BLET President blasts CP for unsafe rail practices and threatening employees
BLET February 16, 2015 View the original piece Dennis Pierce, National President of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and President of the Teamsters Rail Conference (U.S.), blasted Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) today for its growing culture of threats and intimidation toward its employees in the U.S. and Canada. Pierce commented following CP’s issuance of a letter to the BLET representatives on its U.S. operations, Soo Line and the Delaware & Hudson.In those notices,...
With port talks gridlocked, White House move ramps up pressure for a deal
Los Angeles Times February 16, 2015 View the original piece With idled cargo ships piling up along the coastline, President Obama ordered his labor secretary to California to try to head off a costly shutdown of 29 West Coast ports. Obama dispatched Tom Perez on Saturday to jump-start stalled labor talks between shipping companies and the dockworkers' union. The move ramps up pressure to resolve a dispute that stranded tens of thousands of containers on...
Union retirees fear dramatic pension cuts under new federal law
Jim Mackinnon Ohio.com February 16, 2015 View the original piece Bill Hendershot and his wife live on his union pension and Social Security. Hendershot, a retired Consolidated Freightways long-distance truck driver, gets around now in a 12-year-old Toyota Corolla. The couple still pay a mortgage on their home in Canal Fulton. And he’s among a huge group of union retirees nationwide who could see their monthly private pension payments cut as much as 60 percent...
Ruling Delayed on Teamsters Oversight
The Detroit News February 13, 2015 View the original piece Judge reserves decision on deal to end fed consent order. Click here to read more.
West Coast Terminal Operators to Halt Loadings a Second Time
Lynn Doan Bloomberg News February 12, 2015 View the original piece Terminal operators at ports along the U.S. West Coast will, for the second time in less than a week, suspend vessel loadings amid a labor dispute with dockworkers. Vessel loadings and unloadings will be stopped Feb. 12 and again Feb. 14-16, the Pacific Maritime Association, a San Francisco-based group representing employers in the negotiations with longshoremen, said by e-mail Feb. 11. Association members cited “ongoing and costly”...
Farmer Brothers leaving the state, in bitter blow to family of workers
Steve Lopez Los Angeles Times February 11, 2015 View the original piece Farmer Brothers, the iconic coffee company based on the border of Torrance and Los Angeles, likes to market a sweet story about how it came to be. In 1912, Roy E. Farmer thought restaurants should be serving a better cup of coffee, so he started a bean delivery business in the back of his brother's bicycle shop. And from those humble beginnings, the...
Teamsters give CP Rail 72-hour strike notice
Tracy Johnson CBC News February 11, 2015 View the original piece Teamsters Canada Rail Conference has given Canadian Pacific Railway 72-hour strike notice, meaning 3,300 locomotive engineers, conductors and other train workers could walk off the job midnight on Saturday. Union president Doug Finnson is in Montreal this week negotiating with CP, with the help of federal mediation, but says the union has not made headway on issues such as working conditions. Click here to...
Anatomy of a Turnaround: YRC Worldwide
David McCann CFO February 11, 2015 View the original piece This is the first in a series of six articles about the volatile financial misfortunes and turnaround of trucking company YRC Worldwide. See parts two, three, four, five and six. If there were a Comeback Player of the Year award for corporate performance, YRC Worldwide might have taken home the trophy for 2014. Not that the $5 billion trucking company is now a superstar — far from it. Rather, such recognition would be...
Multiemployer plans untangle reforms
Hazel Bradford Pensions & Investments February 10, 2015 View the original piece Some multiemployer pension fund executives are trying to figure out whether to take advantage of a controversial new reform law that allows potential benefit cuts for participants and retirees. Others are hoping for further reforms to allow for alternative plan designs. The Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 — passed swiftly in December — allows deeply underfunded plans to take unprecedented steps to...
In Most States, Trucking is the Most Common Job
Quoctrung Bui NPR February 06, 2015 View the original piece This gives our union leverage; it's time to use it: "Driving a truck has been immune to two of the biggest trends affecting U.S. jobs: globalization and automation. A worker in China can't drive a truck in Ohio, and machines can't drive cars." Click here to view the interactive map and read the full story.