[ad_1]
Are you a forward for dhl Rhode Island or a worker for another logistics company? touch WSWS Tell us about your working conditions and experiences. All submissions will be anonymous.
On Sept. 9, police arrested dhl strikers on picket lines in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, as the local delivery driver’s strike entered its 12th week. On June 22, about 70 delivery drivers attacked Northeast Transportation Services, a contracted supplier of international logistics giant dhl.
Workers are demanding wages to keep up with the cost of living, affordable health care, retirement benefits and security concerns. Northeast employs scabs, who reportedly make $55 an hour, compared with an average of $18 an hour for dhl drivers.
Pawtucket Police and Teamsters Local 251 confirmed five arrests were made outside the dhl Express Service Point. Teamsters commercial agent Thomas Salvatore told reporters the arrests occurred as 50 to 60 protesters approached the gate to Concord Street. Providence Magazine.
Arrested and charged are Charles Reid, 40; Tiffany Thompson, 42; Marisa Delfino, 29; Matthew Maini, 48, and Arthur Porter, 45. The charges include disorderly conduct, simple assault, resisting arrest and obstructing an officer.
An official at IBT Local 251 said police tried to move the crowd away from the gate. dhl courier Rondelle Walker described the violence against one of the protest strikers to ABC 6 News: “She was pushed to the ground with her knees to her face and her head back, and the other was pepper-sprayed in the face. I Got stuck and I was pulled out and it was horrible.”
dhl pickets faced violence earlier in the strike. On July 1, three people were arrested at a picket line outside the Pawtucket Northeast Traffic Facility. Local 251 chief officer Matthew Taibi told Providence Magazine An armed security guard followed him with a baseball bat.
The latest arrests come just after Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee, a Democrat, visited the picket lines. He left before he was arrested, and a spokesman said he had not witnessed the incident and had no comment. Local 251 supports McGee’s re-election bid. He has the backing of the Teamsters, AFSCME, UAW, the National Education Association and other Rhode Island unions who lied that Democrats would support workers’ interests.
Courier services like dhl, FedEx and UPS are notorious for their poor pay and working conditions. Workers at the Pawtucket plant typically drive 250 miles round-trip in a day, regardless of delivery sites, as far as the tip of Cape Code.
One of the main needs of dhl workers is affordable healthcare. The current “family plan” costs at least $370 per week. For most $18-an-hour workers, paying for health care through the company is out of reach.
Teamsters, which has 1.2 million members nationwide, allows Northeast Shipping’s dhl workers and other contractors to remain isolated from major dhl contracts. This summer, IBT approved a new state contract that excludes workers at those contract locations.
Deutsche Post dhl Group is the world’s leading logistics company and the parent company of dhl in the United States, with operations in more than 220 countries and approximately 590,000 employees worldwide. Deutsche Post dhl generated 22.6 billion euros ($23 billion) in revenue in the first quarter of 2022.
Delivery and transport workers have been at the forefront of a global boom in worker struggles, battling rising inequality and inflation, the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, and the social impact of government war policies.
Rail unions are seeking to block a strike by about 70,000 rail workers as a government-imposed “cooling-off period” expires on September 16. The union bureaucracy was sabotaged, and the smaller craft unions struck separate deals with the railroads.
United Parcel Service (UPS), a U.S.-based multinational shipping company with more than 500,000 employees worldwide, has employee contracts that expire in July 2023. UPS employees are also members of Teamsters. The company, which made a record profit of nearly $13 billion in 2021, slashed extra pay for some part-time UPS workers in certain cities “where the job market is particularly tight and during the busy holiday season,” and said extra should not be added. Wages become permanent.
One of the main concerns for UPS drivers, along with increases in wages and benefits, is protecting workers from the heat. Drivers are growing angry over a spate of deaths and hospitalisations over the summer, when heat has reached record levels. With no air conditioning on UPS delivery vans, workers are increasingly experiencing heat stroke, dehydration and fatigue.
In late June, Esteban Chavez, Jr., a 24-year-old delivery driver in Southern California, collapsed and died while making a delivery. Another UPS worker, Jose Rodriguez, 23, was found dead from heat stroke at the end of his shift.
Truckers have tried to defuse outrage over the situations by holding public rallies across the country. Sean O’Brien, president of Teamsters International, said in a statement that the union “is determined to win the best contracts for UPS members by August 1, 2023 and reset wages and benefits for the industry by August 1, 2023. Standard”, when the UPS contract expires.
“We’re not going to extend the talks for a day,” O’Brien said. The Teamsters’ record in the dhl and the isolation of the Pawtucket strikers have exposed the falsity of this claim. A winning strategy for workers at dhl, UPS, and other logistics companies requires the creation of ordinary action committees, independent of unions and their political representatives, to organize a real fight.
[ad_2]
Most Commented