Sunday, May 4, 2014

Today's Teamster News 05.04.14

Teamster News
Historic Pay For Performance Measure Wins Majority Vote For First Time At A U.S. Public Company  teamster.org   ... Ken Hall, International Brotherhood of Teamsters General Secretary-Treasurer, (said),“We do not believe executives should receive a guaranteed windfall in the outcome of a change-of-control when receipt of such compensation could have very little to do with the executives’ actual job performance...
Teamsters strike PepsiCo bottling plant over wages  Indianapolis Star   ...About 345 members of Teamsters Local 135 went on strike Thursday at a PepsiCo bottling plant on Indianapolis’ Northwestside...
Hoffa, Hall Remember Former Rep. Oberstar as Friend of Workers  teamster.org   ...Jim Oberstar stood up to Fed Ex when it repeatedly tried to shortchange its workforce and gain an advantage over the rest of the package delivery sector under the reauthorization of FAA...
Trade
Recent improvements in US trade deficit are unlikely to last  Sober Look   ...While the recent improvements in US trade deficit are a positive, they are largely driven by lower net energy imports. As the economy improves, growth in imports due to stronger demand will become the dominant trend, resulting in a downturn in the overall trade balance...
State Battles
Retirement Accounts for Everyone  Baseline Scenario   ...The Connecticut legislature is considering a bill that create a publicly administered retirement plan that would be open to anyone who works at a company with more than five employees...
War on Workers
Jobs Report: 288K Jobs Added, 806K Dropped out of Work Force  Trade Reform   ...The deindustrialization of America continues as the lowest paying eight categories of jobs gained in April, high paying jobs in manufacturing had little improvement, and hundreds of thousands of people stopped looking for work...
Subway leads fast food industry in underpaying workers  CNN Money   ...Individual Subway franchisees have been found in violation of pay and hour rules in more than 1,100 investigations spanning from 2000 to 2013, according to a CNNMoney analysis of data collected by the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division...
Brazil police accused of 'cleansing' favelas before World Cup football carnival rolls into town  Daily Mail   ...There has been an orgy of extra-judicial killing by Brazil’s military police – the result of a government crackdown to ‘pacify’ the favelas before the world’s media arrive...
Mutiny of the Lab Rats – Europeans Grow Weary of EU Experiment  naked capitalism   ...On the one side will be an unruly coalition of far-right and nationalist groups who would like nothing better than to torpedo the European frigate once and for all ... On the other side of the aisle will be a motley crew of leftist parties determined to put an end to the EU’s fetish for austerity measures and bank bailouts...
Homeless Grandmother Arrested 59 Times for Sitting on Sidewalk  Alternet   ...as part of a decade-long effort to "clean up" Skid Row in Los Angeles (i.e. run the homeless out of the area to ease development), the city of LA has spent at least a quarter of a million dollars arresting, prosecuting and jailing just one homeless woman, 59-year-old Ann Moody, mostly for sitting on a public sidewalk...
"The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap" *opinion)  truthout   ...People are beginning to become disturbingly comfortable with a kind of official hypocrisy. Bizarrely, for instance, we’ve become numb to the idea that rights aren’t absolute but are enjoyed on a kind of sliding scale...