A Country With a Short Memory
It ain’t over till it’s over
State’s UPS workers in contract fight Citing changes to health plans that would force UPS employees to shoulder more expense, unions in Philadelphia, Western Pennsylvania and Louisville, Ky., have refused to accept separate contracts covering workplace rules, wages and benefits. UPS said it continues to make progress with the Teamsters and expects to resolve the issue. “It remains business as usual,” UPS spokesman Dan McMackin said in an email. “We remain confident that the local contracts will be finalized.” Everyone hopes to avoid shutting down a facility because of a walkout, said Gary Piso, UPS alternate steward of Teamsters Local 249, but that option remains if UPS refuses to continue health benefits at the current level. “Nobody wants a strike,” Piso said. “If it’s necessary, there are a lot of people willing to go that route. That’s the one muscle we have.” The situation has not affected operations, though it delayed wage increases for employees. Until a five-year agreement goes into effect, UPS employees are covered under the old contract, which was extended indefinitely upon its July 31 expiration. A national master contract covering 240,000 full- and part-time UPS employees was approved in June. But before that can take effect, union members must approve region-specific supplemental contracts. They have approved all but three of the 28 supplements. Ohio union members approved their supplemental agreement on Wednesday, but the contracts covering nearly 12,000 workers in Western Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and Louisville remain unapproved. Louisville is an air-shipping hub for the company and critical to UPS operations. Ballots were mailed to the 7,000 union employees, and the vote will be counted on April 10, said Fred Zuckerman, president of Louisville Local 89. Nearly 90 percent of Louisville union members rejected the contract in October, and Zuckerman said they probably would defeat it again. “It’s going to go down big,” he said. “Everybody knows it.” The holdout caused some tension between local unions and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The national organization wants the Pennsylvania and Louisville workers to sign off on the contracts, saying that UPS employees still would enjoy better benefits than most Americans. “This is excellent health care coverage,” said Leigh Strope, an international Teamsters spokeswoman. “At a time when most Americans are worried about health care, this provides certainty.” Chris Fleisher is a Trib Total Media staff writer. Reach him at 412-320-7854 or cfleisher@tribweb.com.
UPS Inc. workers in Pennsylvania are in a contract dispute with the national package shipping company, and union officials say they may push the Teamsters to strike if the company doesn’t address their concerns about health benefits.
It’s What They’re Counting On
The Right to Protest
What Brown Can Do TO You: Workers say that the company’s abrupt termination of Reyes. without due process is in violation of the “Innocent Until Proven Guilty” clause in workers’ contracts. After making their voices heard for 90 minutes, the employees returned to work and did their jobs.
UPS Fires 250 Drivers For Protesting Colleague’s Termination
February 26, 250 United Parcel service drivers organized a protest against a former colleague’s firing. Workers at the UPS facility in Maspeth, NY walked off the job last month to voice their disapproval with the termination of Jairo Reyes, a 24 veteran of the company for allegedly clocking in early.
“They delivered their message, then they delivered the packages,” a union source told the Queens Tribune.
UPS says that the firings were justified. “The employees in question abandoned their jobs and staged a protest after encouragement from the local union official, who chose to pre-empt the grievance procedure and organize a walk-out, rather than allowing a dispute to be resolved through mutually agreed upon contractual provisions,” the company said in a statement.
The union maintains that the mass firing was in violation of the contract between the union and the company, and is fighting for the jobs of all 250 workers.
A petition started by the Working Families Party has accumulated over 45,000 signatures to date.
“The tens of thousands of signatures on our petition reflect the strong disapproval of UPS’s underhanded tactics,” Bill Lipton, State Director for the Working Families Party, said in a statement.
Oh yeah
Just wanted to park close……
Argument Against Citizens United
Where is Spring?
Finally, A Move Towards Labor by the President
WASHINGTON — President Obama this week will seek to force American businesses to pay more overtime to millions of workers, the latest move by his administration to confront corporations that have had soaring profits even as wages have stagnated.
On Thursday, the president will direct the Labor Department to revamp its regulations to require overtime pay for several million additional fast-food managers, loan officers, computer technicians and others whom many businesses currently classify as “executive or professional” employees to avoid paying them overtime, according to White House officials briefed on the announcement.
Mr. Obama’s decision to use his executive authority to change the nation’s overtime rules is likely to be seen as a challenge to Republicans in Congress, who have already blocked most of the president’s economic agenda and have said they intend to fight his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour from $7.25.
Mr. Obama’s action is certain to anger the business lobby in Washington, which has long fought for maximum flexibility for companies in paying overtime.
In 2004, business groups persuaded President George W. Bush’s administration to allow them greater latitude on exempting salaried white-collar workers from overtime pay, even as organized labor objected.
Conservatives criticized Mr. Obama’s impending action. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” said Daniel Mitchell, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, who warned that employers might cut pay or use fewer workers. “If they push through something to make a certain class of workers more expensive, something will happen to adjust.”
Marc Freedman, the executive director of labor law policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the nation’s overtime regulations “affect a very wide cross section of employers and our members.”
“I expect this is an area we will be very much engaged in,” Mr. Freedman said.
Mr. Obama’s authority to act comes from his ability as president to revise the rules that carry out the Fair Labor Standards Act, which Congress originally passed in 1938. Mr. Bush and previous presidents used similar tactics at times to work around opponents in Congress.
The proposed new regulations would increase the number of people who qualify for overtime and continue Mr. Obama’s fight against what he says is a crisis of economic inequality in the country. Changes to the regulations will be subject to public comment before final approval by the Labor Department, and it is possible that strong opposition could cause Mr. Obama to scale back his proposal.
Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said the effort was part of Mr. Obama’s pledge to help workers thrive. “We need to fix the system so folks working hard are getting compensated fairly,” she said on Tuesday evening. “That’s why we are jump-starting this effort.”
The overtime action by Mr. Obama is part of a broader election-year effort by the White House to try to convince voters that Democrats are looking out for the middle class. White House officials hope the focus on lifting workers’ pay will translate into support for Democratic congressional candidates this fall.
Since the mid-1980s, corporate profits have soared, reaching a post-World War II record as a share of economic output. The profits of the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 have doubled since the recession ended in June 2009, but wages have stagnated for a vast majority of workers in the same period. Recently, workers’ wages fell close to an all-time low as a share of the economy.
In 2012, the share of the gross domestic income that went to workers fell to 42.6 percent, the lowest on record.
Under current federal regulations, workers who are deemed executive, administrative or professional employees can be denied overtime pay under a so-called white-collar exemption.
Under the new rules that Mr. Obama is seeking, fewer salaried employees could be blocked from receiving overtime, a move that would potentially shift billions of dollars’ worth of corporate income into the pockets of workers. Currently, employers are prohibited from denying time-and-a-half overtime pay to any salaried worker who makes less than $455 per week. Mr. Obama’s directive would significantly increase that salary level.
In addition, Mr. Obama will try to change rules that allow employers to define which workers are exempt from receiving overtime based on the kind of work they perform. Under current rules, if an employer declares that an employee’s primary responsibility is executive, such as overseeing a cleanup crew, then that worker can be exempted from overtime.
White House officials said those rules were sometimes abused by employers in an attempt to avoid paying overtime. The new rules could require that employees perform a minimum percentage of “executive” work before they can be exempted from qualifying for overtime pay.
“Under current rules, it literally means that you can spend 95 percent of the time sweeping floors and stocking shelves, and if you’re responsible for supervising people 5 percent of the time, you can then be considered executive and be exempt,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization in Washington.
Jared Bernstein, the former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the former executive director of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class, embraced Mr. Obama’s move.
“I think the intent of the rule change is to make sure that people working overtime are fairly treated,” he said. “I think a potential side effect is that you may see more hiring in order to avoid overtime costs, which would be an awfully good thing right about now.”
Mr. Bernstein, now a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group, and Mr. Eisenbrey wrote a paper last year urging the administration to raise the salary threshold for overtime to $984 a week. Their study estimated that in any given week, five million workers earning more than the current threshold of $455 a week and less than $1,000 a week are likely to be exempted from overtime. President Bush raised the threshold to $455 in 2004.
Mr. Bernstein said, “Remember, inflation has eroded this threshold a great deal over the years, so it’s hard to see why it’s unfair to make that adjustment.”
White Ho
use officials said that in California an employer cannot deny overtime pay to a salaried worker who makes less than $640 a week. In New York, the threshold is $600 a week. Under recently passed laws, the California threshold is set to rise to $800 per week in 2016, and the New York threshold to $675.
If the changes to the overtime regulations are made, it will fall to the Labor Department’s wage and hour administrator to put them into effect. That position has been vacant since Mr. Obama took office. David Weil, a professor at the Boston University School of Management, is the latest nominee for the post. He is awaiting confirmation.