Teamsters Archives - California Political Review

California is seeing a notable increase in strike activity across private and public sectors as affordability challenges rise for thousands of workers

Angie Ayala, a pharmacy technician at Ralph’s Fare Fresh in Pasadena, drives in from her Hollywood apartment for a five-day-a-week job that pays $24.10 hourly.

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She and her husband are raising two daughters, 10 and 6, in a one-bedroom apartment.

Not long ago, Ayala bought an upright piano and pushed it under the steps that lead to her upper floor apartment. She’d like to get paid more so that she can hire a piano teacher for her oldest daughter — maybe even save to buy a home. But her budget is too tight, and there’s pressure at work.

“It’s a stressful job when the pharmacy is understaffed,” Ayala said. “We fill between 125 and 150 prescriptions a day, make calls to doctors and nurses and insurance — doing two or three things at once,” Ayala said. “There’s a lot more work, especially if you have to deal with vaccine appointments.”

Ayala is among nearly 200,000 union members across California involved in picketing or striking for better pay and benefits, according to estimates provided by union leaders. In the case of Ayala, her union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, is locked in heated talks with major grocery chains in Southern California over an overdue, three-year contract for 65,000 unionized workers. They’ve worked without a contract since March 2.

Union leaders are taking note of this year’s surge in activity — more than any they’ve seen in decades.

Randy Korgan, the Teamsters national director in charge of organizing Amazon, said he’s been an organizer for more than 30 years but hasn’t ever seen this level of “militancy or frustration.” He said workers can’t afford to buy a home in the community where they work with Amazon, but yet the online retailer is charging more for products and services while “paying less for labor and devaluing the jobs.”

Kent Wong, the project director for Labor and Community Partnerships and former director at the UCLA Labor Center, said he also is seeing a rise in union activity.

“We are seeing the level of activism in California more pronounced, in large part because we have larger and more robust unions,” Wong said. “Part of the problem relates to horrendous targeting and victimization of immigrant workers. They are a critical part of the California workforce, and this whole notion that you can develop policies of mass deportation without a negative impact on agricultural, manufacturing or service sectors, is not possible. These policies are counterproductive.”

Here are brief descriptions of major labor negotiations underway in California:

Click here to read the full article in the Press Enterprise

Labor groups have sought out relationships with Uber drivers, whom the company recently settled with, but has yet to classify as employees.

“A day after Uber announced a $100 million settlement with some drivers in California and Massachusetts, the Teamsters announced plans to form an association for workers in California’s ride-hailing industry,” USA Today reported. “The Teamsters said drivers had approached the transportation union seeking help with benefits, a dispute resolution procedure, legal and tax services, advocacy assistance, and a stronger voice on the job,” the paper added, although the way such assistance would be organizationally formalized remained unclear. “Members would probably not join the actual union, but would instead join an association, which could possibly be funded, though not controlled, by Uber.”

Crunching the numbers

So long as Uber and its fellow ride-share companies stay away from the employer-employee model, unionization would be off the table. “One problematic aspect for the Teamsters is that Uber and Lyft drivers are still classified as independent contractors,” as Fortune noted. “As a result, these workers would not be able to form a traditional union. Instead they would have to form an association, which would have limited bargaining abilities and be allowed to speak on the behalf of drivers.”

For that reason, Uber was willing to shell out substantial cash in its California and Massachusetts settlements — “up $84 million,” as the Verge observed, plus “another $16 million if the company eventually goes public.”

“In exchange, Uber gets to keep its business model — drivers are ‘partners’ with the flexibility to make their own schedules, but lacking access to traditional benefits like health care — which has helped fuel its growth across the world, as well as its other worldly valuation of $62.5 billion – making it the most valuable technology startup on the planet.”

“If the lawsuit had gone to trial, and a jury decided that drivers indeed deserved to be full employees, then Uber could have suddenly found itself responsible for all sorts of extra costs, from Social Security payments to minimum wage requirements,” the Verge suggested. But while some Uber drivers have hoped for more benefits, some analysts have questioned whether Uber could sustain itself at all without relying on its unusual business model.

More hurdles

And in California, the settlement will not become law without clearing at least one more hurdle. “Uber’s settlement depends on the approval of a single judge,” Forbes noted. “This is by no means a foregone conclusion, as Uber’s rival Lyft learned earlier in April when Judge Chhabria rejected its $12.25 million settlement of a similar class action. Among other reasons given for the rejection, the amount Lyft would pay was ‘glaringly’ inadequate monetarily, did not provide sufficient payment to the state of California under the Private Attorney General Act claim, and the non-monetary relief, which did not meet one of the lawsuit’s primary goals of reclassifying drivers as employees, was insufficient to overcome these problems.”

At the same time, according to the site, the state’s Private Attorney General Act could allow future suits by “unions such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which continues to attempt to organize Uber drivers in California and in the state of Washington,” or “the U.S. Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board, which have made clear their skepticism of the independent contractor model and intention to allow organization by misclassified employees.”

In fact, this March, the NLRB already sued Uber in a San Francisco federal court, “demanding it obey subpoenas related to five unfair labor practices cases,” as Politico reported. “And just last week an NLRB regional director filed a complaint against a Los Angeles company for allegedly misclassifying its trucking workers as independent contractors. That gives the board an opportunity to rule that misclassifying workers is an unfair labor practice, an issue with obvious relevance to Uber.”

Originally published by CalWatchdog.com