October 18, 2006. The neutrality agreement with UPS Freight, announced by James Hoffa in dramatic fashion in Las Vegas this June is now officially over. UPS Freight spokesman Ira Rosenfeld emphasized to Traffic World that the Teamsters would be bargaining for “one location only” and that the neutrality deal is now void.

A “neutrality and card check” agreement with a company allows our union to organize without company opposition, and when a majority of workers join the Teamsters, the company agrees to bargain.  Hoffa claimed that he had such a deal with UPS Freight (formerly Overnite), but it later was revealed that it covered only one terminal, with less than one percent of UPS Freight’s workers.

The International targeted UPS Freight in Indianapolis, quickly got a majority of cards signed, and will start negotiations with UPS Freight Indianapolis in September.

Bargaining with one terminal out of 200 with UPS will not be easy. When the Teamsters organized 37 Overnite terminals, Hoffa could not bargain a contract.

The neutrality and card check deal will revive only if the IBT wins it (along with an acceptable union contract that does not undercut our national UPS and freight contracts) in a signed agreement with UPS Freight in Indianapolis. UPS members have also raised the issue in contract proposal meetings that neutrality be won not only for UPS Freight, but all UPS nonunion operations.

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 was not going to work. I guess the best way to sum it up is that when officials under me were bickering about their positions and how much they were all gonna get paid, Hoffa sat me down and said, “Remember one thing–it’s always about the money.” That, I believe, was the turning point in my career, because I always thought it was about the members.

International Vice President Phil Young told me Hoffa was upset I was leaving, so I went to see him. “Listen,” Hoffa said. “You’re not allowed to retire, I’ll give you more money.”

I said, “Jimmy, remember when you set me on the couch at the Pennsylvania Conference and you said ‘It’s always about the money?’ ” He said yes, and I said, “It’s not about the money”—and then I left.

I thought about a slogan that fits Hoffa: It’s not what I can do for the union, it’s what the union can do for me. But I feel good about this election, a lot better than I felt about the last one.

I don’t believe people really had enough of a dose of Hoffa on the first round, but I’m pretty sure now, from the people I’ve talked to, that on the second dose, they’re ready for a change, and I feel real good about this election.

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 how their jobs would be protected from future layoffs. Teamsters from Atlanta, Cleveland, Dallas, and Kansas City led the way, and attended the hearing to make sure this was not a done deal. Earlier reports were that the IBT Freight Division supported the change, but rank and file members and stewards asked for clarifications. As a result, the company is reworking the change.

ABF Premium Service Change of Ops Approved

ABF got the green light in September to institute “premium service” bids throughout the Eastern, Southern and Central regions (NMFA Article 18). Their goal is to capture a bite of the lucrative one- and two-day express freight market. Some concerns were raised over details of how the new service will work. Local 728 in Atlanta won the right to have PSE freight staged in a designated area within the terminal. However, there was no agreement on how this freight would be marked so that members and stewards can monitor it to make sure the service is being used, and not abused. Presumably, there will be specific bar codes or labels that allow for daily or weekly reports. Hopefully the ABF change will actually create new work, as called for under the contract (Article 20, Section 4). That was how premium service was pitched at ratification meetings in 2003: to help grow the company and Teamster work.

Graveyard Shift for Road Drivers?

Men who alternate between daytime and nighttime shift work, rather than working a fixed schedule, have triple the normal rate of prostate cancer, according to a Japanese nationwide study, as reported in the Sept. 23 Science News. A variable shift schedule, such as some nurses work, had previously been shown to increase the risk of breast cancer and colon cancer in women. The new finding supports a longstanding expectation that disrupting the 24-hour biological rhythm can cause tumors in men, too.

Teamster members are not the only ones concerned that Hoffa would undercut the National Master Freight Agreement by negotiating a substandard deal at UPS Freight (Overnite).

The CEO of Yellow-Roadway, the largest employer of Freight Teamsters, recently warned that any deal between the Teamsters and UPS Freight, covering one terminal of 125 workers in Indianapolis, will 'set precedent' for the National Master Freight Agreement. Yellow Roadway employs 50,000 Teamsters.

Yellow-Roadway CEO William Zollars made this statement to Traffic World, a leading freight industry publication.

Because Hoffa's "card check and neutrality" agreement covers only one terminal, Zollars expects any contract that UPS Freight would accept will fall far short of the NMFA, and will not allow the employees into the Central States Teamster Pension Plan. That's why Yellow-Roadway plans to use it as precedent to gain concessions in the NMFA.

This scenario is what scares many Teamsters and leaders in the freight industry. Hoffa announced the "neutrality" agreement with great fanfare as part of his reelection effort, but bargaining with less than 1 percent of UPS Freight organized is from a position of weakness, not strength.

UPS Freight spokesman Ira Rosenfeld emphasized to Traffic World that the Teamsters would be bargaining for "one location only" and that the neutrality deal is then void.

[Click here to read the Traffic World article]

“Reprinted from www.leedham2006.org”

July 17, 2006: Hoffa is playing politics with UPS Bargaining and Overnite/UPS Freight.

“We won it—card check, neutrality. UPS Freight. Wow!”

Hoffa kicked off his reelection drive at the Teamster Convention by announcing that our union had won a card check agreement to organize UPS Freight (Overnite).

Hoffa waved a document to the crowd and declared, “This agreement between the Teamsters and UPS Freight is a letter for card check and neutrality at Overnite.”

The delegates at the Convention cheered, and rightly so. Organizing UPS Freight must be a top priority of our union. An agreement that protects the right of UPS Freight employees to freely join the Teamsters without union-busting harassment would be something to celebrate.

Hoffa wasn’t telling the full story about his deal with UPS management.

Hoffa did not reveal that the card check and neutrality agreement applies to only one out of more than 200 UPS Freight terminals.

That is not what most Teamsters understood when Hoffa stood on the Convention podium and puffed, “We won it—card check, neutrality. UPS Freight. Wow!”

Our union must win this organizing battle. It is critical to the future of Teamster bargaining power at UPS and in the freight industry. Failure is not an option. Every Teamster must pledge full support to this effort.

But to win, our leadership has to level with the membership. When it comes to organizing Overnite, Teamster members don’t need spin. We need the truth and a plan to win.

After a string of recent profitable quarters, merger mania appears to have caught up with YRC Worldwide. YRC lowered its first quarter profits by 35 percent and saw its stock price drop. Cost overruns were cited at the Yellow Transportation subsidiary. They report that Roadway Express was on track and not the problem. There was no mention of the USF subsidiaries of YRC. The company said it would offer its profit projections for 2006 when it announces actual first quarter results in late April.

New I.D. Card Coming Soon

Officials from the Department of Homeland Security are making plans for issuing transportation worker identity cards. The requirement may be in place as early as 2007, depending on Congressional action. The program will be modeled along the lines of how the Transportation Security Administration handles hazmat endorsements.

Safety Expert Challenges New Crash Study

A recent study issued by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration determined driver error or other failure by passenger vehicle was the “critical reason” in 56 percent of two-vehicle crashes, with trucks responsible for 44 percent. However, Jerry Donaldson, senior research director for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, disputes the findings. “The study violates everything that is known as peer accepted principles of good research design and data collection,” according to Donaldson. Donaldson contends appropriate research would have required using a control group and objectively gathered data. The FMCSA study relied predominantly on interviews retroactively examining individual crashes. Donaldson asserts this creates a “hindsight bias.” He added, “for the $20 million (the study cost), the public has gotten a virtually scientifically worthless piece of work.” Challenges to the current regulations covering hours of service are based on separate, previous safety research on trucker fatigue.

The May 16 acquisition of Overnite by UPS means that our biggest nonunion competition now has the deepest pockets in the freight industry.

UPS has the means to undercut union carriers to increase Overnite’s market share and you can bet they plan to do it. FedEx has turned its own LTL carrier into a $3 billion player.

To compete with FedEx, UPS intends to double Overnite’s size.Unless we act decisively, Overnite’s increased market share will come at Teamster members’ expense.

The IBT doesn’t seem to get this. On the day of the purchase, the Hoffa administration issued a press release saying, “If this purchase helps UPS to continue to successfully compete in the global marketplace in the long run, it will increase our members’ job security.”

How is a stronger nonunion Overnite going to increase freight Teamsters’ job security? That kind of talk has members asking if the Hoffa administration has given up on freight altogether.

Threat and Opportunity
For freight Teamsters, the UPS purchase of Overnite is a major threat. But it’s also our best opportunity to organize Overnite once and for all.

Our Teamsters union represents the vast majority of employees at UPS-Overnite. The question is, will the IBT use this leverage to organize Overnite? Or will the Hoffa administration stand by and watch as UPS grows its nonunion freight division?

The early signs are not good. Hoffa’s statement on the acquisition said only that the IBT will “monitor” the situation. The arch union-buster of freight is now backed by the biggest bank account in the transportation industry and the best that Hoffa can do is promise to “monitor” developments?

Teamster representation at UPS gives us new leverage over Overnite. We’ve got to use it to bring the 10,000 drivers and dock workers at Overnite into our union and into our Teamster benefit plans.

The national freight grievance panel ruled on April 28 that former Red Star employees are entitled to be hired at the new USF Holland terminals in the East. The workers learned in May that the company has to back-date their seniority to when they should have been hired, but not provide back pay.

Thanks to a grievance filed by members of Philadelphia Local 107, the panel ruled that USF Holland failed to hire the former USF Red Star employees in order of seniority. The right to preferential hiring was part of an earlier agreement worked out between the IBT and USF last July, following the shutdown of Red Star and USF Holland’s decision to open terminals in the northeast.

Angered by the fact that USF has not lived up to the agreement, and the IBT has done little about it, Philly Teamsters filed the grievance and also filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board.

These Teamsters lost their jobs in the USF Red Star fiasco and now have been denied even new-hire jobs at USF Holland. The decision also allows for yet more stalling. The panel established a subcommittee of Dan Virtue for the union, and Leonard Waldo for the company, “to review the applications.” After all these months, this should not be needed. Since there is no backpay in the decision, the company can stall all it wants if the IBT continues to allow it.

After the decision, USF Holland advertised for drivers and dock workers in an ad in the May 22 Buffalo News, apparently still intending to deny jobs to Teamsters.

It’s been many months, and it’s time for the union to stand behind the people the union put on strike. USF (and Yellow) need to understand that they will face consequences up to strike action if they don’t comply with the agreement.

Yellow has announced that its USF Dugan subsidiary will close. This is after our union spent two years, millions of dollars, and countless hours of Teamster labor to organize Dugan. After USF attacked our union a year ago by shutting down its unionized Red Star division during an ill-fated strike, some 1500 good Red Star Teamsters lost their jobs, with little to no response from the International Union.

The closing of Dugan and the consolidation of USF’s remaining subsidiaries under the label YRC Regional Transportation raise questions for our union leadership.

Are we going to use this opportunity to make Yellow-Roadway a wall-to-wall Teamster company, or will Hoffa once again issue a press release parroting the company and saying he will “monitor the situation.”

USF Holland, Yellow’s biggest and most profitable regional, will grow by picking up Dugan business in the southeast and midwest, where the two operations overlap. Since Holland is under the national freight contract, this is the positive part of the story.

But that’s not the whole story. YRC Regional, now headed by former Roadway CEO Jim Staley, is rebranding 21 terminals with the Bestway or Reddaway label, and only three (all in Missouri) as Holland. Some Reddaway and Bestway terminals are union, with white paper contracts, and most are non-union. You can bet your lunch money that Yellow is not planning to have those 21 terminals go Teamster, unless we make it clear they will not operate profitably unless it happens.

We can go back to square one and start organizing them, one at a time, or we can supplement that effort with a strategic campaign to force Yellow to let its employees choose to unionize without any intimidation, with a neutrality agreement and with card check.

Yellow Roadway — like UPS-Overnite — is on the move. Consolidating, expanding, and making a major investment in China. Will the Teamster leadership get on the move to make this a fully unionized corporation? Now is the time.

January 6, 2006: Greenville's Roadway Express facility is losing a significant number of jobs as the company realigns its business to better reflect traffic patterns and reduce transit times, said Michael J. Smid, the company's president and chief executive officer. Although Smid declined to say how many positions would be affected, a local union official put the number at more than 200 jobs.

Skip Barnett, a Teamsters Local Union No. 28 business agent who works with freight contracts, said the union expects to whittle that number to about 200 positions and added that union employees would be allowed to move with the work.

"This is a lot of middle-class jobs for the Upstate to lose," Barnett said.

Salaries for Roadway's long-haul drivers -- among those affected -- average between $60,000 and $85,000 annually, Smid said.

"If you take this by itself, it's bad, but you can handle it," said Bill Pendleton, area manager of the state Employment Security Commission's Greenville office. "If you look at the big picture -- what's been happening for the past year or two -- it's concerning. But as tough as we have it, we're still below the state average" when it comes to unemployment.

Greenville County reported an unemployment rate of 5.8 percent in November, compared with 7.1 percent joblessness for the state as a whole.

Roadway's Greenville facility, which presently has more than 300 employees, has both a consolidation and distribution unit and a local delivery unit, Smid said. Roadway Express is eliminating the consolidation and distribution function in Greenville.

Barnett said between 80 and 85 employees represented by the union would remain at the facility. A few office workers and supervisors not covered by the union contract also would continue to work there.

"Greenville is part of a change in our national transportation network," Smid said. "The change is an effort to improve the speed, the reliability and the efficiency" of the company's service and to reduce the amount of cargo handling.

The greatest impact of realignment would be felt at the company's terminals in Hagerstown, Md., and Greenville. They will "continue being facilities and operations, but their scale will change," Smid told TrafficWorld, an industry-related magazine.

More than 1,000 people nationwide will be affected by the changes, he said. Affected employees in Greenville include drivers, freight-handling professionals, supervisory personnel and support personnel.

"In each change of operations, we are repositioning our people, our resources and our assets to match changes we have seen in traffic patterns," Smid said.

Roadway plans to reduce freight handling in the Northeast and deliver to distances of 1,000 miles in two days or less. Coast-to-coast deliveries will be made in no more than four days. Deliveries from the central part of the country to the West Coast will take three days.

Although no changes have been implemented yet, the restructuring will be completed in the first quarter, Smid said.

He said the realignment will not reduce the size of the overall work force, and Barnett said the company probably would hire about 40 additional drivers. About 30 locations will gain employees as work is moved to there.

"Anybody who is working under a contract is being allowed to follow their work if they wish," Barnett said, who added the company would pay moving expenses.

Smid said that employees also have the option to move to the local delivery unit if jobs are available.

Barnett said workers who choose not to leave Greenville would be placed on layoff and are eligible for recall for five years. He said any of those employees also would be eligible to be hired at other unionized carriers in the area and must be considered before other applicants.

Smid said the company's work agreement does not include a severance package because the employees are subject to recall.

Barnett said he believes that anyone who wants similar work in the region would be able to find it even though trucking is a little slow this time of year.

Although some union members are upset about the Roadway restructuring, about half of Greenville's work came to the area the same way years ago, he said.

Roadway Express has initiated the required legal notifications to the Teamsters Union and state agencies, Smid said.

Pendleton said the state Department of Commerce's Rapid Response Team has been notified by Roadway of the change of operations. Employment Security Commission personnel hope to meet with employees soon to explain unemployment insurance benefits, other services and what they can expect in the job market here.

The job situation is not as good as it could be, he said.

"I hope we will see a better 2006 than 2005," Pendleton said."

Reprinted from The Greenville News, January 6, 2006
By Jenny Munro
/jmunro [at] greenvillenews.com">jmunro [at] greenvillenews.com