Teamsters are losing their jobs — and there is one labor leader to blame

 Sean O’Brien just might be the worst labor leader in America. If you don’t believe me, just consider his horrible performance last week culminating in the unemployment of thousands of his working-class members, and a sweet payday for Wall Street fat cats.

As the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, O’Brien styles himself as a fighter, an in-your-face kind of guy in public and on social media, daring big corporations to mess with him and his members under the handle ­@TeamsterSOB. He recently negotiated a deal with UPS that averted a strike and won some concessions, so he must be doing good, right?

A closer look at O’Brien’s oeuvre as a labor leader is more complicated: he’s buddies with Bernie Sanders, the socialist Vermont senator who has a habit of praising dictators like Fidel Castro. Nice. He’s a big name-caller during public confrontations. Childish. He also effectively laid off 30,000 people last week ­because of an idiotically pointless ­negotiating strategy that put a trucking company called Yellow out of business. Really dumb.

When you think of the Teamsters, you often think of Jimmy Hoffa Sr., its iconic and flawed former leader. Hoffa spent time in jail because he was said to engage with mobsters while conducting union business. But no one doubted his intelligence or his commitment to the rank-and-file.

He built the modern Teamsters from disjointed groups of local truckers into a national powerhouse and the largest union in the country. He knew when to strike and when not to. Something called the National Master Freight Agreement, a set of rules between truckers and employers, was a Hoffa brainchild and it remains in effect to this day.

It’s widely believed Hoffa was killed by the mob because he put his members’ interests over theirs. After he was released from prison, Hoffa sought to regain leadership of the union and wrest control of it from the mob, until he disappeared in 1975.

Yeah, Hoffa was a loyal, tough and, above all, pretty shrewd guy. His son James P. Hoffa would later run the union in much the same way. You can’t say the same for O’Brien in the shrewd department following his dealings with Yellow, a company that engages in a niche and difficult business known as “Less Than Truckload” freight shipping.

Yellow has been around for nearly a century. In recent years, its management certainly made mistakes — lots of debt for acquisitions. It nearly folded during COVID and needed a loan from the Trump administration to stay in business.

It’s been limping along ever since. Earlier this year, management came up with what it billed as a long-term solution to its woes: A restructuring that consolidated operations without layoffs. It also asked its drivers for some trivial concessions like unloading trucks.

Enter Mr. Tough Guy Sean O’Brien. The Teamsters union chief said no — his members have been giving too much back to the jackasses who have been running Yellow into the ground for too long. Yellow said that if the union didn’t compromise, it would go out of business.

O’Brien’s response: A photo on Twitter of a gravestone, with the epitaph: “Yellow 1924-2023.”

Was it a bluff? Yeah probably, but it was a pretty dopey one. Maybe O’Brien wanted to squeeze a few more bucks out of Yellow in labor concessions, even though Yellow isn’t exactly rolling in cash and wasn’t bluffing about bankruptcy.

Twenty-two thousand teamsters who worked at Yellow lost their jobs.

Dia Dipasupil

Sean’s tactic backfires

In any event, O’Brien’s brinkmanship (if you can call it that) backfired. Yellow filed last week and, yes, 30,000 people, 22,000 of them Teamsters, lost their jobs.

When asked by Fox Business’s Cheryl Casone if he felt any responsibility, O’Brien’s response was “No, not at all,” and that it was all Yellow’s fault. Pretty laughable stuff for anyone with half a brain, including his members, whom I hear put pressure on O’Brien to launch last-minute negotiations with the company.

O’Brien says the company called him first. Either way, it was too late: Company officials told me they told O’Brien his intransigence caused all customers to bolt to other carriers.

A lose-lose, right? Nope. Wall Street is making bundles off Yellow’s carcass. The company filed what’s known as a Chapter 11 liquidation. That means it needs to pay back its creditors and make good on $1.5 billion in secured debt. A chunk of that will go to pay off the federal-government loan, and another, bigger piece will be to make the hedge fund Apollo Global whole.

Apollo is sitting pretty in the aftermath of Yellow’s demise, and so is a restructuring firm named Ducera, which has been hired to liquidate the company and pay back the secured creditors.

Ducera is raking in the cash because Yellow actually owns its assets — trucks and the land beneath its offices and terminals — and bankers there see big interest from buyers with bids that could exceed debt levels as they sell Yellow’s assets. One reason: They will be sold to competitors that aren’t union shops and thus can afford to expand without having to deal with O’Brien and the Teamsters.

That’s why savvy traders are betting that stockholders, who usually get wiped out in liquidation, will now get some money back in this one because of the strong demand for assets that Ducera is bidding out.

Shares of Yellow, which fell to below $1 and were heading to zero during the Teamsters standoff, closed Friday at $1.86 and at one point spiked above $4. Hedge funds are jumping in and out of the stock making tons of cash while all those Teamsters are staring at unemployment.

All because of the “brilliance” of @TeamsterSOB.

https://nypost.com/2023/08/12/teamsters-are-losing-their-jobs-sean-obrien-is-to-blame/

Ending child services is the new Defund the Police

 Can you imagine if the New York Police Department invited Defund the Police activists to train their officers? That’s what the New York State Family Court and the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) are doing. In a June webinar for almost 400 ACS workers, parents, child attorneys and family court judges, advocates who want to “abolish” the child welfare system lectured public servants about why it should be eradicated.

There are few people, including this author, who would argue that the child welfare system doesn’t need reform. But the utopian theories of activists and academics calling on government agencies to end it entirely pose a serious danger to our most vulnerable children.

The “abolitionists,” as they like to style themselves, begin with the idea that the child welfare system is grounded in racist desires to separate minority families. Dorothy Roberts, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading movement voice, told the June audience that the child welfare system is “designed to accuse, supervise, regulate, punish, separate and threaten.” Agencies like ACS are  “grounded in a history of slavery and settler colonialism, and the way in which family separation was essential to those institutions.” 

These views are starting to trickle out into the mainstream. Last year, the Biden administration official in charge of child welfare compared agency field-workers to “overseers on plantations” and advised the public not to call child protective services: “Save Black children from that knock on the door and that tunnel of child welfare.”

What happens when we tell people who have decided to do these difficult jobs that they are part of an irredeemably racist system? For one thing, it may make them want to quit. Some agencies in this country already have a turnover rate as high as 40% due to low pay, poor training and the heartbreaking nature of the job. 

For others, though, it could make agents change the way they do their jobs, treating black children differently because the workers don’t want to be seen as, well, slavemasters. ACS recently put out a report saying that its own workers thought it was a racist agency (though only black and Hispanic workers could participate and only 50 in an agency of thousands actually chose to). 

The City’s child services department is being infiltrated by a vocal group of “abolitionists” who seek to shut it down.

Thanks to endless criticism, some child protections agencies are seeing turnover rate as high as 40% due to low pay, poor training and the heartbreaking nature of the job. 

The US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is leading a major effort to combat the effects of loneliness on the American people.

Shutterstock

Roberts and others have argued that because black children are more likely to be investigated by CPS and removed to foster care, the system must be based in “white supremacy.” But there is rarely an acknowledgement that black children are more likely to suffer abuse and neglect and three times as likely to die from maltreatment as their white peers. If anything, the notion that child welfare is structurally racist has become an article of faith. 

Just a few weeks ago, Alan Dettlaff, a professor at the University of Houston and leader of the upEnd movement (seeking to abolish child welfare) tweeted to media, “Dear Journal Editors: Please inform your reviewers that it is not necessary for authors to provide a citation when they state a system is racist. This falls under the category of ‘common knowledge’.” In other words, demanding evidence for claims of racism is now racist as well. 

Roberts went on to explicitly state that CPS workers and courts should adopt different standards for how black children are treated: “So when we talk about the standards of care and protection, we have to ask ourselves, well, whose standards of care and protection? Certainly not, not ours, as people of African descent.” Really? Because African-Americans are fine with their children being subject to a higher level of abuse and neglect than white children? 

Critics of child services divisions claim that African-American families are more likely to be targeted for disciplinary actions or separations.

Getty Images

Like with the effort to end child welfare departments, the “defund the police” movement claims that race and racism are also behind the over-representation of African-Americans in the criminal justice system.

AP

This is the point of Defund the Police as well. We should ignore higher crime levels in certain city neighborhoods because responding to it might lead to more arrests of black men. Never mind that the victims of these crimes are also disproportionately black. So we should turn a blind eye to the abuse and neglect perpetuated by black parents even though it is black children who will suffer. Fortunately, the NYPD has not yet resorted to bringing in radical activists to lecture their ranks on why we don’t need police. If only ACS and the New York Family Courts could do the same. 

https://nypost.com/2023/08/12/ending-child-services-is-the-new-defund-the-police/

Florida deputy is exposed to fentanyl, saved by Narcan

 The frightening moment a Florida deputy was exposed to fentanyl during a traffic stop — and was likely saved by another officer who quickly administered Narcan — was caught on his bodycam.

Flagler County Sheriff’s Deputy Nick Huzior, was on the side of a road testing a white powdery substance found inside a vehicle that had been pulled over around 3:45 p.m. on Thursday, when, despite his protective equipment, he suddenly didn’t feel right.

Video shows Huzior, who was wearing personal protective equipment, stepping away from the hood of the red car where he had been conducting the tests and walking over to another deputy’s cruiser and knocking on its passenger-side window.

“I feel lightheaded,” he tells Deputy First Class Kyle Gaddie, according to the clip from the sheriff’s office.

“Call EMS.”

Gaddie quickly gets out of his car and tells Huzior to sit down as he radios for assistance. He reaches inside the police vehicle to pull out a small dose of Narcan, warning the deputy that it won’t hurt him if the substance turns out not to be fentanyl.

Gaddie holds the dose up to Huzior’s mouth and tells him to breathe in.

“One Narcan administrated,” he says on the radio before asking Huzior how he feels.

“I feel really dizzy. My heart is beating really fast,” he replied.

Gaddie tells him to keep breathing as a good Samaritan comes over to offer assistance.

Bodycam footage showed a fellow deputy administering two doses of Narcan to Huzior.

News4JAX The Local Station/YouTube

“My left hand is going numb,” Huzior says at one point. Gaddie immediately gives him a second dose of Narcan, the video shows.

Huzior then says his face is feeling numb.

“That’s probably the Narcan hitting you,” Gaddie says.

Video shows the ambulance arriving and Huzior being loaded onto a stretcher.

The officer is still recovering from the scary incident on Saturday, the sheriff’s office said.

Fentanyl is 100 times stronger than morphine, according to the DEA.

The frightening ordeal began after police received several 911 calls regarding a reckless driver who had fled a hit-and-run scene in the city of Bunnell and took off on State Road 11, nearly causing several more crashes, police told WPLG.

Huzior, who was still recovering Saturday, was taken in an ambulance after he was exposed to fentanyl.

News4JAX The Local Station/YouTube

The driver, identified as 61-year-old George Clemons of Crescent City, eventually stopped on his own on the side of the road. He was found sitting in the driver’s seat with the keys beneath his legs, police said.

Deputies spotted narcotics, an empty Bud Light can and a mini bottle of alcohol in plain view inside the vehicle, according to FCSO.

Clemons refused a sobriety test and was charged with driving under the influence. After he was detained, Huzior tested the narcotics the deputies had found.

Clemons was charged with DUI, fentanyl possession, cocaine possession, possession of less than 20 grams of marijuana, possession of a legend drug without a prescription, possession of suboxone and possession of drug paraphernalia.

The Narcan was orally administered, video shows.

News4JAX The Local Station/YouTube

The Bunnell Police Department additionally charged Clemons with leaving the scene of a crash with property or vehicle damage in connection with the hit-and-run in their jurisdiction.

Clemons is being held at the Flagler County jail on $25,500 bond.

“What happened yesterday is a perfect example of the dangers law enforcement face each and every day from poison on the streets,” said Sheriff Rick Staly.

“Thankfully, our deputies are well-trained and equipped with Narcan, which allowed DFC Gaddie to potentially save the life of a fellow deputy.”

https://nypost.com/2023/08/13/florida-deputy-exposed-to-fentanyl-saved-by-narcan-his-bodycam-shows/