Sunday, August 10, 2014

Today's Teamster News 08.10.14

Teamsters
Unions That Used to Strike  Jacobin   ...In early July, 120 mostly poor and immigrant port truckers set up picket lines at three trucking companies in LA-Long Beach Harbor, extending their longstanding campaign to unionize. … Following the rules of their own contract, the union told its members to cross the truckers’ pickets and return to their jobs. This action was in line with the ILWU’s informal pact with the PMA to maintain the flow of work after their contract had run out, and it snuffed out any potential the embryonic solidarity of the longshore workers and port truckers might have had to shift the balance of power between themselves and their employers...
Teamsters Boycotting Hollywood Trucking Firm Quixote  Variety   ...A branch of the Intl. Brotherhood of Teamsters has launched a boycott of the non-union Quixote Studios, one of Hollywood’s largest operators of truck and trailer fleets...
Teamsters, prominent Hollywood vendor in high-profile standoff  Los Angeles Times   ...“We're trying to bring production back to California, but we want it to be union production and that's what we're trying to do,” Dayan said. “We're trying to organize the unorganized and to help those individuals maintain a middle-class livelihood. That's what we do...”
Trade
End in Sight for U.S.-Japan TPP Talks On Agriculture Market Access, Oe Says  Bloomberg BNA   ...Oe said that during two days of intensive, substantive negotiations, the areas where compromises are to be made have been clearly identified but that those compromises remain to be realized...   
War on Workers
Flipping Schools: The Hidden Forces Behind New Jersey Education Reform  truthout   ...Real estate concerns and facilities funding increasingly drive neighborhood school closings and the expansion of privately managed charter schools. By allocating millions of dollars in little-known bonds exclusively to charters while imposing austerity on public facilities, the state has quietly stacked the deck for charters, leaving neighborhood schools to molder in decline...
Bare shelves for Market Basket as employees and shoppers unite in profit-sharing fight  PBS Newshour   ...The owners of a successful New England grocery store chain are in a family feud over whether company profits should go to shareholders or to employees, some of whom have abandoned their shifts and hit the streets...
How rural poverty is changing: Your fate is increasingly tied to your town  Washington Post   ...  If your hometown went south, you probably did with it, unless you managed to get out and had the wherewithal to not come back...
“A Financial Casino Would Be a Step Up From What We Have”  naked capitalism   ...casinos are well aware of the fact that the house can lose and they monitor gamblers intensively to make sure that no one is engaging is sleight of hand. Thus if we treated our banking system like the financial casino that it has become, we’d be much better off than we are now...
A Corporate Tax Break That’s Closer to Home  New York Times   ...the Internal Revenue Service, officials have recently opened the window to another (corporate tax break). They did so in a ruling disclosed late last month by Windstream Holdings, a telecommunications company based in Little Rock, Ark. The ruling allows Windstream to spin off its copper and fiber network into a real estate investment trust, or REIT. That sounds pretty ho-hum until you realize it means that Windstream won’t have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes...