What’s at stake at the Teamsters’ convention

A really useful article going over who’s who and what’s what in the Teamsters this year.

Going through what the IBT Convention is, what we’re voting on, why it matters, and a little history of the Teamsters.

Sister and brother Teamsters,

By now everyone knows that the Coronavirus (COVID-19) is a serious pandemic that threatens serious illness and death. Governor Tony Evers has declared a state of emergency following more confirmed cases of the virus in Wisconsin, and is ordering public schools to close starting Wednesday, March 18th. It can’t be overstated how serious this public health crisis is.

As Teamsters, we’re not powerless here. We have not heard from Local 695, but there are examples from other Teamster locals we should take from. Local 705 in Chicago has been contacting their members’ employers asking them to suspend absentee discipline during the crisis: no one should lose their job to take care of themselves or a loved one.

The Chicago Teachers Union has called for additional paid sick time that line up with quarantine recommendations (15 days). Amazon warehouse workers, not represented by a union, petitioned and won paid sick leave protections; workers at the City of Madison, including rank and file Teamsters, are likewise petitioning for safe conditions, paid leave and job protection — while we’re working, we need a safe workplace that includes sanitizer, respirator masks and other gear to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International has released a brief calling for:

• At least two weeks of paid sick leave for all workers;
• Extension of unemployment benefits for workers temporarily laid off or whose work hours have been disrupted;
• Payroll tax cuts for all lower- and middle-income workers; and
• Protection against unfair termination or discrimination for those suspected of being exposed to the coronavirus.

There are things that can be done to protect our health and our livelihood. Read your contracts for any health and safety information, contact Local 695 asking them to get to work on this yesterday, and organize for what we need — we don’t expect anyone’s going to do it for us.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has put together a very good fact sheet regarding COVID-19 that we’d encourage everyone to read:

Click to access coronavirus_flier.pdf

Solidarity — Rebuild 695.

“Whenever a collective bargaining agreement is about to be negotiated, modified or extended at the request of the employer or by this Local Union, the principle executive officer or business representative shall call a meeting at which the membership shall determine and authorize the bargaining demands to be made.”

Bylaws of Teamsters Local 695, Section 26 Negotiations, Ratification of Agreements, Strikes and Lockouts (A)

The contract at Madison Metro Transit (City of Madison) expired December 31st, 2018. According to our Local Union’s current bylaws, the union was supposed to call a meeting where “the membership shall determine and authorize the bargaining demands to be made.” Nearly a year later, this meeting still has not happened. Members have heard little about the status of the ongoing bargaining; “We’ll tell you when there’s something to know.” At the two meetings we’ve had in the last year and a half, both times business agents declared that we would not be talking about bargaining.

Rank and file Metro Teamsters are circulating a petition demanding that we get the meeting that was supposed to happen BEFORE the contract expired. Members need to be able to say what we want and what we’re willing to bargain to get it. We have dozens of signatures that we’ll submit soon — if you’d like to sign the petition but haven’t had a chance please email rebuild695@gmail.com and we’ll get you in touch with people who have them.

If you’re a 695 Teamster at another shop and want help putting something like this together, send us a message and we’ll help with what you need.

Have a great Thanksgiving all! Solidarity!

Its been a week since the vote count and the smoke has cleared some, so we can start to look at what we got from running in this election.

As we’ve said over and over, this was the first officer election in 20 years. The last election was in 1998 when a 695 business agent, Ruth Ann Stadola, ran the Stadola slate ran against incumbent officers. Teamsters Local 695 does not have a culture of engaging in the local, so not only did no one expect an election — most people didn’t even know we could have them! By running, we showed that members can fight for the direction of the union.

Second, we built connections across the local. When we started this campaign, we were mostly Teamsters at Madison Metro. That’s no secret. Local 695 has shops from outside Milwaukee to La Crosse — there are dozens of represented sites, but most of us only know Teamsters where we work. We went out to meet other Teamsters in Local 695, talked about the common issues we have and started to build the connections that we will need to rebuild this local.

Third, we educated about what is happening. We named out our issues: appointed stewards, secret contract bargaining, worse contracts, only 24 hours to read proposed contracts before we vote, union representatives too friendly with management. Wherever we went, we heard sister and brother Teamsters say, “I thought it was just us.” It ain’t. We exposed how Local 695 has continued to give themselves raises as our union membership declines and the quality of our representation gets worse.

Lastly, the results of the election clearly show that this isn’t “just a Metro thing” — just under half of our Local voted for Rebuild 695. Our message of democracy, member involvement and fighting for better conditions is something that resonates. The election administrator complimented us on a very competitive run, said we did extremely well for a first run.

The incumbents on the Schultz slate had all the advantages: more money, access to member information we could not have, access to the site lists, stewards who could push their message, knowledge of when we would make our mailings so they could make counter mailings, the ability to call craft meetings and tell people “remember to vote for us”. Any protests we made went to them as the sitting Executive Board to make determinations on — no justice there.

Even less than 100 days to assemble a slate and campaign, and with all of those advantages for the incumbents, we still took 47% of the vote. In 2016, only 475 members in Local 695 voted in the IBT General Presidential election; this election had 1097 votes, engaging the membership in a way that hadn’t been done in decades. We are damned proud.

We’re going to continue to be active in the local. We’ve received many questions about what to do next — we’ll be having a meeting in the coming weeks to regroup and to talk about what to do. Keep reading this website, we’ll post things as they come up. We also want to encourage Teamsters to submit news about what’s going on at your shop: rebuild695@gmail.com We have to give a big shout out to Teamsters for a Democratic Union, who helped give us advice and wrote the book on rank and file campaigning. If you haven’t already, JOIN TDU! This is a national organization of Teamster members fighting for the spirit of our union.

SOLIDARITY!

Votes were counted Friday, October 25th at Teamsters 695, 1314 N Stoughton Rd in Madison. Rebuild 695 brought observers: Andy Sernatinger, Sonci Stone, Nikki Sampson and Matt Sarenich; rank and file member Eric Johnson also came to observe. Wayne Schultz Slate had staff members Brian and Sandy as their primary observers; Rick Roeth and Bill Roeth were present for most of the count as well.

1097 ballots were cast in the election. Merriman-River began by scanning the outside barcode on every ballot to make sure that they were eligible to vote before opening the envelopes for the vote tally. The Teamster dues system (TITAN) automatically challenged 73 ballots on the basis of their dues not being up to date. Rebuild 695 issued challenges for 4 ballots on the basis of receiving returned undeliverable mail for our campaign literature when they were still able to cast a ballot. There was overlap between one of the Rebuild ballots and the TITAN challenges, for a total of 76 challenged ballots. One ballot was sent in using a personal envelope instead of the official return mail and was disqualified by the election agent (never opened).

Challenged ballots were held aside in case the margin was close, at which point the slates would attempt to resolve which ballots were eligible — these ballots were never opened as the margin of victory was larger than the number of ballots (opening them wouldn’t change the result of the election).

1020 ballots were then opened by Merriman-River, had their anonymous votes taken out and placed in a box to be counted. 994 ballots were counted through the ballot scanner; 23 ballots had to be hand counted because they were not able to be fed through the scanner. 3 ballots were void: there was a blank ballot, a ballot with identifiable writing and one with both sides marked.

The majority of ballots were slate ballots, though there were many ballots which were marked for individual candidates in both slates — some ballots did not mark for every office. The margin of victory for the Schultz Slate was greater than the number of challenge ballots (73), so the challenges did not need to be resolved and those ballots were not opened. The results are below (ST 1 is the machine count, ST 2 is the hand count, Total is machine + hand count).

We’ll write up some thoughts on these results later, but as many are surely curious we wanted to make sure this information was out ASAP.

Hey folks, we’ll have a longer post soon but we wanna make sure to get the word out for people eager to hear.

1097 ballots cast, with 73 challenged ballots (flagged by the system for dues payment). The result is 540 for Schultz Slate, 454 for Rebuild 695. The margin of victory was 85 votes, so the election consultant did not open the challenged ballots since they would not have changed the outcome of the election.

Over the weekend we’ll post the full breakdown by office, but we’re very proud that nearly half of Local 695, 46%, voted for Rebuild 695. The incumbents had many advantages and no local officer election had been held in Teamsters 695 since 1998. We gave a very competitive race, and we don’t take the results to mean we were “beaten”.

We are still Teamsters, we are union people. Stick with the union, fight for the union. Today wasn’t our day, but its far from over.

Solidarity, REBUILD 695!

This being the first local election we’ve had since 1998, most of us aren’t familiar with the process. Here’s what’s going on:

Friday, October 25th the ballots will be counted. According to Merriman-River Group, there’s no limit on the number of observers to the ballot count but they reserve the right to cap if there are too many people in the room (according to them, this doesn’t really happen ever).

Both slates will have their representatives meet at the Teamster Hall the morning of the 25th at 9:30am. We will then go to the Post Office where the ballots have been sent to collect them, and bring them back to the Hall on Stoughton Road — Merriman-River again says that only the Post Office has keys to the box where ballots have been sent. Counting will then commence at the Teamster Hall, and should go until about 4pm.

As soon as we have the results, we will broadcast them on our website and send emails/texts to our lists. Whatever the result, we’ll be having a party Friday night, 10/25/19 from 7 – 10pm at Bierock, 2911 N Sherman Ave, Madison WI 53704. See you there!