Today's Teamster News 02.06.14

Teamsters Back Legislation Reining in Anonymous Campaign Money  teamster.org   ...Yesterday, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters threw its support behind new legislation that seeks to reform the political campaign finance system and return government to everyday Americans...
Airline Professionals Association Teamsters Local 1224 and Silver Airways Partner to Begin Addressing Pilot Shortage  Teamsters Local 1224   ...Silver Airways and its pilots, represented by the Airline Professionals Association Teamsters Local 1224 (Local 1224) and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Airline Division (IBTAD), today announced that they have successfully partnered to reach an agreement that will help address pilot shortages at the airline and provide Silver’s pilots with pay increases and quality of life improvements...
CN conductors' strike averted after company and Teamsters union reach new tentative labour agreement  Wall Street Journal   ...CN (TSX: CNR) (NYSE: CNI) announced today that it has reached a new tentative collective agreement with the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference - Conductors, Trainpersons and Yardpersons...
Contract has one year added  News Transcript   ...Officials in Colts Neck, New Jersey have inked a one-year contract extension with Teamsters Local 11 covering several white-collar employees of the township...
Court of Appeals Hands Victory to U.S. Workers  Economic Policy Institute   ...The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled yesterday that the Department of Labor’s H-2B visa wage methodology regulation is valid, handing a defeat to a coalition of employers who want to keep wages low for employees in forestry, seafood, hospitality, landscaping and other physically demanding jobs...
Labor board tries again to change union rules  Associated Press   ...Labor regulators are trying once again to streamline the process in which workers decide whether to join labor unions, a move sure to reignite the bitter debate between union advocates and employers that seek to discourage workers from unionizing...
Biden: Unions 'only guys keeping the barbarians at the gate'  Detroit News   ...Vice President Joe Biden defended the role of organized labor, saying opponents are mounting a long-term war to attack unions. “These guys on the right — they know without you there — they call every shot,” Biden told more than 1,000 UAW members and retirees on the final day on its four-day annual political conference here. “You guys are the only guys keeping the barbarians at the gate...”
Over 1 in 6 Men in Prime Working Years Don’t Have a Job  Naked Capitalism   ...The duration and severity of unemployment among men in their peak earning years suggests that there is both more suffering than is readily apparent, and that this group is also likely to wind up impoverished in their old age. These men, with their sense of identity often strongly vested in being producers and breadwinners, face a grim future in psychological as well as financial terms...
Korea Passes ‘U-Turn’ Law With Generous Incentives For Companies To Bring Manufacturing From China Back To Korea  Trade Reform   ...It includes generous incentives and subsidies for companies to return production to Korea...
Top UK Regulator: People Have Good Reason Not to Trust Currency Rates Set By Big Banks  Wall Street on Parade   ...Global investigators have accumulated evidence that strongly suggests that traders at the too-big-to-fail banks have been rigging foreign exchange rates in much the same manner that they rigged the interest rate benchmark, Libor...
Just before Lac-Mégantic, railways sought to reduce inspections  CBC News   ...The Railway Association of Canada, whose major members include CN and CP Rail, asked the federal transport minister at the time, on June 7, 2013, to repeal rules that require certified rail car inspectors to do detailed examinations of brakes, axles, wheels and car components before they are loaded...
That’s cold, Whole Foods: Polar vortex firing spurs Chicago strike  Salon   ...Workers walk off the job to support a co-worker who stayed home in the snowstorm with her special needs son...
Turkish Unionists: 'We Are Not Terrorists'  Portside   ...The right-wing government is using anti-terror laws to crack down on an old enemy—the union movement. But unionists could lead Turkey's development in a democratic and secular direction...
New surveillance technology can track everyone in an area for several hours at a time  Washington Post   ...As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. Although these cameras can’t read license plates or see faces, they provide such a wealth of data that police, businesses and even private individuals can use them to help identify people and track their movements...
Judge Markson Declares Administrative Code Unconstitutional, Dismisses Charges  Wisconsin Citizens Media Cooperative   ...Dane County Judge John Markson dismissed charges against political dissidents arrested during Scott Walker’s failed crackdown on unauthorized singing in the Wisconsin State Capitol...
Student Loan Companies Face New Scrutiny For Bad Practices Against Borrowers  Huffington Post   ...Companies that collect student loan payments may have a financial incentive to stymie borrowers who wish to quickly repay their debts, a top federal regulator said Monday...
A High School In A Poor Neighborhood Closed Down. These Folks Reopened It And Kicked Some Butt. How?  Upworthy   ...When a school on the West Side of Chicago closed its doors, people from the business world, labor unions, government, and the community came together to reopen the doors and transform it into a model for others. The best testimony of their success? The kids themselves...
Report: For-profit probation industry hurts America’s poorest  Salon   ...A report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch (HRW) highlights how private companies charged with overseeing the probation of hundreds of thousands of misdemeanor probation sentences every year “trample” some of America’s poorest with “discriminatory” penalty fees...
CCA to pay Idaho $1 million for understaffing privately run Idaho prison  Associated Press   ...Corrections Corporation of America will pay Idaho $1 million for understaffing the state's largest prison in violation of its contract, the AP reports, according to a settlement agreement announced late Tuesday...

Why oh why can't we have a better media??

This is why we sometimes hate the New York Times. The paper ran a story on Sunday about the Big Bad Government attacking poor widdle Louisiana business owners. Why, these saintly employers desperately want to hire American workers, but there just aren't any unemployed Americans in Louisiana. So they HAVE to hire guestworkers from Mexico, who LOVE cutting up alligator meat for poverty wages.

Either the reporter, Julia Preston, is the most gullible person on the planet or she's carrying out her newspaper's anti-worker agenda. Maybe it's both.

The guest worker program, aka the H-2B visa program,  is just one of the ways U.S. employers drive down wages. Others include slavery, prison labor, union busting, offshoring and wage theft, but we'll get to those another time. The U.S. Labor Department is putting new rules into effect on Sept. 30 that would require employers to pay guest workers by the hour instead of by piecework. They'll make more money that way. On Wednesday, Louisiana food associations sued to stop the rule.

H-2B has been called modern slavery. The National Employment Law Project (NELP) explains why. There is a long history of abuses in the program,

...ranging from labor violations to discrimination, wage and hour violations, visa fraud, debt peonage, involuntary servitude and labor trafficking that have long plagued this under-regulated program...

Temporary “guestworker” programs have long worked to the detriment both of the U.S. workers who are bypassed in favor of foreign workers, and for the foreign workers who fall prey to unscrupulous employers and their labor contractors. Dozens of criminal and civil prosecutions have been launched against employers and recruiters for filing fraudulent applications for non-existent jobs, for race and gender discrimination, for human trafficking and wage and hour violations.

NELP explains how employers like the Louisiana alligator meat suppliers can claim they can't find Americans to do the work (the unemployment rate in Louisiana, which the Times doesn't mention, is 7.6 percent):

NELP advocates have been involved in cases where U.S. workers were bypassed in favor of foreign workers, sometimes through bogus advertisements in media designed to avoid U.S. workers, through unreasonable job qualifications, or through simple lack of follow up with qualified U.S. workers. One media investigation reported that an East Coast visa fraud conspiracy simply scheduled interviews with U.S. applicants for inconvenient times, such as 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve. The few Americans who actually appeared reported later that the interviewers were "intimidating" and made the jobs sound "as bad as possible."  Yesterday, a Georgia news outlet reported cases involving employers who allegedly advertised H-2B jobs far from the actual location of the jobs, and refused to hire qualified workers referred to them by the state workforce agency.

Some employers simply fire American workers and hire guest workers, as this Florida state senator allegedly did.  The Miami Herald reported on Friday,

In the waning days of the 2011 legislative session, Sen. JD Alexander, one of the state’s most powerful lawmakers, delivered an impassioned floor speech against a measure that would have required employers to check the immigration status of new hires.

Alexander, a Republican from Lake Wales, offered a firsthand account of housing guest workers from Mexico to help pick his crops.

“You can’t get anybody to come do this stuff, folks. And it’s the same thing, whether it’s construction, or whether it’s hotels. Americans don’t want to do it,” Alexander said moments before the Senate defeated the legislation, a top priority of Gov. Rick Scott.

Now, Alexander, who owns a farm in Polk County, is facing a lawsuit from two farmworkers who say he violated federal law by firing American citizens and green card holders and replacing them with guest workers.

At least some newspapers are on the ball.