Thursday, December 29, 2011

Woo-hoo! Another Teamster organizing victory in GA

Please give a warm welcome to our 38 new Teamster brothers and sisters at Republic Waste in McDonough, Ga. They voted 24-14 to join Local 728 in Atlanta after a hard-fought campaign.

Renard Henley, a driver for the automatic silos, said there's a lot of frustration among the bargaining unit. Their pay was $175 a week before the company merged. Said Henley,
They came back and cut it and said $160 is better than what we were getting. They piled more work on us, If you didn’t have 358 stops, they took the helper off ...You got a lot of people after three years their body has broken down.
 Henley is hoping the Teamsters will bring him peace of mind.
We deal with a lot of intimidation on thejob. If you complain about anything, the first they tell you is there’s the door if you don’t like it. We didn’t need to hear that. We’ve got a family just like they do. They made sure that we were afraid of them. 
Local 728 won seven -- count 'em, seven -- National Labor Relations Board elections this year, including two at Republic. Said Local 728 President Randy Brown,
This is a great victory for our union. It adds another unit to an existing group of Republic workers in the Atlanta area. It goes to show, yet again, that we can organize waste workers in the South.
Props to Local 728, and welcome to our new brothers and sisters.