Merritt Billington has worked at UPS for about 25 years; a career he started when he was 18 years old. He delivers packages in the city of Gilroy for UPS and serves as the Local 853’s chief shop steward at the Morgan Hill Center in San Jose. He makes 150-190 deliveries each day — a workload that’s up by about 25% since COVID started.
For most of his career at UPS, Billington was an active member with Local 287.
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Rather than gathering in a high school auditorium, Local 853 switched its annual Membership Appreciation Event to be a “drive-through.” On October 31, nearly 1,000 members came to the DoubleTree Hilton in Newark to pick up their membership gift, and the “State of Our Union” speech and raffle were held on zoom the next day.
Keep readingOn July 18, the Northern California Ready Mix drivers working for Cemex and Central Concrete, who are members of Local 853 and 315, overwhelmingly ratified their contract extension by mail ballot. This contract impacts 600 members at facilities across the Greater Bay Area.
“Given the current circumstances brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting inability to do most things in person, full-blown negotiations would have taken months and would have put areas of our contract at potential risk,” said Local 853 Principal Officer Rome Aloise.
Keep readingBusiness Agent Efren Alarcon reports that the 120 members at Anheuser Busch, formerly Horizon Beverage, in Oakland overwhelmingly ratified a one-year agreement in August by mail ballot.
“They got a 3% wage increase (about 85 cents/hour) and full retro pay back to April 1. Hopefully, we’ll be back to meeting and voting in person by the time this contract comes due again.”
Keep readingOn July 20, Teamsters joined trade unionists from across the East Bay for an event called Strike for Black Lives. The purpose was both to support Black Lives Matter and to draw attention to the plight of low-wage workers who are deemed “essential workers” during the pandemic.
After a brief rally, the event marched from Mosswood Park to a McDonalds on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, where workers had, at that point, been on strike for 42 days over safety and other issues.
Keep readingWhen you think of “paratransit,” perhaps you envision a service that takes seniors and the disabled to day centers and medical appointments. That may be the mainstay, but paratransit does more than that. At least it did before the pandemic hit, and ended most of that business.
Some drivers at SF Paratransit, a TransDev company, were laid off in late February. That changed in early April when the city realized they could use paratransit services and put the drivers to work as “COVID” drivers.
Keep readingWhenever a new company wins the bid to provide services from a unionized company, it’s never a guarantee that the workers will be rehired and the union contract will be respected. Fortunately, all of that happened when Local 853 signatory employer MV Paratransit lost its contract with the City of Berkeley, and A Para Transit won it.
On June 1, the new company started their operation and offered work to all 22 of the existing MV drivers.
Keep readingIn a secret ballot mail vote held in February, the members of Local 287 voted overwhelmingly to merge into Local 853. The merger became effective on May 1.
After an explanation of the merger was mailed to each member, the Local held an open meeting for all Local 287 members. Nearly 300 members turned out to ask Local 853 Secretary-Treasurer Rome Aloise questions about the pros and cons of a merger.
“Local 287,
Keep readingIn March, the members who work at Sysco Foods in Northern California and Nevada ratified a new six-year agreement that offers the largest economic settlement with the company in the nation. The negotiations took more than four months to complete, in large part due to the company’s aggressive attempt to remove language that protects working conditions. The offer was only possible because of a coordinated effort between the IBT Warehouse Division, Joint Council 7, and Locals 137,
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Teamster members who drive the construction vehicles for the City and County of San Francisco are now doing that work with a little more of a smile. Local 853 members haul the big equipment, the tractor trucks that clean out the sewers, the water trucks, and more. On May 9, those 200 Teamsters overwhelmingly ratified their new three-year agreement, and according to Business Rep Dan Harrington, “It’s the best contract we’ve been able to get in the last 20 years.”
Harrington explained that the negotiations had to go to mediation,
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