Hey, get the ZUCK up – let's unionize Facebook buses, cry Teamsters The Teamsters Union is lobbying Facebook to recognize a unionization of the company's bus drivers – the ones shuttling FB'ers to and from work in Menlo Park every day. The union said in an open letter [PDF] to CEO Mark Zuckerberg that it was looking to include the private coach drivers in its Local 853 group in hopes of …
...how much the drivers are paid? Or if they are in a union or not?
"Loop Transportation, the company it contracts for bus service"
Oh, I see, shout about a big company and how they are stiffing the poor working Joes to grab some headlines.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the dispute between the drivers, the union and Loop Transportation, there's just a service contract between Loop Transportation and Facebook. Drivers wages and conditions are not part of Facebooks concerns, certainly not to the extent that the Union need to ask Zucks blessing for unionisation. FB just put out a contract and bus companies bid for it. If said winning company can't pay their drivers enough based on their bid terms, then they need to pull out or renegotiate (and someone else might win it)
This is just typical of the blackmail that the Teamsters use against target companies.
It is the same BS that propagates from the "Un-democratic" party and it's minions. Oh woe is me, I need a raise, don't mention I've done nothing to deserve one except be too lazy to go to school and not have enough skills or education and have to take a low wage job. Next they'll get some shill from MSNBC to say Facebook is being "racist" or some other topical epithet.
The teamsters will only take your already limited money and give you crap in return. These days unions don't/can't provide much if any benefit unless the worker makes more than $25 / hour so the union can afford to provide significant representation.
I would really like a comparison of the non-union wages and benefits to union ones - with the union dues pulled out. I've seen a couple of local shops quit their unions because they just weren't doing anything for the workers. A rep would come down once a year and make sure negotiations included a backhander to the union and would accept whatever management declared for the worker wages and benefits. End result was that actual earnings (after increases in dues and COL) decreased. The workers all decided to vote themselves an immediate wage increase by booting the union and not paying dues. So far they are getting at least the same % increases as they were as union, and generally more. YMMV.
Usually bus drivers are considered unskilled workers. I've done it to make ends meet between real jobs and it isn't that tough. I've had a variety of manual and/or unskilled labor jobs as fillers or to support myself through school and there is a good reason I got out of that rut. Certain jobs are exceptionally hard on the body and others are just so phenomenally boring that I couldn't stay. Honestly, if I could make the same money doing something trivial as I can doing tech work, I would be sorely tempted. That being the case, shouldn't jobs that are mentally challenging, that not everyone can do, require extensive training/school/OJT, etc be compensated better? I don't expect to make what a licensed doctor of medicine makes. Bus drivers shouldn't expect to make what degreed professional positions make.
Additionally the Teamsters can take a flying leap. After having to work with the local on a pretty simple project I'm over them. Any time you can do the work yourself, pay the union "workers" to stay home instead of coming to the jobsite and come out ahead simply because of how much faster things got done, done right, and with less frustration there is something wrong.
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