-
Local and National Union News
Teamsters at Toyota in Maryland ratify strong new contract
May 9, 2025 | Warehouse workers at the Toyota distribution center in Glen Burnie, Md., represented by Teamsters Local 570, have voted by a 97 percent margin to ratify a new three-year collective bargaining agreement. The Glen Burnie facility package and ship parts for Toyota across the mid-Atlantic region, playing a critical role in the company’s supply chain. Despite Toyota’s long-standing opposition to unions, these workers are demonstrating that even the world’s largest, foreign automaker can be held accountable by a united and organized workforce. Learn more here.Teamsters respond to Trump's union job-protecting film tariffs
.jpg)
May 5, 2025 | Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien and Teamsters Motion Picture Division Director Lindsay Dougherty released the following statement on President Donald Trump’s announcement to place a 100 percent tariff on films produced abroad: “For years, Hollywood studios have hollowed out the industry by following Corporate America’s crooked playbook of outsourcing good union jobs…These gigantic corporations line their pockets by recklessly cutting corners, abandoning American crews, and exploiting tax loopholes abroad. While these companies get rich fleeing to other countries and gaming the system, our members have gotten screwed over. The Teamsters Union has been sounding the alarm for years.” Read the full statement here. Why this matters: Local 355 represents local-area movie industry Teamsters. UPS, looking to slash 20,000, gets strong warning from Teamsters
Apr. 30, 2025 | UPS is looking to cut about 20,000 jobs and close more than 70 facilities as it drastically reduces the amount of Amazon shipments it handles, The Associated Press reported yesterday. In quick response, the Teamsters issued a statement that reads in part, “United Parcel Service is contractually obligated to create 30,000 Teamsters jobs under our current national master agreement. If UPS wants to continue to downsize corporate management, the Teamsters won’t stand in its way. But if the company intends to violate our contract or makes any attempt to go after hard-fought, good-paying Teamsters jobs, UPS will be in for a hell of a fight.”
Elsewhere in the News
Week Ending 05/10/2025
• Quartz: UPS, post office are both slashing staff
• Freightwaves: Is the economy about to collapse?
• S&H Magazine: Unions to Congress: Restore NIOSH staff
• On Labor: A labor agency without a labor board
• Slate: America’s labor unions are souring on Trump
• Teamsters recognize Mental Health Awareness Month
• Reuters: Amazon loses bid to block NLRB case over NYC union bargaining
• LA Times: Why ‘Leo’? New pope shows support for workers, labor unions
• CBS News: Worker safety agency NIOSH lays off most remaining staff
• Detroit Free Press: UAW wants automakers to build millions more autos in US
• US News: 3,000 union machinists on strike at jet engine maker Pratt & Whitney
• The Guardian: Mass resignations at labor department threaten workers in US and overseas, warn staff
Is It Time for Unions to Rethink Everything?
May 9, 2025 | U.S. UNIONS | … [Labor union activists and experts interviewed for this article] all agree that defending federal workers is an urgent, critical battleground for the labor movement in this moment. And now, watching the president forcibly strip hundreds of thousands of workers of their union representation only intensifies the stakes. But to be clear, the union still exists. Those workers are still organized into a union and still maintain their labor leverage. Lacking legal protections under labor law raises retaliatory risks considerably and cannot be dismissed, but ultimately a union is defined by the rank and file and its leverage—not labor law. The question of labor militancy, it seems, is increasingly on the minds of workers, both unionized and not. Worker militancy means “building up the confidence of every worker to take action in their own defense as a group. It’s about workers having agency and entering the stage as actual actors [instead of] these passive recipients of whatever it is the political establishment or their bosses are willing to give them.” The Nation
Letter Carriers Union Slams Trump’s Reported Pick to Lead USPS
May 8, 2025 | PRIVATIZATION | President Donald Trump and the U.S. Postal Service’s leadership have reportedly agreed to appoint a FedEx board member to succeed Louis DeJoy as postmaster general, heightening concerns that the administration is pushing the independent mail agency toward privatization. … Trump and the USPS Board of Governors are expected to name former Waste Management CEO David Steiner to lead the Postal Service. Steiner is currently the lead independent director at FedEx, a Postal Service competitor. Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers — a union representing nearly 300,000 active and retired letter carriers — called the decision to place Steiner at the head of the USPS “an aggressive step toward handing America’s mail system over to corporate interests.” Truthout
UPS, FedEx Once Handled a Deluge of Packages From China. That’s Changing.
May 7, 2025 | ECONOMY | Less than a year ago, executives from FedEx and UPS were talking about how they were handling a flood of packages from China to American consumers. Explosive” is how Carol Tomé, UPS’s chief executive, in July described the volume of shipments from e-commerce companies selling Chinese goods in the United States. And FedEx’s chief customer officer, Brie Carere, said about those companies in June, “No one carrier can serve their entire needs.” But that torrent is expected to slow to a trickle after President Trump on Friday closed a loophole that had allowed cheap goods from China to enter the United States without paying tariffs. A falloff in such shipments could deprive companies like UPS, FedEx and DHL of a big source of revenue. The New York Times
|
