Today's Teamster News 10.11.13

Hoffa: Secret U.S. - Euro Backroom Trade Talks Are More Of The Same  teamster.org   ...An article in Wednesday’s New York Times details how corporate leaders met last year with European officials on the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) months before trade negotiations officially began...
Teamsters' Agreement Prevents Layoffs at Workforce Central  Teamsters Local 117   ...Members of Teamsters Local 117, employed at Workforce Central in Tacoma, have voted to forgo their contractual rights and significantly reduce their hours in order to prevent layoffs, which would have otherwise resulted during the federal government shutdown...
Five UPS Supplement Ballots Counted  teamster.org   ...Ballots have been counted for five UPS local supplements/riders so far, and four have passed. Go to www.teamster.org/UPS and http://www.upscontractrfacts.com/ to view the results...
Whitaker council approves police deal  McKeesport Daily News   ...Whitaker council unanimously approved a three-year agreement Wednesday for its police force with Teamsters Local 205 in White Oak, Pennsylvania. The workers will see their wages increase by $1.40 over the next three years...
Legislators Travel to Hanford Express Support for Marquez Brothers Workers  California Labor Federation   ...In August, 200 workers at a Marquez Brothers cheese production plant in Hanford (Kings County) voted to join Teamsters Local 517 in Visalia, Calif. Last week, three Assembly members drove eight hours to meet with them and demonstrate their commitment for California Latinos to realize the American Dream…
Hurst: Privatized sanitation might not cost jobs  Princeton Daily Clarion   ...The Teamsters Union represents half the workforce within Princeton’s (Indiana) water, sanitation and sewer departments, but according to Mayor Bob Hurst, only seven people would be affected if the city decides to privatize its sanitation system...
Berkeley: Pyramid Brewery workers protest layoffs  Vallejo Times Herald   ...Cat Wiest, a laid-off Pyramid Brewery worker and shop steward, doesn't buy her bosses' contention that the company must furlough the 15 workers at its Gilman Street location for six to nine months while the facility undergoes upgrades. She suspects the real reason for the layoffs is due to the August 7 election when 12 of the 15 workers voted to join the Teamsters...
Grocery strike looms as negotiations resume  KIRO News   ...Unions, including the Teamsters, are lining up to support Seattle-area grocery workers if they go on strike due to failed negotiations...
Florida Woman Threatens Bankster's Life With a Gun and Gets Dad's Million Dollars Returned  Truthout   ...Daphne Davis invited a top bank executive to her office at the Piggly Wiggly grocery in Apalachicola, pulled out a Smith & Wesson .40-caliber pistol and threatened to shoot him dead. "I told him my face would be the last one he would see if he didn't get Daddy that paperwork," Davis said. The documents came 20 minutes later...
Hell No! to Citizens United 2.0  Common Dreams   ...The Supreme Court of the United States is poised to continue dismantling restrictions on money in politics in a new case that begins today: McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission...
White House to restore military death benefits denied in wake of shutdown  Guardian   ...Solution expected following mounting outrage over denial of benefits to families of service members killed in action...
Government efforts to protect health and safety are slowed or halted as shutdown lingers  Associated Press   ...The government shutdown has slowed or halted federal efforts to protect Americans' health and safety, from probes into the cause of transportation and workplace accidents to tracking foodborne illness...
This cancer patient’s treatment is on hold because of the government shutdown  Washington Post   ...In April 2012, Michelle Langbehn was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that affects 1 percent of cancer patients in the U.S.. After nine months of chemotherapy, she and her doctor began looking into other potential treatment options, including a trial at the National Institutes of Health, which is now on hold because of the government shutdown...
The 5 creepiest things about how the Koch brothers engineered the shutdown  Death and Taxes Magazine   ...This weekend, The New York Times revealed how the Koch Brothers and Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese engineered this here shutdown we’re dealing with right now, and how they’d been planning it ever since Obama was reelected...
Richest 1 Percent Hold 46 Percent Of The World's Wealth  Reuters   ...Global wealth has risen by 68 percent over the past 10 years to reach a new all-time high of $241 trillion and the United States accounts for nearly three quarters of the increase, Credit Suisse said in its World Wealth Report...
Anxiety As Stimulus Hike To Food Stamps Set To End  Associated Press   ...A temporary increase in food stamps expires Oct. 31, meaning for millions of Americans, the benefits that help put food on the table won't stretch as far as they have for the past four years...
TPP - Trading In Our Sovereignty Fast-Track to a Train Wreck  Croton Watershed Clean Water Coalition, Inc.   ...Imagine that all we have done to protect our lands, lives and livelihoods from fracking, secretively signed away. Imagine our right to redress grievances bypassed by a tribunal of private sector corporate lawyers, with no chance to appeal their legally binding determinations...
New Report: Preventable Medical Mistakes Account for One-Sixth of All Annual Deaths in the United States  Mercola.com   ...Our conventional health care system is in desperate need of radical change, and the findings published in a new report clearly backs up this assertion...
Dark Money Group Wins IRS Recognition as Tax-Exempt Nonprofit  Pro-Publica   ...The IRS has granted nonprofit status to America Is Not Stupid 2013 a so-called dark money group best known for a 2012 election ad featuring a talking baby who compared the smell of his diaper with a Montana senator...
AFSCME Members Fighting to Maintain Pension and Protect Public Against Tea Party Ballot Measure  AFSCME   ...If a tea party-backed ballot measure to privatize Cincinnati’s municipal employee retirement system passes, retirement security for 7,500 workers, retirees and survivors will be gone...

5 reasons unpaid Internships are ruining America

Internships are becoming more important in getting a first job – and they're increasingly unpaid. According to the New York Times, about half of the million-plus internships taken by college undergraduates every year are unpaid. More than 50 percent of current college graduates are estimated to have had at least two college internships. No data exists on how many recent college graduates take internships after college.

What sort of impact is this having? Noah Baron, from the New American Politics PAC, argues: 

A neglected issue … which affects nearly every college student in the United States today is that of unpaid internships…. The problem of unpaid internships affects all but the most wealthy.

Here are five ways unpaid internships are destroying the U.S.:

1. Unpaid Internships Are Ruining College: Researchers from the College Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University find that taking an unpaid internship can harm a student's performance in school.

75% (of students) were also working a second job for pay in order to cover college expenses and the credits for their unpaid internship. Anecdotally, many students report working as many as 40 to 50 hours per week — and some of those are freshman. Their advisors often do not know they are working beyond their federal work study hours, and they are having trouble meeting assignment deadlines in class because they are working so much. When prioritizing their activities, work for pay comes first, internship or career enhancement comes second, and school work comes last. 

Learning to balance academic, work and life responsibilities quickly translates into juggling paid work, unpaid work, and work that you pay to do. Small wonder only half of those lazy college students actually survive until graduation. 

The unpaid internship isn't even that valuable for students who do survive and graduate. The National Association of Colleges and Employers 2013 Student Survey found that “while paid internships increased the likelihood of receiving a permanent job offer, unpaid interns fared only slightly better than students who did no internship at all." 

2. Unpaid Internships Have No Labor Rights: Because they receive no income from the company, unpaid interns are not employees, and are therefore not protected from sexual harassment, workers compensation, or any other sort of employment regulations. Forced to work 10 hour days, or don’t get a lunch break? Nobody cares. Without payment, interns are technically volunteers and have no labor rights. 

However, interns are allowed to sue for negligence. And back pay. And anything else that happens to them. That is, if they can afford it. 

3. Using Unpaid Interns Causes Massive Legal Liability Headaches For Businesses: The Department of Labor internship guidelines are very strict at for-profit institutions; you can’t replace workers or benefit from intern work, and you have to supervise interns with “training which would be given in an educational environment”. The Atlantic observes that: 

• A summer full of filing, data entry, and occasional lunch run would appear to be utterly insufficient to meet this standard. Presumably, a magazine intern wouldn't even be allowed to publish an article, since they'd be helping the publication turn a profit. 

Any internship that doesn’t fulfill these stringent requirements is open to lawsuits from former interns similar to the recent Fox Searchlight, Atlantic City Records, New Yorker and W Magazine cases. Even internships used as college classes are suspect:

• California and some other states require that interns receive college credit as a condition of being unpaid. But federal regulators say that receiving college credit does not necessarily free companies from paying interns, especially when the internship involves little training and mainly benefits the employer. 

4. Unpaid Interns Drive off Good Talen: Research interns at ProPublica argue that unpaid internships replace skilled workers:

...the current arrangement between employers and unpaid interns is neither fair nor sustainable. The set-up — where organizations hire workers under pet names such as “apprentice” or “volunteer” and pass off full-time employees’ responsibilities without compensation — undermines a large pool of people in this country, typically young folks. In this sense, employers who actively recruit and rotate new talent without paying for it are directly hurting a critical sector of their own industries. 

Without a paying job, intelligent recruits are likely to abandon the industry for something more sustainable: flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

5. Unpaid internships stifle job creation: The unpaid college internship has spawned the creation of the barely-paid post-college internship and a new class of perma-interns that roams around for new internship positions every few months in the hope that someday, someone will hire them.

Back in February, the Washingtonian commented on their plight:

• You can find young people languishing at film studios in Los Angeles and magazine empires in New York City. Similarly, Washington’s job pyramid … doesn’t start at entry level; it starts at internship. Our area is now home to one of the largest intern-industrial complexes in the country, one that extends well past the bustling summer months.

These low-paid workers don't have much to spend, and so they aren't supporting the businesses in their community (or any business, for that matter. They aren't buying homes, and they aren't buying refrigerators or carpeting or furniture. 

Turns out, denying a significant section of the population good jobs with good wages hurts us all.

Today's Teamster News 06.15.13

America's private prison system is a national disgrace  The Guardian   ... in a recent lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of prisoners at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility (EMCF)...the ACLU contends, the facility, which is operated by private contractors, is rife with horrific abuses...
New Report: How the U.S.-EU Trade Deal would Grant Sweeping Corporate Privileges  Public Citizen   ...Report after report has indicated that the massive U.S.-EU deal is on shaky ground now that the NSA spying scandal has fueled European privacy concerns and botched the hopes of U.S. telecommunications firms to use the deal to downsize data privacy protections...
Senator Warren Presses White House to Release Pacific Trade Text  Bloomberg Business Week   ...President Barack Obama’s administration should release documents the U.S. and 10 other Pacific-region nations are using as they negotiate a new trade agreement, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said...
Another reason to love Costco: better prices for generic prescription drugs   Deseret News   ...Not only does Costco pay its workers decent wages, Los Angeles Times reporter David Lazarus recently reported that Costco's drug prices consistently came in well below those of other leading pharmacies…
Google lambasted over tax avoidance in the U.K  MarketWatch   ...Google Inc. has aggressively avoided paying corporation tax in Britain and its reputation won’t be restored until it begins to pay what is due, a U.K. parliamentary committee said Thursday, in the latest sign that governments around the world are stepping up scrutiny of the tax affairs of multinational firms...
NSA snooping: Facebook reveals details of data requests  BBC News   ...Facebook received 9,000-10,000 requests for user data from US government entities in the second half of 2012...
BofA Gave Bonuses to Foreclose on Clients, Lawsuit Claims  Bloomberg News   ...Bank of America Corp. (BAC), the second-biggest U.S. lender, rewarded staff with cash bonuses and gift cards for meeting quotas tied to sending distressed homeowners into foreclosure, former employees said in court documents...
IT FINALLY COMES OUT: Elite Traders Are Getting Access To Data Before Everyone Else  Business Insider   ...Time after time ahead of major news, there seems to be someone who knows something before it happens — there seem to be trades that hit too hard and fast before the news is actually made...
Banks Slow to Clean Up the Mortgage Mess  CNBC   ...After multiple enforcement actions, lawsuits and multibillion-dollar settlements, state and federal regulators are making sluggish progress in their efforts to prod banks to help mortgage borrowers...
More unpaid interns file lawsuits against employers for pay   Los Angeles Times   ...There are tens of thousands of interns during the summer time, asked to make coffee and shuffle mail for little to no pay, all for a line to add to their resume. But the unpaid internship is under assault, at least in New York, where employment lawyers are filing lawsuit after lawsuit against media companies over unpaid internships – and winning...
MT task force will address wage gap for men and women state workers  KXLH News   ...On Thursday, Governor Steve Bullock signed an executive order establishing a task force to address the issue of the wage gap between men in women in Montana's work force, and they'll be starting internally first...
Connecticut attorney general taking layoff ruling to Supreme Court  Middletown Press   ...Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen vowed Thursday to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that said former Gov. John G. Rowland's administration violated unionized state employees' constitutional rights when he laid off 2,800 of them in 2003...
School district approves raises  News-Leader   ...The Springfield (Missouri) school board approved four 2013-14 collective bargaining contracts during its study session on Tuesday that includes across-the-board pay hikes for employees, including workers represented by Teamsters Local 245...
Stagehands End Protest, Deal Struck with Brookhaven Amphitheater  Port Jefferson Patch   ...Theatrical Teamsters Local 817 and Long Island Stagehands Local 340 IATSE have reached an agreement for their members after protesting outside Brookhaven, New York's Pennysaver Amphitheater...
Peace Wapiti bus drivers to fight mandatory retirement  Peace Country Sun   ...Senior bus drivers with the Peace Wapiti School Division (PWSD) who are represented by Teamsters Local 362 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, are taking a stand against the division’s controversial retirement policy...
L.A. City Council and film industry again clash over green bike lanes  Los Angeles Times   ...The L.A. City Council and the film industry are once again on a collision course over a green-colored bike lane downtown, which has been a bone of contention with location scouts and filmmakers, who complain that bright green color makes it harder to film movies set in a different era along the street and to continue L.A.'s long tradition of playing other cities....