks employees approve contract, avert strike St. Louis Post-Dispatch …Schnucks’ cashiers, baggers and other employees voted overwhelmingly to approve a three-year contract Wednesday night, ending a months-long battle over health insurance and wages that put St. Louis’ largest independent grocery chain on the brink of a strike. Members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 655 who are employed by Schnuck Markets Inc. voted 1,020-507 to approve the contract, or 67 percent of the total votes cast…
California state workers to start casting ballots on possible strike SacBee …A strike vote for members of California state government’s largest union is scheduled to begin next week, according to announcements from SEIU Local 1000. SEIU Local 1000 is trying to gain leverage in contract negotiations for the 95,000 workers it represents…
Harvard Workers Went On Strike and Won—Here’s How They Did It, and How Students Helped The Nation …Harvard University Dining Service (HUDS) workers ratified a new contract with the university following a historic strike that lasted 20 days. The contract, which raises the minimum pay for dining workers, requires Harvard to pay for any increases in health-care co-pays, and provides fair compensation for workers facing seasonal layoffs during the summer, is major victory…
Ivanka Says Trump Hotel Workers Love Her Dad. Wednesday’s Protest at His New Hotel Suggests Otherwise. Slate …About a hundred protesters gathered on Wednesday morning, many marching on behalf of workers trying to unionize at Trump’s Las Vegas hotel. Holding up signs that read “Boycott Trump Old Post Office Hotel. Trump Las Vegas Hotel Must Negotiate” and “Stand With Immigrant Workers,” members of D.C. labor organizations and other anti-Trump protesters marched in a circle around the plaza in front of the hotel…
How labor groups are fighting Trump Politico …National labor unions hoping to put a dent in Donald Trump’s support among working-class voters are running a massive ground game in swing states, sending out a detailed script to nearly 2,000 canvassers who’ve knocked on more than 6 million doors so far…
Black Workers See Fastest Wage Growth In More Than 15 Years Newsone …The U.S. Labor Department found weekly earnings rose by nearly 10 percent for full-time Black workers in the third quarter of this year—the fastest growth rate in nearly two decades. The increase in earnings since the recession ended in mid-2009 for African-Americans is 15.7 percent. Latinos are next in line with 15.5 percent and Whites are a little more than 13 percent…
The gig economy has grown big, fast — and that’s a problem for workers Recode …While the gig economy promises to free workers from the traditional, drab 9-to-5 work environment, the reality is quite different. Many contractors employed in gig-economy–type jobs lack health care and retirement benefits, are at the mercy of their employers’ scheduling needs and — despite being promised so much freedom — find themselves little more than glorified service workers…
Signs That American Workers Are Winning Bloomberg …A bevy of labor market indicators are all saying the same thing: There aren’t a lot of Americans looking for work, so those with jobs are starting to reap the benefit in the form of higher wages. In a note to clients, Macquarie Capital Markets Ltd. Economist David Doyle highlights the growing pile of evidence that wage growth is “picking up steam”…
SOCIAL JUSTICE & OTHER NEWS
Trump campaign boasts of ‘major voter suppression’ effort targeting women and black people Think Progress …With two weeks to go before Election Day and victory slipping further out of Donald Trump’s reach, the hotel mogul’s campaign is launching what they call a “major voter suppression” effort aimed at driving down turnout among white progressives, young women, and African Americans…
Republican women increasingly fear party is alienating female voters Washington Post …This division within the Republican Party comes as polls suggest the nation is on the verge of electing its first female president even as misogyny remains a part of American life and culture. Ironically, it is Trump’s candidacy rather than Hillary Clinton’s that has brought sexism to the forefront of political debate…
Justice Department Says Poor Can’t Be Held When They Can’t Afford Bail NBC …Holding defendants in jail because they can’t afford to make bail is unconstitutional, the Justice Department said in a court filing late Thursday — the first time the government has taken such a position before a federal appeals court. It’s the latest step by the Obama administration in encouraging state courts to move away from imposing fixed cash bail amounts and jailing those who can’t pay…
Clinton slams Trump’s hypocrisy in using undocumented labor to build D.C. hotel Washington Post …Trump’s new downtown D.C. hotel was built thanks to the efforts of a large workforce that included Hispanic construction workers, including some workers who say they are undocumented, The Washington Post reported. “We know he’s used undocumented workers. And that’s one of the things he’s run his campaign on, about deporting undocumented workers”…
ICE Officers Overwhelmingly Use Their Discretion to Detain LGBT Immigrants American Progress …Although the memo does not specifically mention LGBT immigrants, due to their extreme risk of abuse in detention, they are recognized as a “special vulnerability” category by the DHS.3 Data obtained recently by the Center for American Progress through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that despite the priorities outlined in the memo, the DHS elected to detain a higher percentage of LGBT immigrants who were not subject to mandatory detention…