October 18, 2006. On Friday night, Tommy Burke (right) of Local 391 in North Carolina was inducted into the Rank and File Hall of Fame for 30 years of dedication to the movement, and 20 years of work on pension justice. He was presented the award by Frank Bryant (left) of Local 391. Burke told the crowd, “I have been fighting the fight a long time. We members in North Carolina formed a Pension Improvement...

October 18, 2006. Every year, hundreds of Teamsters travel across the country to attend TDU’s Rank and File Convention. They come for the educational workshops. They come to learn more about what is happening in our union. But most of all, they come to build an organization that speaks the truth and fights for a stronger union. Tommy Burke and Dolores Bowden (see articles below) appear to be two very different types of Teamsters. Burke...

October 18, 2006.RICK SATHER, Local 638, Star Tribune Minneapolis I first heard about TDU in the mid-80s, through a newspaper article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and through some of the guys at work. But it wasn’t until 1989 that I became a member. I had recently been elected to the bargaining committee, and we were facing a no-strike clause similar to the one that the San Francisco Teamsters have faced [see Convoy #236]. Before...

July 27, 2005: UPS workers in Germany have launced a website in English as a way to reach out to brother and sister workers in North America. Go to www.netzwerkit.de/projekte/galley/ for the site.

July 25, 2006: The National Labor Relations Board has charged FedEx Ground with engaging in a pattern of illegal activity against New Jersey drivers. The case stems from work that Teamster Local 177 has been doing with FedEx workers for a number of years. In 2005 the local won an NLRB ruling that FedEx drivers were employees, not contractors. Similar decisions have been issued over the years, which have confirmed that FedEx “contractors” are actually...

October 18, 2006. Tom Griffith was a freight driver before he was elected president of Harrisburg, Pa. Local 776 a little over 20 years ago. He was Eastern Region Freight Director for several years. He knows the Hoffa administration from the inside and talked about the reason he retired. The following is adapted from his address to the TDU Convention. I started working at the IBT, it didn’t take me long to realize that this...

October 18, 2006: The grocery industry outsourcing trend continues with Kroger’s announcement that they will be transfering warehouse and delivery operations in Louisville to TransCorp Inc. and Zenith Logistics. The new third-party operators quickly set the stage for their bargaining strategy by handing Local 89 members packets with job applications and info on wage and benefit cuts. Neither Local 89 nor the Warehouse Division have taken steps to counter these scare tactics, or put in...

By George Kieffer, adapted from the www.denverbrown.com website. October 18, 2006. UPS continues to get good press concerning its PAS system. Everyone from technology journals to the main stream press have sung the praises of Package Flow Technology and the Preload Assist System. Let’s look at a few of the stories about PAS to see how they compare to reality. Optimize Magazine: “It helps managers ensure that drivers are not overdispatched and that last-minute load...

October 18, 2006. This summer in California, UPS tried to enlist Teamsters in their effort to undermine litigation over the company’s practice of forcing employees to work off the clock. Faced with a major lawsuit involving violations of California wage and hours laws, UPS got the legislature to pass a bill giving unionized transportation companies an exemption from laws requiring lunch breaks during specified times in work shifts. A law designed for UPS! In an...

At the September 21 Multi-Region Change of Operations meeting in Chicago, Yellow Transportation’s VP of Labor Relations announced that the Yellow clerical Change of Operations was “withdrawn without prejudice” and that it would be “resubmitted before the end of the year.” This was in response to a barrage of questions from Yellow’s Teamster clerical members at terminals across the country. They demanded more information from the company about the change, how it was calculated, and...