Teamsters Seek To Unionize More Tech Shuttle Bus Drivers In Silicon Valley

An anonymous reader writes with news about the effort to unionize shuttle drivers in Silicon Valley. "Shuttle bus drivers for five prominent tech companies will decide whether to unionize on Friday in a vote that has the potential to dramatically expand organized labor's territory in Silicon Valley and embolden others in the tech industry's burgeoning class of service workers to demand better working conditions. Drivers who ferry Yahoo, Apple, Genentech, eBay and Zynga workers -- all employed by contractor Compass Transportation -- will decide whether to join the Teamsters union in an election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. Union leaders say they want to bring the drivers into the fold so they can negotiate better pay and benefits -- as well as relief from a split shift that has the drivers working morning and evening shifts with no pay in between. A contract the Teamsters struck over the weekend for Facebook's shuttle bus drivers, who work for Loop Transportation, offers a glimpse of what may be possible: paid sick and vacation time, full health care coverage and wages of up to $27.50 an hour."

Comments

Sick

[symes]

I do not like unpaid sick leave in some industries - particularly nurses, healthcare workers and the like. It means people are more likely to work when they are ill, forced to by financial concerns. Not good when they are dealing with people who are vulnerable. Same is true, to some extent, for bus drivers. Driving a bunch of people around while suffering from fever, etc., is going to effect their ability to drive. There's probably a compromise, such that drivers get 50% pay when ill. But would still prefer to see someone not drive me around while suffering from poor health. So what is good for workers and unions can also be good for customers as well.

Re:Sick

[Anonymous Coward]

It boggles my mind that in the richest country in the world, there is even debate over this. The rest of the world has already realized that of course someone shouldn't lose their house or their job because they got the flu.

Re:Sick

[Virtucon]

Richest by getting rid of basic things like paid sick leave and turning workers into temps or "contract workers." In this instance I wish the teamsters luck because having drivers sit all day as "down time" when then can't really do anything else except hang around the bus and not get paid is also pretty fucked up.

Re:Sick

[hey!]

Well, this "richest country in the world" business is somewhat misleading. It means the country with the greatest aggregate economic power, not the country where people tend to be the best off. You need to look at several measures before you can begin to understand the thing that's mystifying you.

By total GDP the US is by far the wealthiest nation in the world. It has almost twice the total GDP of the second country on the list, China. By *per capita* GDP, the US is about 10th on the list, just below Switzerland; so by global standards the typical American is wealthy, but not the wealthiest. On the other hand the US ranks about 20th in cost of living, so the typical American has it pretty good.

Where things get interesting is if you look at GINI -- a measure of economic disparity. The most equal countries are of course the Scandinavians, with Denmark, Sweden and Norway topping the list. The US is far from the *least* equal (Seychelles, South Africa, and Comoros), but it is kind of surprising when you look at countries near the US on the list. Normally in most economic measures you see the US ranked near advanced industrialized countries in Europe, but it's neighbors on the GINI list are places like Turkmenistan, Qatar, and El Salvador.

What this means is that we have significant classes on either end of the scale: the *very* wealthy and an economic underclass. Now because of the total wealth sloshing around in the US, the US underclass has it pretty well compared to the underclass in, say, India. But what this doesn't buy is clout or respect. "Poor" households in the US usually have TVs and refrigerators -- a fact that seems to anger some people, who see the poor in the US as ungrateful people who are too lazy to improve themselves. But a study by the OECD suggests that they don't have the *time* to improve themselves. In a ranking of countries by time spend on leisure and self-care the US ranks 33rd, at 14.3 hours lagging almost two hours per day behind world leader Denmark (big surprise). But remember this is an average; it doesn't represent the time available for the poor.

Most Americans seem to think that poor people spend all their time sitting around waiting for handouts. This willfully ignores the phenomenon of the working poor. After selling my company, I volunteered on a lark at a charity which refurbishes old furniture and household stuff and furnishes the homes of poor people, and I found poor people to be neither lazy nor ungrateful. Let me tell you I have never met so many people who work two or sometimes more jobs. Particularly shocking were the number of women who took their children out of abusive relationships, and then have to work a full time job, raise three or four kids, without a car and in a neighborhood that doesn't have a grocery store. You don't know what gratitude is until you've given a poor, overtaxed mother beds when her children have been sleeping on the floor for months.

When some smug, ignorant and conspicuously well-fed media head starts whining about the poor having refrigerators, it makes me want to punch them in the mouth.

... Driverless cars?

[Karmashock]

This is perhaps one of the most stupid places the teamsters could possibly make a push.

Nothing is going to inspire the likes of google and apple to build driveless cars faster than getting dicked around with by these retrograde knuckle dragging union goons.

The teamsters have lots of union works across the country that drive things. Most of their customers don't own design teams working on driverless cars. If they poke a stick in google and apple's eye over this issue they're just going to redouble their efforts.

And what happens when they succeed? Not only will the teamsters lose Silicon Valley which will have all its people driven around by robots... but their other union members all over the country will probably start losing their jobs as well. Because the various companies that employ them won't have to pay union scale anymore. They can pay robot scale. Which is low. No healthcare. No overtime. No paid vacations. No pensions.

And THAT is the company you want to piss off? This is straight up idiocy. Whomever is running the teamsters is a fucktard.

Which isn't surprising to me. My father had to negotiate with them once. Company he worked for assigned him to talk to a teamster negociator that the union had brought in to talk to the company. My dad didn't really have authority to do anything. He was just listening to the proposal so he could relay it back to management.

Anyway, the teamster guy was a giant red faced baboon that basically tried to physically intimidate my dad. My dad is not a large or physical man. He's an intellectual type guy... quiet, reasonable, believes in being nice just because. And this asshole teamster in a simple query of terms thought it was reasonable to imply he was going to beat my father up. I mean... what the fuck?

Anyway... management responded by giving the union everything they asked for. Literally everything. They just said yes down the line. Win for the teamsters right? Well, management was also massively pissed off. So they immediately started setting up an alternative operation. Takes years to set up. But the new contract would be in force for years. When the contract expired, the union sent the same asshole to ask for even more stuff. The company responded by firing them all and relocating the operation to the new site.

Does that suck? Yep. Ideally it would be nice if differences could have been resolved. But the teamsters don't negotiate. They make demands. And if you don't give them what they want, then they go into full primate mode... turning tables over, beating their chest, humping various things, throwing their poop around... and basically doing everything they can to burn all their bridges.

They're terrible at their jobs. They're really good at getting what they want TODAY. But they piss people off and no one wants to do business with them in the long term. Their whole business model is to monopolize labor so that you can't do business with anyone else. And using that as leverage they just make fucking rediculious demands. You're left with two options... either give them what they want or you have no labor period. Well... that's not fucking acceptable. If I could do business with a dozen different unions and none of them wanted to give me my price that would be one thing. But if I can only deal with ONE union then its the same as dealing with one corporation. They're under no pressure to be reasonable because you have no options.

And that just inspires companies to think of ways to get away from that bullshit. The big drive to outsource everything to asia is in large part a consequence of the unions. They drove labor over seas. And once the unions in the US are no longer a factor, we should see a significant return of that manufacturing etc to the US. It is already starting. We're seeing a lot of manufacturing growth in the South East and South West... specifically in states where the unions are weak. The unions killed the rust belt. The reason it went to rust in the first place is because they gave themselves

Re:... Driverless cars?

[Karmashock]

Of course not. When big national unions come in to take over labor its all roses and rainbows. The flayed men and pyres of burning bodies come later.

I judge the teamsters by their previous conduct and their reputation in other markets. As any rational person should when judging such an organization. They have a long standing reputation which people I personally know can attest to of intimidation, unreasonable demands, and basically leveraging any bargaining position past the point of breakage.

They're the sort of union that if they don't get what they want they sometimes break equipment, throw bricks through windows with murder threats on them, and other fucking insane bullshit.

Were this a union group without that reputation then I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. But this is the teamsters. They've a reputation of being rough with people that don't give them what they want. And the reality is that no one has patience for that shit anymore. These old unions still think it is the 1930s. It isn't. And if they try to start slapping around the likes of Google/Apple with this shit... they're going to get replaced with robots.

Re:... Driverless cars?

[Karmashock]

They used to save lives. Like a lot of things that had a point once... their time has past.

I mentioned several times that unions have done some really good things in the past. And really, I have no problem with unions in principle. However, there are bad unions that need to just die. And the teamsters are on that list.

The teamsters, the dock workers, the auto workers union, and a couple others are not helping anyone besides the union leadership. Pissing off the companies or making it unprofitable to operate in various areas doesn't help the workers. It costs jobs and closes factories and encourages outsourcing.

If the unions stuck to making sure work environments were safe they wouldn't have the reputation they've earned.

You're going to have to deal with that reputation. Is google full of angels? Nope... but they're not full of retarded assholes either. And the teamsters is that.

Again... they have a rep. And my father personally dealt with them and confirms it.

My father just so you understand probably one of the most peaceful kind quiet men you'll ever meet in your life. As I said above, the company he was working for sent him to get the teamster's terms from their negotiator and the guy basically suggested he was going to beat my father up... In the conference room.

They're fucking baboons. You want to tell me about the good things unions do? I'm not talking about all unions. I'm talking about THAT union and any union like them. There are a bunch of unions that have a bad reputation of intimidation, vandalism, extortion, and general thuggery. Not all unions have that reputation. There are lots of unions that are on great terms with their industry partners and always have been. These are the unions that understand that the only way they get paid is if the company makes money and if business happens. They go to negotiating tables and understand they're not going to get everything they want.

Look at the shit the dock workers union is pulling RIGHT NOW. Its going to cost the US economy around 30 or so billion dollars and that was as of the last time I checked. And why? Because the wages they're getting paid that lots of people would fucking kill for aren't enough.

And here is my big problem with unions like that... often there is no alternative. It is a monopoly on labor.

If at the very least a given company could bargain between a few competing unions then at least they might be able to have a REAL negotiation. But when only ONE organization controls ALL the labor... you're fucked. The union knows you're fucked. And so the stupid ones fuck you. And companies don't like to get fucked. You fuck them enough and they start to think of ANY way what so ever out of that situation.

And while it might take some time... they tend to find a way out. The Unions that have been losing membership for generations are largely doing so because they over played their hands. There are several unions that haven't lost that much membership. Oh yes. Unions that are roughly as strong as they ever were... and they tend to have much better relationships with everyone because they don't play power games. Most of these unions represent skilled labor and the unions tend to restrict themselves to setting safety policy or working conditions. They actually tend to avoid involving themselves in wage negotiations leaving that up their members to work out individually. I know, that seems odd. But such unions exist.

And they do what you said... they save lives. That is where they start and that is where they stop. If the teamsters did that, they'd have a much different reputation. But they don't... and they have the rep they have.

Re:... Driverless cars?

[PPalmgren]

Unions generally don't mature from their inception, its kind of a self-selective process. The goal of union leadership is more bodies, more pay, and more dues. As a result, they are inherently anti-progress, anti-tech, and anti-change. If they tried to align more with the companies they work with in setting production goals instead of man-hour quotas, I think the relationships would be much more amicable. Another poster got it right that the problem is with 'monopoly unions' or unions that control the labor force of an entire industry with no competition and sometimes no competition/advancement allowed (forced via contracts). In those situations, the most high-profile being the Teamsters, UAW, and the two coastwide Longshore unions, its about the union and the union only, industry be damned. Then people wonder why GM and Chrysler had to be bailed out, hostess crashes and burns, and several shipping terminals go bankrupt.

On another note, I feel the adversarial process is the bane of the 20th/21st centuries. It has turned prosecution/defense into a farce, it creates uncooperative industry issues like the unions/companies mentioned above, and it has turned congress into a wasted existence. Too many lawyers are bringing the adversarial process into places where it doesn't belong and ruining any chance of cooperation and advancement.

Re:Slashdot

[ledow]

No, I have Javascript enabled, have latest Chrome. It's just borked, and it only happened today (no updates to software between yesterday and today - same browser session still running in fact!) but the site now doesn't render at all nicely and it LOOKS deliberate, but I'm missing any kind of Post button at all.

Re:That is okay

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Unions are collective bargaining. Collective bargaining forms the basis for an intelligent, social civilisastion. Some unions are good for workers, campaigning for an end to the dire conditions found themselves enduring through early C20, and others are corrupt and useless (in Western Europe I have rarely found a harmful union, but the US is so hardline capitalist that even some of its unions end up top-heavy), but saying "smash the unions!" is like shouting "GMO is evil!" - it's a nonsense blanket statement by an anti-science ideologue;

2) Soon sufficient automation will make you unemployed. Be careful what you wish for, because it's only hubris that's keeping you confident. Unless you're a multimillionaire you're not secure, and a sufficiently small handful of multimillionaires in an automated utopia will soon find nobody is interested in protecting their wealth.

Re:In related news...

[Virtucon]

Well if I worked for any of those companies and utilized these buses, I'd want to make sure that the guys at the wheel were at least satisfied with what they were doing and not ill nor overworked; especially if I had to put my life in their hands.

Re:That is okay

[Anonymous Coward]

"smash the unions!" is like shouting "GMO is evil!"

Right now, at this time, people and small business (and thus the economy) are losing a lot of money because unions are closing down the docks in major ports. Why? Because they want their uneducated box-pushers who are already earning 147k a year, to make even more. Did you read that? People who did not invest in any degree, dropped out of high school and got a job at the docks earning 147k a year, and are now demanding more. Demanding more by crippling the rest of the economy. Are you kidding me?

TFA even says:

"Now is the opportunity for shuttle bus drivers, for food service workers, for janitors, for security officers to re-ask the question: Should I be equally as valued as the high tech workers in the high tech industry?" said David Huerta, president of United Service Workers West.

Really? I mean, really? Are you seriously expecting an employee without a high school diploma doing the most simple job in the world to earn the same income as someone with a Master's degree or PHD? Really? That's just plain nonsense. Remember that all they do is drive a vehicle from A to B. Something that all of us do on a very regular basis.

Let's for a moment look at a Bay Area without bus drivers. There would be a bit more cars on the road so it would take me an hour to get to work instead of 40 minutes. And perhaps I'd work from home a bit more.

Now let's see what would happen to Apple, Google or Facebook if there would be no software engineers. Oh wait, I forgot. There would be no Apple, Google, or Facebook.

Is it really that weird that tech companies pay their high value tech employees more than the average bus driver?

The one thing that I agree with, and I agree with that very strongly, is that everyone who has a full time job should be able to earn a living wage and get healthcare benefits. Every single bus driver, every single janitor, every single security guard should be able to put a roof over their head, buy some nice toys for their kids and go to Disneyland once in a while. So in that sense, I do agree with the outcome of the process, and even think that the $27,50 is a bit low. $35 would be better and fair, considering the housing market in the Bay area.

But they should also realize that if they had done better in school (no, that English major does not count), they could have had a tech job as well. It takes 16+ years of education to get a Master's degree. It takes less than 16 months to get a commercial driver's license. That fact is embedded in tech workers wages.

Samzenpus reminding you to hate the unions!

[damn_registrars]

Because it would, of course, be a terrible thing if drivers were well qualified, reasonably paid, and respected by their employers. Really, who doesn't wish they could work 70+ hours a week for 35 hours of pay? And job stability is so 1950s...

Re:That is okay, the end is nigh!

[Anonymous Coward]

> It takes 16+ years of education to get a Master's degree. It takes less than 16 months to get a commercial driver's license. That fact is embedded in tech workers wages.

Someone with education of a Master's degree messes up work: sorry for the bug, we'll release a hotfix patch or a service pack soon, we thank you for your patience in the while!

Someone with commercial driver's license messes up work: CNN breaking news, schoolbus careens into river, two dozen kids missing. In other news, 18-wheeler carrying barrels of concentrated fluoric acid explodes upon collision with town hall, 20 dead, 750 citizens evacuated, national guard mobilized, FEMA sets up local command centre.

It is also not OK that LGBT hairdressers earn seven figures a year, while garbage collectors earn 15 USD / hour. No garbage collection => megacity soon depopulated by diseases. No LBGT hairdresser => put a pot over your head and cut off what sticks out! The free world / western / americanized capitalist society is totally fsck'ed up when it comes to moral values and labour relations. The managers become little divine kings in their palaces and luxury sedans and flying chariot, while many common people become more and more like peasants or even serfs. The decadent and hedonistic first world is heading to a crash soon, one which will eclipse that of ancient Roman Empire.

After that comes a new Dark Age, where the equally insane asian-despotic, planned economy regime principle will be the celebrated leitmotif and China or Putinistan will act as role models for most of the world. Is there a need for history to repeat itself over and over again, as if mandated by a natural law? Isn't it possible create stable and just societies everywhere, like Scandinavia, where respect for the common good makes everybody's life for the better?

Re:That is okay

[dywolf]

the simple fact of the matter is that EVERYONE is underpaid.
that doesn't mean you should begrudge the dockworker a decent living simply because "they're uneducated box pushers".

rather, the key to boosting everyones' pay to where it should be is to start raising wages.
the economy can handle it easily.

The simple fact of the matter is that is wages had kept pace with productivity the current median wage would be ~140k/yr, and not the current anemic ~50k/yr.

All the extra revenue from that increased productivity has been going to the executives, the CEOs, the 0.1%, since the mid 70s. Ever since they first started weakening the unions, spreading the myth of "trickle down economics", and generally f---ing over the middle class who built this country and its economy. God forbid the people who actually generate that revenue, who actually caused the growth in the economy, share in the fruits of their labor.

Re:That is okay

[nbauman]

Right now, at this time, people and small business (and thus the economy) are losing a lot of money because unions are closing down the docks in major ports. Why? Because they want their uneducated box-pushers who are already earning 147k a year, to make even more. Did you read that? People who did not invest in any degree, dropped out of high school and got a job at the docks earning 147k a year, and are now demanding more. Demanding more by crippling the rest of the economy. Are you kidding me?
 

Yes, I read it. It's $83,000 a year, not $147,000. Stop bragging about how smart you are if you can't read a simple newspaper story, realize there are two sides to the story, and do some simple arithmetic.

You say it would be fair for them to make $35/h. Well, $35/h x 40h/wk x 50 wk/yr = $70,000/yr, which is pretty close to $83,000. So they merely drove a good bargain. You have a problem with people making good money?

There are reasons why they make so much money that you resent them.

First, they know how to negotiate. That's something you might learn from them.

When they negotiate, they don't want to match the race to the bottom. They know how much their employer is making and they want a piece of the action. They want job security and they want, in effect, something like an ownership interest in the company. That's not so strange. In Germany, unions have a seat on the board of directors of a company.

Second, they made a grand bargain decades ago. There was new technology that would make their job more labor-saving and efficient. Instead of obstructing it, they agreed to be forward-thinking and go along with it. However, if the company got the benefits of improved efficiency, they wanted the benefits of improved efficiency too. That's why they're making $83,000 a year. Here's a profitable business, where the owners are making millions a year. Why should they settle for $70,000 when their boss is rich and could easily pay $83,000 a year?

My landlord was making at least $300,000 a year, probably more. He inherited the building from his father, like most landlords. He worked hard, just like a longshoreman. Do I envy him? No. That's the free market.

If you live in a rental building, do you envy your landlord if he makes $300,000 a year? Do you envy your maintenance man, who fixes your boiler? Do you envy your auto mechanic? This is a rich country. Why do you want to drag everybody down to the bottom?

Sure, Blame The Unions

[Greyfox]

Short sighted leadership making cars no one wanted had nothing to do with it.

Re:That is okay

[jcr]

Collective bargaining forms the basis for an intelligent, social civilisastion.

Bullshit.

Unions in the USA exist to steal money from workers to buy hookers and blow for mobsters and politicians. The teamsters in particular are as dirty as they come.

-jcr

Re:That is okay, the end is nigh!

[Rich0]

A better example of a coding error might be this one.