“The Atlanta Police Dept. sent a detective to surveil Fight for $15 organizers meeting today at our union hall,” wrote Teamsters Local 728 Organizing Director on Facebook. “Guy sat in his car in our parking lot watching fast food and airport workers prep for actions this afternoon and evening. Unreal.”
“We have to ensure that their pay and working conditions are good enough that we get decent, qualified, focused people who can be entrusted with our children’s safety” says Yarbro “It’s hard to imagine any function more public than the school bus picking up and dropping off our children each day. There must be public accountability so that we make sure something like this never happens again”.
Yesterday, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced that the bus driver, Johnthony Walker, that in addition to his duties as a bus driver that Walker also worked the graveyard shift. Starting wages for bus drivers at Durham in Chattanooga are only $13.30 an hour and in order to provide for his three-year-old daughter, the 24-year-old Walker routinely worked from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. at Amazon’s warehouse several nights a week.
Many drivers say that the lack of training for school bus drivers employed by Durham and the low pay that makes it difficult to attract more skilled drivers. According to the wage tracking site GlassDoor.com, Durham School Services pays bus drivers on average only $14.92 an hour with many bus drivers being forced to take seasonal jobs, when school is out of session. Indeed, Genevere Walker, the mother of Jonnthony Walker, told CNN that her son was forced to work two jobs in order to make ends meet.
“We’re glad that UPS can afford to invest in beefing up its international fleet,” said Jim Kelley, an aircraft mechanic at UPS’s Worldport facility in Louisville, Kentucky in a press release. “But if UPS can afford major capital investments and huge raises for top brass, then UPS can also choose to invest in the maintenance workers who do strenuous and dangerous work every day to make its success possible”
“We have to figure out how to grow off of this issue” says Kentucky AFL-CIO spokesperson Delane Adams. of the pending “right-to-work” fight in Kentucky.
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“By making race and family heritage a part of the campaign, Senator Gardenhire owes the people of District 10 a full explanation of his family’s slave-trading past,” says Muhammad.
UMWA’s Smith stresses the importance of passing the legislation soon. “Failure to pass this bill this year will put the lives of some 16,000 retired miners, their dependents and widows at immediate risk, as they will lose their health care at the end of December. About 6,500 more will be at risk of losing their health care in 2017.”
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