Teamsters Move In Reform Leaders in New York Local
“It’s time to close the concessions stand,” said the candidates of the New Directions slate, and members of Teamsters Local 814 in New York City agreed. They voted 406-154 for the reformers.
Most Local 814 members work for commercial movers, who do the heavy lifting for businesses in the New York area. For years the moving companies have won concessions that expanded the use of casuals and lower-tier workers and shorted the union’s pension and health funds.
This was despite what President-elect Jason Ide called “a long history of members taking the lead in this local.” The movers struck in 2002 and 2005 with very little backing from officers, but “many, many movers stepped up and worked hard to make sure the strike lines were active—it took a lot of coordination to make sure those picket lines were always up, and people were proud of that.”
The movers with experience leading on the strike lines and pitching in on negotiations formed a good part of the New Directions slate. Ide himself, a member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, led a rank-and-file contract campaign at Sotheby’s, the art auction house, last year that won big wage increases, shrunk the two-tier pay gap, and brought temps into the union.
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Ide was one of a group of rank and filers who made contract T-shirts, collected money for their own strike and lockout fund, set up a phone tree to textmessage the whole workforce, and, as bargaining came to a head, organized daily rallies where they got updates from the bargaining committee.
The Sotheby’s contract results were a complete turn-around from a disastrous lockout three years earlier—and set the bar for the other movers in Local 814. The New Directions slate then formed to fight concessions throughout the local.
Just a few weeks before ballots were to go out, New Directions members uncovered pension fund documents that showed President George Daniello had approved a plan to reduce annual pension credits to zero and slash members’ payouts. The incumbent had kept this secret for nearly a year.
The New Directions candidates say that toward the end, Daniello got desperate: he had ballots sent to 50 nonmembers, including friends and family. Despite the attempted cheating, the final vote tally was almost exactly what the reformers had predicted through their systematic campaigning. The winners are to take office January 1.