Sunday, October 19, 2014

Today's Teamster News 10.19.14

Teamsters
Teamsters’ employees will not get raises  Hernando Today   ...Hernando County, which was poised to give salary increases to hundreds of employees — union members and others — instead will give them only to some non-union workers. The nonunion employees who will receive raises are those whose paychecks were deemed too low by consultants who looked at pay of government employees elsewhere…
First Student drivers vote to authorize strike  Savannah Now   ...First Student school bus drivers and mechanics voted to authorize a strike during a meeting of the Teamsters Union Local 728 on Saturday...
Trade
TPP Agreement Will 'Definitely' Raise Medicine Costs  telesurtv.com   ...The U.S. government has insisted you shouldn't read the leaked draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Expect the cost of life saving drugs like cancer medicine to rise under the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), a Malaysian legislator warned on Friday...
TPPA would criminalise journalism  No Right Turn   ...it also criminalises leaks which are detrimental to a party's international relations or international security. So, the US is trying to US the TPPA as a backdoor to silence WikiLeaks, the Snowden files, and the entire enterprise of journalistic criticism of power...
A Trade Storm Is Brewing  Public Citizen   ...Because Fast Track is so unpopular in the House, Speaker John Boehner has a devious plan to force the bill through Congress in the “lame duck” session after the November elections...
State Battles
The Court won’t interrupt Texas voter ID law  Scotus Blog   ...In a stinging defeat for the Obama administration and a number of civil rights groups in a major test case on voters’ rights, a divided Supreme Court told the state of Texas early Saturday morning that it may enforce its strict voter ID law for this year’s general election, with early voting starting next Monday...
About Those 8400 Jobs (opinion)  Milwaukee Sentinel   ...what really matters, is that Governor Walker promised us, that his 250,000 jobs pledge was his "floor not his ceiling".    He came as close to reaching his jobs promise as the Bucks did in landing Lebron James!...
War on Workers
Two-Thirds Of America's Biggest Retailers Are Worried About Flat Wages  Huffington Post   ...Sixty-eight percent of the top 100 retail companies in the U.S. -- a group that includes, Walmart, Apple, McDonald's and J.C. Penney -- say the country's stagnant wages pose a major threat to their bottom lines, according to a new report by the Center For American Progress...
Ebola! Prevention and Responsibility  In The Public Interest   ...Why didn’t the National Institutes of Health (NIH) properly anticipate Ebola? It did, according to NIH director Dr. Francis Collins. “NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001,” he asserted, pointing to stagnant congressional funding for developing a vaccine and therapeutics. Dr. Collins said that with funding, “we probably would have had a vaccine in time…”
Unprecedented amount of 'dark money' fuels midterm races  Los Angeles Times   ..."Is that going to become the new normal, this kind of money focused on one candidate, and we don't know where it's coming from?"...
405 Reopened After Construction Workers Killed in DUI Crash  KTLA   ...Two construction workers were hit and killed by drunk drivers on the northbound 405 Freeway early Sunday morning.