Teamster News
L.A.-Area Port Truckers Expand Strike To Three New Companies Los Angeles Times ...Drivers from QTS Inc., LACA Express and WinWin Logistics Inc. joined an ongoing strike Monday morning, said Barb Maynard, a spokeswoman for the Teamsters Union, which is backing the drivers...
Port Truckers Drive Home Difference Between Contractors And Employees Los Angeles Times ...Decades ago, such drivers were full-time employees, but many companies began treating them as independent contractors to bump profits and cut labor costs. And when environmental safeguards made expensive clean-energy trucks mandatory, drivers essentially became indentured servants, with truck leasing costs, insurance and other expenses deducted from their paychecks, often knocking them below minimum wage but still requiring them to pay for gas and repairs....
Fired Disney performers seeking jobs, back pay Bay News 9 ...The Teamsters Union representing the three men has already been through the grievance process and will now go forward to present their case to a federal arbitrator, unless Disney meets their demands...
Trade
French Government Will Not Sign TTIP Agreement In 2015 EurActiv ...Matthias Fekl, France's Secretary of State for Foreign Trade, has made it clear that France will not support the inclusion of the Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanism (ISDS) in a potential TTIP agreement...
State Battles
Government employees produce nothing, says ignorant Kansas House Speaker Ray Merrick of Johnson County (opinion) Kansas City Star ...News flash for Ray Merrick: Those employees doing “nothing” are the schoolteachers, firefighters and police officers employed by governments across the state. These are the hardworking employees who make it possible to educate Kansas children and protect Kansas families...
An Embattled ALEC, Buoyed by Election Results, Lays Blueprint for 2015 Center for Media and Democracy ...ALEC has been bleeding corporate members, but with Republicans now in control of 68 out of 98 state legislative bodies, there are fewer impediments to the enactment of the corporate-friendly legislation that ALEC peddles -- and in early December, ALEC and the corporations that still fund it will likely lay out the legislative blueprint for 2015 at the ALEC States & Nation Policy Summit in Washington, DC...
California Tells Court It Can’t Release Inmates Early Because It Would Lose Cheap Prison Labor ThinkProgress ...Out of California’s years-long litigation over reducing the population of prisons deemed unconstitutionally overcrowded by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010, another obstacle to addressing the U.S. epidemic of mass incarceration has emerged: The utility of cheap prison labor...
War on Workers
Number Of Homeless Children In America Surges To All-Time High: Report Huffington Post ...The number of homeless children in the U.S. has surged in recent years to an all-time high, amounting to one child in every 30, according to a comprehensive state-by-state report that blames the nation's high poverty rate, the lack of affordable housing and the impacts of pervasive domestic violence...
We Are the Most Unequal Society in the Developed World...And We Don't Know It (opinion) Huffington Post ...Americans grossly underestimated this gap. Instead of 354 to 1, the Americans in representative survey think it is only 30 to 1. When asked what the ideal pay gap should be, Americans say that a fair gap would be about 7 to 1...
Agencies Look For Cause Of Fatal Gas Leak In Texas New York Times ...Randall Clements, the plant manager, said DuPont was working with the authorities and conducting its own “top-to-bottom review” of the accident. Asked how the leak had begun and whether the problem had been a result of equipment failure or human error, a company spokesman, Gregg M. Schmidt, said answering those questions was part of the investigation...
Worker dies in fall at Mosinee paper mill Associated Press ...A 55-year-old worker was killed when he fell from a hydraulic bucket while installing insulation at a Mosinee paper mill...
Trump Taj Mahal Casino In Atlantic City Will Shutter New York Daily News ...The owner of the struggling Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort filed court papers on Friday saying it will close next month, making it the fifth of the city’s 12 casinos to shut down this year...
Miscellaneous
Keystone at Senate tipping point The Hill ...Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and other supporters of the Keystone XL oil pipeline are stuck at 59 votes — one vote shy of the supermajority they need to move their bill forward on Tuesday...
