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Local and National Union News
Teamsters go to war against Republic Services.
July 9, 2025 | The union is aggressively expanding a nationwide strike for fair contracts at Republic Services, one of the nation’s largest and wealthiest waste management companies. More than 2,000 Teamsters are currently on strike or actively honoring picket lines in major cities across the country with more strike extensions expected in the coming hours and days. “Republic Services has been threatening a war with American workers for years — and now, they’ve got one,” said Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien. “Republic abuses and underpays workers across the country. They burn massive profits and funnel money to undeserving, corrupt executives. The Teamsters have had it with Republic. We will flood the streets and shut down garbage collection in state after state. Workers are uniting nationwide, and we will get the wages and benefits we’ve earned, come hell or high water.” Learn more here. PHOTO/The Vacaville ReporterO'Brien: ‘Tell UPS your good union job is not for sale.’
July 8, 2025 | UPS is trying to buy your job. Managers and their underlings are going to come into your barns and ask you to sign up for this “voluntary severance plan.” We need to be protecting our jobs, and we need everybody, again, to reject this scam. Watch the video to learn how we're going to do it – as one, unified force. UPS violates Teamsters National Contract with plan for buyouts
July 3, 2025 | United Parcel Service (UPS) is expected to unveil an illegal plan later this month to buyout full-time employees represented by the Teamsters, a corporate scheme that will directly violate the union’s national contract protecting 340,000 delivery workers. The multibillion-dollar company’s Driver Voluntary Severance Plan (DVSP), which UPS has not yet publicly disclosed, would offer cash to drivers to initiate early retirement or quit their job. The DVSP, likely to be announced to workers in the coming weeks, would leave most drivers without quality health insurance if they retire under the program and… Learn more here. Pictured: Teamsters practice picket during the 2023 campaign for the current national contract with UPS . AP PHOTO/JOHN RAOUXRepublic Services Teamsters Launch Strike in Boston
July 1, 2025 | Update 07/09: Republic Services is refusing to resume negotiations. Teamsters extend picket lines to major West Coast cities. Details here. This morning, 450 Republic Services workers represented by Teamsters Local 25 were forced on strike by the waste giant, inevitably disrupting waste collections for hundreds of thousands of residents throughout the Boston area. Primary picket lines could extend nationwide and result in a work stoppage for over 3,500 Teamsters. Republic Teamsters are demanding a contract with improved wages, better benefits, and stronger labor protections. The multibillion-dollar waste corporation has refused to give workers a fair deal, pushing them to the picket line. Learn more here. Screenshot via CBS News Boston video
Elsewhere in the News
Philly Municipal Workers ‘Holding the Line’ as City Refuses to Pay Living Wage
July 8, 2025 | STRIKES | Update 07/09: Strike ends with tentative deal reached. Details here. Over 9,000 sanitation workers, 911 dispatchers, water services workers, crossing guards, and other city employees walked off the job last week, demanding that the city increase their salary enough to meet the rising cost of living. But even with trash piling up on the streets and other city services understaffed, Mayor Cherelle Parker (D) would not agree to the demands made by AFSCME District Council 33, Philadelphia's largest blue-collar union. "It's not like as if our members are making $80,000, $90,000 a year," [DC 33 president Greg] Boulware said. "A 2% increase on those would be significantly higher than it would be on somebody making $40,000-$45,000 a year. So, her math truly is not mathing, and you're clearly not paying attention to the working people that are going on in this city." Common Dreams
90 Years after Its Passage, the NLRA Is Under Siege
July 2, 2025 | U.S. LABOR | The Wagner Act — or, more formally, the National Labor Relations Act — was the product of Depression-era concern about the social and economic effects of industrial unrest manifest in citywide general strikes, factory takeovers, and many violent confrontations between workers trying to form unions and the police or private security forces defending the interests of anti-union employers. The architects of the Wagner Act were New Deal Democrats. They knew that a new national labor policy was needed to promote collective bargaining as a peaceful alternative to such unregulated labor-management conflict. [Now, 90] years after President Franklin Roosevelt signed the NLRA into law on July 5, 1935, this statutory encouragement of collective bargaining is under assault and showing its age. In These Times
9,000+ Philadelphia City Employees Are On Strike
July 1, 2025 | STRIKES | Greg Boulware, president of District Council 33 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, called for an immediate and indefinite work stoppage of the more than 9,000 municipal employees he represents after contract negotiations with Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration fell apart late Monday night. Boulware’s decision kicks off the first major strike of city workers since the DC 33 “trash strike” in 1986, and this year’s iteration may have much in common with that year’s three-week shutdown, which saw garbage piling up at city-designated drop-off centers in the summer heat. Boulware’s move dramatically increases the stakes of the already-tense negotiations between Parker’s team and DC 33, the lowest-paid of Philly’s four major municipal unions… Philadelphia Inquirer
U.S. Journalist Faces Deportation for Covering Protest in Atlanta
June 30, 2025 | IMMIGRATION | Mario Guevara, a Hispanic journalist who has lived in the United States for more than 20 years, was arrested on 14 June while he was reporting on the ‘No King’ protests in Atlanta. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its US affiliates, the National Writers Union (NWU), The NewsGuild-CWA and The Authors Guild, have condemned this attack and intimidation against Guevara. The incident is a clear violation of press freedom. International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).
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