UPS Inc. said fourth-quarter earnings per share will be $1.25, lagging Wall Street estimates, because of higher costs related to U.S. deliveries during the peak season.

“While [domestic] package volume and revenue results were in line with expectations, operating profit was negatively impacted by higher-than-expected peak-related expenses,” the statement said. UPS also said 2015 earnings would be “slightly below” its prior full-year target of 9% to 13% profit growth.

Click here to read more at Transport Topics.

The Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market reached a tentative contract agreement on Saturday with more than 1,200 workers, averting a potential strike that could have disrupted the region’s supply of fresh fruits and vegetables.

The three-year agreement would give workers a raise of $20 a week the first year, $22 the second year and $24 the third year. The increases represented a compromise between the union’s earlier push for a raise of $25 a week each year, and the merchants’ counteroffer of $16 in the first year and $22 thereafter.

Click here to read more at The New York Times.

The Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market reached a tentative contract agreement on Saturday with more than 1,200 workers, averting a potential strike that could have disrupted the region’s supply of fresh fruits and vegetables.

The three-year agreement would give workers a raise of $20 a week the first year, $22 the second year and $24 the third year. The increases represented a compromise between the union’s earlier push for a raise of $25 a week each year, and the merchants’ counteroffer of $16 in the first year and $22 thereafter.

Another sticking point had been the merchants’ demand that more workers begin contributing $20 a week to their health plan; employees hired in the past three years already make such contributions. Under the tentative agreement, the health care contributions would be extended to some higher paid workers such as supervisors and salespeople.

The workers will vote on the agreement on Wednesday, according to their union, Teamsters Local 202, which announced the tentative deal. Daniel Kane Jr., president of Teamsters Local 202, said the union’s bargaining committee recommended that the agreement be approved.

“We’re not too far from our demands, so we feel confident that it will be ratified by the rank and file,” said Mr. Kane, who noted that “it’s the largest wages and benefits package we’ve received in the last 20 years.”

If union workers were to reject the agreement, there could still be a strike, Mr. Kane said.

Robert Leonard, a spokesman for the market, said that its merchants were happy that both sides were able to come together. “At the end of the day, discussions resulted in a fair package, which goes a long way towards addressing the issues raised by management and labor,” he said.

Union workers had been prepared to carry out the first strike at the Hunts Point market in nearly 30 years after contract negotiations stalled in recent days. They had initially planned to strike as early as Friday morning, but union leaders said that, at the request of a federal mediator, they had agreed to postpone any action until at least Sunday.

The market, made up of about 40 independent merchants but run as a cooperative, is the region’s largest supplier of fresh produce to wholesale and retail businesses, including grocers, bodegas and produce stands. While warehouse workers and drivers typically earn $38,000 to $53,000 a year, a smaller number of supervisors and others can earn more than $75,000, Mr. Kane said.

The two sides had already reached an agreement that calls for the market to increase its own contributions to workers’ health insurance and pension plans.

“We were boosted by the support of our elected officials and everyday New Yorkers,” Mr. Kane said. “It’s getting harder and harder to get by in this city. People really rallied around these workers demanding a wage that their families can live on.”

The U.S. government is ushering in a new era for the Teamsters, ending its 25-year supervision of a union once infamous for its ties to organized crime.

Teamster corruption has held the federal government’s attention since the late 1950s, when Robert F. Kennedy first pursued the matter as counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, also known as the McClellan committee. Kennedy continued to investigate the Teamsters after he became attorney general in 1961, and those investigations continued in one form or another through the 1980s.

Click here to read more at Politico.

 

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the federal government said Wednesday they had reached an agreement to end 25 years of strict oversight designed to root out corruption and alleged Mafia influence in the union’s highest ranks.

The proposed deal, which was reached with U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s office in Manhattan, would end a 1989 consent decree stemming from a landmark racketeering lawsuit brought a year earlier by the Justice Department. Prosecutors alleged that organized crime members had seized “an interest in and control of” the 1.3 million-member union.

The agreement calls for government oversight to be phased out over five years. Eventually, the union will appoint independent officers to probe corruption allegations, a task currently handled by a three-member independent review board that includes a government appointee.

The Teamsters also agreed to maintain an election process for top officers mandated by the consent decree in which all union members can vote. At many other unions, only convention delegates cast ballots.

Union officials said they expect a federal judge to approve the agreement at a Feb. 11 hearing.

Mr. Bharara said that while the Teamsters have made significant progress in ridding its ranks of corruption, the threat of wrongdoing by organized crime still exists and the government would continue to monitor the union’s handling of disciplinary matters.

“While threats persist, the organized crime influence the government found to have reached the highest echelons of IBT leadership in 1988 has long been expunged,” Mr. Bharara and the union wrote in a joint statement to the judge.

Teamsters President James P. Hoffa, who fought the consent decree for years, said it was a historic day for the union.

“After decades of hard work and millions of dollars spent, we can finally say that corrupt elements have been driven from the Teamsters and that the government oversight can come to an end,” Mr. Hoffa said.

Ken Paff, national organizer with a rank-and-file group called Teamsters for a Democratic Union and a Hoffa critic, praised the continuation of election rules.

He said a new requirement that the union pay for one mailing of campaign materials to all members before elections would help level the playing field for challengers to Mr. Hoffa.

“We’re pleased because we have protected and even enhanced the supervised right to vote for all members,” Mr. Paff said.

The Teamsters originally agreed to government oversight to settle the broad racketeering lawsuit. At the time, then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani alleged the union had made a “devil’s pact” with the Mafia by allowing it to control officer elections.

The suit named as defendants 18 members of the union’s executive board and 26 alleged organized-crime members, 25 of whom had been convicted of crimes such as extortion, embezzlement and illegal union payoffs.

On Wednesday, Mr. Giuliani said he believed the consent decree had been a success, noting that oversight continued across Republican and Democratic administrations. He said he believed the union had cleaned up corruption, but noted that the Mafia is far weaker today.

“The Teamsters is now free to operate as a very legitimate union. There’s no burden placed on it to operate as a subsidiary of organized crime,” he said.

Before reaching the agreement under the Obama administration, union officials had lobbied unsuccessfully in the past for an end to the decree, including through negotiations with the Clinton administration.

The current deal was the result of years of settlement negotiations, the union and prosecutors said in their memorandum to the judge.

Last summer, the Teamsters asked a federal judge for the first time to end the consent decree.

At that time, prosecutors responded that they would support scaling back government control over the union but not eliminating the measures, saying that “corrupt and undemocratic practices persist at all levels of the union.”

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment Wednesday on the earlier statement.

The union wrote in a court filing last year that charges of corruption had dropped precipitously. Cases that involved alleged racketeering or other activity that prompted the consent decree fell to 33 in the past decade, from 144 in the first five years of the consent decree, the union wrote.

A Contract dispute between commercial producers and Teamsters Local 399 has escalated, raising the prospect of the first Hollywood strike by the union in nearly two decades.

On Sunday, Teamsters drivers, location managers and scouts voted by a 10-to-1 margin to reject a contract proposed by the Assn. of Independent Commercial Producers and to authorize their leaders to stage a walkout should they fail to reach an agreement by the end of the month.

Click here to read more at the Los Angeles Times.

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It's a chilly day in midtown Manhattan, but union organizer Julian Tysh is undeterred. He's here representing Teamsters Local 814 to protest businesses that hire non-union movers. And he's not alone. 

After unfurling what looks like an inflatable mattress, he pulls the cord on a small engine, and a balloon begins to take shape: first the belly, then the claws, then the buck teeth, and finally the yellow eyes.

Click here to read more at Marketplace

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ABF Logistics has purchased Smart Lines Transportation Group, a truckload brokerage firm based in Oklahoma City, for $5.17 million.

Smart Lines, which primarily serves the food, energy and industrial sectors, has 24 employees and generates about $18 million in annual revenue, ABF said.

ABF Logistics is the third-party logistics arm of ArcBest Corp. and a sister company to less-than-truckload carrier ABF Freight.

The acquisition, completed Jan. 2, expands ABF Logistics into the Oklahoma City market.

“The purchase of Smart Lines Transportation Group is an important step in our strategy to grow the emerging businesses at ArcBest and provide a variety of supply chain services to our customers in the way they expect,” ABF Logistics President Jim Ingram said in the Jan. 5 statement.

Greg Roush, Smart Lines’ founder and former president, is now branch director for the Oklahoma City location, which is officially operating under the ABF Logistics name.

ArcBest, based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, ranks No. 13 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest U.S. and Canadian for-hire carriers.

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In his 2014 state of the union address, President Obama kicked off what could unofficially be dubbed the Year of the Minimum Wage. Just a year earlier, he had called for a $9 federal minimum, but there he was in early 2014, saying workers should earn at least $10.10 an hour. The shift shows how coordinated campaigns for higher wages, which started with fast-food workers and spread more broadly, raised expectations of what’s considered fair compensation.

Obama’s call to raise the federal minimum may have gone unanswered, but states and cities picked up the torch. In 2014, 13 states passed legislation or initiatives to raise the wage floor, not just in Democratic strongholds but in red states as well. Now the results of those campaigns are starting to come to fruition nationwide. About 3.6 million people will see their pay go up for the new year, according to an analysis of census data by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which supports higher minimum pay.

Click here to read more at Bloomberg.

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Conservative groups are opening a new front in their effort to reshape American law, arguing that local governments have the power to write their own rules on a key labor issue that has, up to now, been the prerogative of states.

Beginning here in the hometown of Senator Rand Paul and the Chevy Corvette, groups including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Heritage Foundation and a newly formed nonprofit called Protect My Check are working together to influence local governments the same way they have influenced state legislatures, and anti-union ordinances are just the first step in the coordinated effort they envision.

Click here to read more at The New York Times.

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