Teamsters
Teamsters Support Alaska Airlines Contract Workers Fight for $15, Union Teamster.org ...The Teamsters Airline Division has pledged its support of contract workers at Alaska Airlines who are fighting for fair wages and union representation. The contract workers picketed outside airports across country today in an effort to raise public awareness of their fight...
Fired Workers Win Back Their Jobs Times News Weekly ...Allan Henry, an organizer for the Teamsters, said that after speaking out against Five Star Carting and their working conditions, Bush and Darden were told to sign papers deeming them terminated before they could receive their paychecks. “Now they both have their jobs back, but this is the type of working conditions and the type of retaliation these workers are dealing in this industry,” Henry said...
Strike At McMahon Distributeur Pharmaceutique Inc’s Montreal DC Materials Management & Distribution ...Unionized employees, represented by the Teamsters Québec, local 1999, are on strike at McMahon Distributeur pharmaceutique inc’s Montreal DC. The union rejected the company’s offer after several months of bargaining...
De Blasio Administration To Begin Horse-Carriage Outreach Capital New York ...The de Blasio administration began its outreach on Monday to horse-carriage drivers and others who would be affected by legislation to abolish the industry...
Global Labor & Trade
Costa Rica Announces Plan To Eradicate Child Labor By 2020 Tico Times ...During an event Monday morning, Costa Rica announced an initiative to get more than 40,000 children out of the workforce. The multi-pronged approach builds off previous efforts to reduce child labor and aims to eliminate the practice altogether by 2020...
TTIP Talks Dubbed Secretive And Undemocratic Sputnik ...As the EU Foreign Affairs Council re-starts discussions on Thursday on the trade and investment partnership with the United States (TTIP), a senior UN official has dubbed the talks undemocratic and secretive. The controversial TTIP agreement has been pushed through by US President Barack Obama, who has called for the negotiations for the world's biggest trade agreement to be speeded up. As the talks get underway in Brussels on May 7, the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, Alfred de Zayas, expressed deep concerns over the talks...
TPP, TTIP And TISA: How The Media Misrepresent Obama’s “Fast Track” “Secret” International Trade Deals Centre for Research on Globalization ...Both conservative and liberal ‘news’ media misrepresent U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed international trade-deals as if they were about only such things as lowering tariffs and reducing national trade-protectionism — which are relatively minor surface-features of these huge proposed treaties: TTIP with Europe, TPP with Asia, and TISA (Trade in Services Agreement)...
Obama's Scheduled Visit To Nike Has Trade Deal Skeptics Scratching Their Heads Huffington Post ...Nike, which is regarded as a pioneer in overseas outsourcing, has a long and checkered labor history in Vietnam. The footwear and apparel giant was pilloried for alleged sweatshop conditions in its contracted factories in Vietnam back in the 1990s, bruising its public image. By most accounts, Nike has helped make significant safety improvements in factories through its own monitoring programs since then, but wages in Vietnam are still extremely low, and the government has a poor track record of enforcing labor laws there...
State & Living Wage Battles
Pennsylvania Senate OKs Public Employee Collective Bargaining Bills Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ...Republicans on Wednesday gave Senate approval to two bills that they said would increase transparency in collective bargaining for public employees, but which Democrats equated to union-busting...
Wisconsin GOP’s Latest Attack On Food Stamp Recipients Would Cost The State Millions Think Progress ...Wisconsin would have to spend millions of dollars to realize a Republican scheme to restrict how poor people shop for food, state fiscal analysts revealed Wednesday...
For Women In This State, Getting Pregnant Will No Longer Mean Losing A Job Think Progress ...On Tuesday, the New York State legislature passed a bill aimed at shielding pregnant women from workplace discrimination, which the governor has said he will sign...
Racist History Of ‘Right To Work’ Shows Threat To Black, Latino Workers Chicago Reporter ...Rauner may be a true believer in trickle-down ideology, but for major right-to-work supporters like the corporate-sponsored American Legislative Exchange Council (which pioneered the county-level approach Rauner is now taking), it’s all about removing unions as a political check on the power of corporations. But that will have real costs for working families in Illinois. And the costs will be highest for blacks and Latinos...
Why The FEC Won’t Crack Down On Campaign Finance Violations In 2016 Think Progress ...Though the election is more than a year away, several candidates and soon-to-be candidates have already been accused of campaign finance violations. But the head of the government’s main agency for investigating the claims and enforcing the laws on the books has publicly admitted that few violators will be brought to justice this election cycle...
Effort To Repeal Prevailing Wage Law Fails In Committee Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ...A bill to repeal the state's (Wisconsin) prevailing wage failed in committee Thursday, when Republican Sen. Howard Marklein joined the panel's two Democrats to block the measure...
Pence Signs Bill Repealing Indiana Construction Wage Law Indianapolis Business Journal ...Local boards will no longer set minimum wages for public construction projects in Indiana under a law signed Wednesday by Gov. Mike Pence. The bill will eliminate the boards that set what is known as the common construction wage that workers must be paid on most state or local government projects...
Senate Votes To Block Union Dues Deduction For Some Public Employees Houston Chronicle ...Senate Bill 1968 would allow the payroll deductions to continue for police, fire and emergency-services employees -- groups that generally vote Republican in most parts of Texas -- but would not allow them for other unions, such as those for teachers, construction trades and other unions...
U.S. Labor
The 40-Hour Work Week Is A Thing Of The Past Wall Street Journal ...The phrase “nine to five” is becoming an anachronism. About half of all managers work more than 40 hours a week, according to a new survey from tax and consulting firm EY, and 39% report that their hours have increased in the past five years. Little wonder, then, that one-third of workers say it’s getting more difficult to balance work and life...
U.S. Productivity Falls 1.9% In First Quarter Wall Street Journal ...U.S. worker productivity fell in the opening months of 2015, extending a poor track record since the recession and underscoring longer-term risks to American workers’ wages...
Making The Economy Work For The Many, Not The Few -- Step 1: Raise The Minimum Wage (opinion) Huffington Post ...If the minimum wage in 1968 had simply kept up with inflation it would be more than $10 today. If it also kept up with the added productivity of American workers since then, it would be more than $21 an hour. Some opponents say minimum wage workers are teenagers seeking some extra pocket money. Wrong. Half are 35 or older, and many are key breadwinners for their families. And don't believe scaremongers who say a $15 minimum will cause employers to cut employment. More money in people's pockets means more demand for goods and services, which means more jobs not fewer jobs...
U.S. Employers Add Solid 223,000 Jobs, Unemployment Rate Falls To 7-Year Low Huffington Post ...U.S. employers added 223,000 jobs in April, a solid gain that suggests that the economy may be recovering after stumbling at the start of the year. The Labor Department said Friday that the unemployment rate dipped to 5.4 percent from 5.5 percent in March. That is the lowest rate since May 2008, six months into the Great Recession...
Miscellaneous
Oil Train Erupts In Flames In North Dakota Wall Street Journal ...A BNSF Railway Co. train carrying crude oil derailed Wednesday morning in rural North Dakota, erupting into flames and sending billows of black smoke into the air...
What Will Happen To American Jobs, Incomes, And Wealth A Decade From Now? (opinion) Huffington Post ...We are now faced not just with labor-replacing technologies but with knowledge-replacing technologies. The combination of advanced sensors, voice recognition, artificial intelligence, big data, text-mining, and pattern-recognition algorithms, is generating smart robots capable of quickly learning human actions, and even learning from one another. A revolution in life sciences is also underway, allowing drugs to be tailored to a patient's particular condition and genome...
Break Up Big Banks (opinion) Huffington Post ...We don't hear it discussed much in the media, but the reality is that the middle class of this country, once the envy of the world, is collapsing, 45 million Americans are living in poverty, and the gap between the rich and everyone else is growing wider and wider...
Wall Street Had Five Years To Prove They Can Control Their Computers. They Failed. Think Progress ...Regulators have struggled to explain the 2010 flash crash, first blaming it on legitimate trades made by a Kansas-based firm and then charging one individual trader with intentionally creating the crash from his parents’ basement. It’s not clear that either explanation is correct, though, and that very inability to convincingly diagnose what happened that day underscores how loose human control over digitized trading strategies has become...
Trucking Company Shows Facebook Road To Future New York Times ...Frustrated by Swift Transportation’s co-founder and chief executive, Jerry Moyes, the company’s shareholders will be voting at Friday’s annual meeting whether to eliminate a dual-share structure that grants him control. Owners of Facebook and other similarly feudalistic frameworks one day may find themselves similarly frustrated...
