Friday, July 4, 2014

Today's Teamster News 07.04.14

Teamster News
Hinckley Springs Workers Go Out On Strike  Des Plaines Valley News   ...Union representatives and local employees said that negotiations with ownership, DS Services of America Inc., broke down June 25. Employees said that the company refused to negotiate with the union and have indicated that they want members to take a pay cut while taking on more responsibilities. That has union members angry...
Mike's Hard Lemonade Is Too Sour, Say Ohio Teamsters  teamster.org   ...At Columbus’ Independence Day celebration, “Red, White and Boom,” Teamsters who work at Heidelberg Distributing gave information to the public today about anti-worker behavior by the company, which is the distributor of Mike’s Hard Lemonade products in Ohio...
Teamsters Local 988 Welcomes Houston Laundry Drivers into Union  teamster.org   ...Laundry drivers at Angelica Linen voted 9-5 yesterday in favor of union representation with Teamsters Local 988 in Houston, Texas. There are 14 drivers in the new bargaining unit...
Trade
Trans Pacific Partnership Meeting Switched From Vancouver To Ottawa, Ducking Critics  BoingBoing   ...What could make the secretive Trans Pacific Partnership process even less legit? Moving it at the last minute, under cover of darkness, from Vancouver to Ottawa, in order to avoid critics of the treaty and how it is being negotiated...
State Battles
Governor Patrick Signs Domestic Workers Bill Of Rights Into Law  Boston Globe   ...Governor Patrick signed into law a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights on Wednesday, making Massachusetts the fourth state in the country to provide protections for nannies and housekeepers that most employees at companies take for granted...
Realtors asked for budget provision expanding foreign ownership of state land  The Cap Times   ...Wisconsin Realtors look to be next in line to benefit from Gov. Scott Walker’s “Wisconsin is open for business” vow. While there has been no shortage of speculation behind what is driving Walker’s proposal to loosen restrictions on land purchases by buyers from outside the U.S., Thomas Larson, vice president of legal and public affairs with the Wisconsin Realtors Association, takes some of the credit...
New Delaware Law Will Ensure Employers Can't Force Workers To Have Unsafe Pregnancies  Think Progress   ...On Monday, the Delaware House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that would protect pregnant workers from discrimination after the Senate had previously done the same...
States That Raised Their Minimum Wage Are Experiencing Faster Job Growth  Think Progress   ...Think a higher minimum wage is a job killer? Think again: The states that raised their minimum wages on January 1 have seen higher employment growth since then than the states that kept theirs at the same rate...
War On Workers
32 states lag U.S. in job recovery  Associated Press   ...Even though economists declared the recession over in June 2009, Illinois is still down 184,000 jobs from pre-recession levels. New Jersey is down 147,000. Both states were hurt by layoffs at factories. Florida is down 170,000 in the aftermath of its real estate market collapse...
June Full-Time Jobs Plunge By Over Half A Million, Part-Time Jobs Surge By 800K, Most Since 1993  zero hedge   ...Is this the reason for the blowout, on the surface, payroll number? In June the BLS reports that the number of full-time jobs tumbled by 523K to 118.2 million while part-time jobs soared by 799K to over 28 million!...
How the South is becoming a solid band of poverty: One in three live in poor neighborhoods  Daily Mail   ...The number of Americans living in poor neighborhoods has skyrocketed in the last decade - and nowhere is the trend more prominent than in the South, where more than 30percent of the population is concentrated in an area with high poverty...
The War On Workers (opinion)  New York Times   ...All of Illinois’s in-home care providers benefit from union representation. Until Monday, all were required to pay a modest fee for those services. But now workers can “free ride.”...
Once Again, The Roberts Court Rules Against American Workers  The Hill   ...In both the public and private sectors, non-member employees who pay fair-share fees enjoy a well-established and longstanding right to opt out of paying for a union's political activities. Rather, this case was simply a partisan effort by anti-union forces to destroy the collective rights of public employees...
Miscellaneous
If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance  Boing Boing   ...In a shocking story on the German site Tagesschau (Google translate), Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz report on the rules used by the NSA to decide who is a "target" for surveillance...