How Ya Doin’?

Just another day in paradise!

Just beatin’ the big brown dead horse!

Just wackin’ big brown!

Just holdin’ on for dear life!

Just lovin’ life!

Just driven’ the big brown machine!

Just huggin’ boxes!

Just another Monday in Paradise!

Gettin’ down with brown!

Just massagin’ cardboard!

Just livin’ the big brown life!

Must be paradise ‘cause I keep comin’ back!

Lovin’ now, hopin’ to leave soon!

Just happy to be here!

Happy to be here, wishin’ I was somewhere else!

Getting’ by till the cows come home!

Just takin’ a big brown!

Hanging out till things get better!

Wishin’ things were better!

Hopin’ for the best, expectin’ the worst!

Feelin’ the love!

Wackin’ brown after the sun goes down!

Just givin’ other people’s stuff away!

Countin’ visit’s!

Hope it’s paradise!

Planning my day!

Beatin’ the big brown noodle!

Hopin’ for sensitivity!

Lovin’ the boss!

Just glad they care so much!

Hopin’ for an early day!

Just knowin’ things will be better tomorrow!

If you think it’s bad today, just wait!

Livin’ light!

Headin’ them off at the pass!

Gettin’ motivated!

Gettin’ brown outa my ass!

Prayen’ with the big brown god!

Motivatin’ through the day!

Wonderin’ about the bosses wacky terbacky!

Believin’ in the universe!

Blank stare!


And you?

Obama and Labor..a new beginning

On the economy, President Barack Obama signaled once again the ground is shifting -- this time with regard to unions.

    With his signature on three executive orders, President Barack Obama expanded workers rights and reversed Bush administration orders that were seen as anti-union.

    Then, the president said something that hasn't been heard in the Oval Office for a long time.

    "I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem, to me it's part of the solution," said President Obama.

    The president called for leveling the playing field for workers and the unions that represent them. 

    "Because we know that you cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement," said President Obama.
KGO-TV

Union Dues

A Good Investment

I Told You So

Have you noticed that the horses in the Teamster logo have changed a little? With the use of shading, the horses have become a little more angry.

Food for Thought

A Race to the Bottom

Toward the end of an important speech in Washington last month, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said to her audience:

Ms. Weingarten was raising a cry against the demonizing of teachers and the widespread, uninformed tendency to cast wholesale blame on teachers for the myriad problems with American public schools. It reminded me of the way autoworkers have been vilified and blamed by so many for the problems plaguing the Big Three automakers.

But Ms. Weingarten’s defense of her members was not the most important part of the speech. The key point was her assertion that with schools in trouble and the economy in a state of near-collapse, she was willing to consider reforms that until now have been anathema to the union, including the way in which tenure is awarded, the manner in which teachers are assigned and merit pay.

It’s time we refocused our lens on American workers and tried to see them in a fairer, more appreciative light.

Working men and women are not getting the credit they deserve for the jobs they do without squawking every day, for the hardships they are enduring in this downturn and for the collective effort they are willing to make to get through the worst economic crisis in the U.S. in decades.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate this month, the president of the United Auto Workers, Ron Gettelfinger, listed some of the sacrifices his members have already made to try and keep the American auto industry viable.

Last year, before the economy went into free fall and before any talk of a government rescue, the autoworkers agreed to a 50 percent cut in wages for new workers at the Big Three, reducing starting pay to a little more than $14 an hour.

That is a development that the society should mourn. The U.A.W. had traditionally been a union through which workers could march into the middle class. Now the march is in the other direction.

Mr. Gettelfinger noted that his members “have not received any base wage increase since 2005 at G.M. and Ford, and since 2006 at Chrysler.”

Some 150,000 jobs at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have vanished outright through downsizing over the past five years. And like the members of Ms. Weingarten’s union (and other workers across the country, whether unionized or not), the autoworkers are prepared to make further sacrifices as required, as long as they are reasonably fair and part of a shared effort with other sectors of the society.

We need some perspective here. It is becoming an article of faith in the discussions over an auto industry rescue, that unionized autoworkers should be taken off of their high horses and shoved into a deal in which they would not make significantly more in wages and benefits than comparable workers at Japanese carmakers like Toyota.

That’s fine if it’s agreed to by the autoworkers themselves in the context of an industry bailout at a time when the country is in the midst of a financial emergency. But it stinks to high heaven as something we should be aspiring to.

The economic downturn, however severe, should not be used as an excuse to send American workers on a race to the bottom, where previously middle-class occupations take a sweatshop’s approach to pay and benefits.

The U.A.W. has been criticized because its retired workers have had generous pensions and health coverage. There’s a horror! I suppose it would have been better if, after 30 or 35 years on the assembly line, those retirees had been considerate enough to die prematurely in poverty, unable to pay for the medical services that could have saved them.

Randi Weingarten and Ron Gettelfinger know the country is going through a terrible period. Their workers, like most Americans, are already getting clobbered and worse is to come.

But there is no downturn so treacherous that it is worth sacrificing the long-term interests — or, equally important — the dignity of their members.

Teachers and autoworkers are two very different cornerstones of American society, but they are cornerstones nonetheless. Our attitudes toward them are a reflection of our attitudes toward working people in general. If we see teachers and autoworkers as our enemies, we are in serious need of an attitude adjustment.
Bob Herbert 
New York Times

Time to Rise to the Occasion

With all of the contract talks and pension issues, many of you have missed the one earth shattering, (from a driver perspective), result of the contract changes. The people that rose to the top over the last 20 and 30 years will be leaving soon.

These are the people that have watched over the company to see to it that you were able to have a family life. These are the people that saw to it that you had job security and couldn’t be fired at the whim of some jagoff.

These were also the people that looked after your Local union, voicing your needs and desires to people who may have had your interest at heart, but had no connection directly to you.

 These are the people that were directly involved with the politics of your life. They have the true knowledge of what your life is like, and they took that knowledge to the politicians that had the power to change things for you, and voiced your needs to people that might not have cared otherwise.

They had the ability through practice to take on the corporatists that feel you make too much money and that healthcare for your family was an extravagant request. They saw to it that you had time to be with your family, and that your family issues rose to the top of your demands.

More and more today those needs are being attacked as these people ride off into the sunset. The time is now for you to Rise to the Occasion. Sooner or later it will be your turn to take up the cause of your life. If you don’t, the battle will be forever lost. You are under constant attack. You have just been insulated from that attack by those people that have fought the battle for you. I challenge you all now since many of us are about to leave.

Bob Newhouse

Batgirl vs. The Chamber of Commerce

        First, take your full lunch everyday. We are requiered to take an hour for lunch each day. Every minute you don’t take and choose to work for instead is work that should have been dispatched to another car. Our building dispatches about 300 routes a day and if just 16 of those drivers skip half of their hour  lunch, they have ran an entire route that should have been dispatched and run by anotherTeamster. Don’t let the company reduce our ranks and undermine our power by skipping part of your lunch. Every Teamster on the payroll is another person making our union stronger. 
        Use your 8-hour requests. Each driver in Denver gets three 8-hour requests per month. Our center has 45 drivers. If each one reduced their dispatch by one hour (from 9 to 8 hours), 3 times a month, that’s 135 hours a month or the equivalent of over 3 weeks of work that we could generate just by taking what’s is rightfully ours to enjoy. We could add a driver in our center if everyone used all of their 8-hour requests.
        Refuse to work excessive overtime. We have strong 9.5 language in our contract. Use it. Keep your hours under control and the company will need more drivers to cover the routes that we are running ourselves right now by working 10 to 11 hours a day. Just 8 drivers working an extra hour per day are absorbing a route that another Teamster should be running. Excessive overtime weakens our union and hurts our families.
        Don’t work off the clock. Every time you work off the clock you are giving the company a false impression of how long and how many people it takes to get the job done. Don’t give away precious minutes that someone should be paid for. UPS made $3 billion profit last year, you don’t have to work for free to keep them afloat.
        Stop supervisors from doing our work. Go to your steward every time you see a supervisor working and have him investigate the reason for this violation. Sometimes the reasons are legitimate, sometimes not. If not, then file a grievance. Time slip grievances encourage the company to put on more people. See the next blog entry here for the steps to follow when you see a supervisor doing our work.
        And finally, grow the business. The company consistently refuses to hire more people because the growth is flat. They say it would be bad management to add people when the business isn’t growing. So, grow the business and grow the Union. 

        None of these simple ways to grow the Union require a degree in organizing or long weekends spent talking to unorganized workers. These are things we can do everyday at work to grow our Union. Do your part, grow the union.
George Kieffer

Questions and Answers

How We Beat
Right to Work for less

    The pushers of the “right to work for less" agenda  tried to sell their poison to the voters of Colorado last November in the form of a ballot initiative, Amendment 47. Statewide, local unions rose up in defiance of the proposed amendment. As a newly retired Teamster on a pension, I was invited to join the fray. How could I say no?

    On Sept. 20, six weeks before the election, I went to work for the Colorado Council of Teamsters as a Field Operator, responsible for educating my union brothers and sisters on the virtues of voting and the evils of right to work for less. The CCT was a brotherhood of Teamster locals in the state (minus Local 17 which had its own agenda) and other unions joined together under the umbrella group; Protect Colorado’s Future.

    Out of state money was already buying anti-union TV ads. We immediately set out to educate our members on the issues and the truth about right to work for less. That meant leafleting the worksites. I love to hand out at the jobsites, you get to meet other Teamsters, you get to talk about unity and power and you meet a few schmucks.  

    With the schmucks, you have the opportunity to practice your debating skills. That will become important as election day draws near. You have to sell non-voters on the importance of voting and convince fence-sitters to vote your way. Tru\e schmucks cannot be convinced to vote Labor, so you don't waste too much on them. The down side of leafleting is that some of these shifts change in the wee hours of the morning.   

    At first, we met with little company resistance, but that soon changed. UPS banned leafleting from all their jobsites nationwide, but not before we had completed a marathon handout catching all the shifts with leaflets, buttons and t-shirts that shouted “Vote NO on 47.” By the end of the first week the word was out.

    It takes a lot of money to run a campaign. Experts advised us that if we could raise $14 million, we could defeat right to work for less. Ten million and we could make a big show but probably lose. We raised $3 million. We had our work cut out for us.

    With the aid of the Teamsters, Protect Colorado’s Future countered the right to work amendment with 4 amendments of their own. The 4 ballot initiatives included mandatory health insurance, criminal penalties for CEO’s who rip and run, no terminations without just cause and the right of injured parties to sue. Business leaders flinched when Labor easily got enough signatures to place all 4 proposals on the ballot. They might get right to work, but at what price? The business community was starting to sweat.

    On Oct. 1, a deal was struck between business and labor, with more than half ofn the business community abandoning right to work and throwing their support (and money) in with us. In return, we pulled all 4 of our amendments off the November ballot.  The coup de grace was when Coors patriarch Bill Coors, publically opposed right to work for less. But young Jonathon Coors continued the fight. And so did we.

    Our focus changed as we continued to get thrown off the job sites and we went to our Stewards to carry the message in the workplaces. Our ranks had grown from 6 to 16 field operators. We went directly to Steward's homes with new flyers for them to take into work and pass out.  

    Of course, everywhere we went we planted yard signs, yard signs, and more yard signs. I got busted in Thornton planting signs on public property and the cops took my license and let me sweat a little before letting me off with a warning. A bunch of my Field Ops almost got arrested in Fort Lupton for leafleting in the street and were run out of town and told to not come back. But our support was growing as we began to buy air time, both radio and TV.

    It was impossible to get accurate polling information on the ballot amendments during the election. While we thought we were doing pretty well, there was always that nagging feeling that rural Colorado was going to sink us. One day the newspaper would print an article opposing Amendment 47 and I’d think, “Yeah, we can win this.” Then I’d see a TV at attacking “union bosses” and I'd think “Oh my God, we’re dead.” I was a rollercoaster of emotion. 

    We knew it was vital that every union member cast his or her vote in this election. And that every member talk to their family and friends about the benefits of a strong Union.  We began to focus of "get out the vote". GOTV.    

    Much to our surprise and delight, the major Denver newspapers came out against right to work. I don’t know if that was part of the deal or if they really felt it was bad for Colorado. I wouldn’t call the local papers labor friendly, but we welcomed their support with open arms. Politics make strange bedfellows. By the end of October our group had grown to 25 Field Operators, early voting had started and we had
begun working Saturdays and Sundays volunteering for the Obama campaign.  It was getting down the wire and we were kicking it into high gear. We had several celebrity sightings; I met George Lopez at a rally.

    Unknown to most people, there is a lot of information available on the web that can be used in a campaign. We were able to tell which Teamsters in Colorado were registered voters, who had requested a mail-in ballot and who had actually mailed it in. This was carried to the extreme when, on election day, Obama campaign workers that we volunteered for could tell at 3 o’clock in the afternoon if a registered voter had been to the polls yet or not. Then they fanned out across the neighborhood knocking on doors and urging registered Democrats who had not yet voted to go to the polls.  

    When the workers in Colorado spoke on Election Day, their voice was loud and strong. NO Right to Work. An overwhelming 56% of the voters rejected the anti-labor efforts of Jonathon Coors and Jake Jabs. This was the second time Colorado had defeated right to work. It was tried before 50 years ago, in 1958. Let’s hope it’s more than 50 years before it’s tried again.

George Kieffer

Getting What You Want

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