Hoffa beats Zuckerman in tight Teamsters race. With a late surge of votes from the West and Canada last month, Teamsters President Jim Hoffa overtook challenger Fred Zuckerman and narrowly won re-election. After ballots were counted from the East, South and Central, Zuckerman (president of Local 89 in Louisville, Ky.) led Hoffa by 6,364 votes. But Hoffa beat Zuckerman by over 14,000 votes in the West and 15,000 in Canada. Unofficial results gave Hoffa 100,893 votes (51.4 percent) to 95,032 (48.6 percent) for Zuckerman.

Besides the West and Canada, Hoffa won in the East, with his largest margins in Boston and the Bronx. Zuckerman won big in the Central region, including Chicago and Mokena, Ill.

Zuckerman, the candidate of Teamsters United (successor to the Teamsters for a Democratic Union reform group) blasted what he called giveback contracts and highlighted his local’s success against concessions United Parcel demanded for its big Louisville depot.

Jobless rate declines to lowest level since before crash. The U.S. unemployment rate dropped 0.3 percent in November to 4.6 percent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that was the lowest jobless rate since a year before the Great Recession began. Businesses claimed to create a net of 156,000 jobs, while governments added 22,000 jobs. Most were in local governments, not including schools. Some 7.4 million people remained jobless, down 387,000 from the month before. That’s the lowest figure since November 2007, when 7.24 million were out of work. The jobless rate that month was 4.7 percent.

BLS added that 95.06 million work-eligible people weren’t in the labor force, so 1 of every 11 workers (9.3 percent) was unemployed, underemployed or so discouraged they stopped seeking work.

Veteran labor organizer warns of Trump administration. When it comes to unions and Republican President-elect Donald Trump, organizer Phil Cohen gets to the point: “Prepare for the worst.”

And, adds Cohen – who battled some of the worst firms in the country in his years of organizing textile workers in the anti-union South – that means training unionists and community allies in organizing.

Author of “The Jackson Project” (about his experience organizing in Jackson, Miss., and the region), Cohen said the President-Elect has one goal: to do what’s best for Donald Trump. If that means leaving unions alone, he will; if it means trying to destroy them, he will. So labor and friends must prepare for the worst scenario. That could mean Trump joining congressional Republicans in passing a national Right-To-Work law, which would trash union finances or the ultimate GOP scheme: repealing Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, which gives workers the right to organize.

“If he (Trump) thinks it’s to his advantage to wipe us off the face of the Earth, that’ll be an apocalypse” for unions, he said. Workers’ preparation must create a “campaign to make it in his (Trump’s) best interests to stand down” from trying to destroy the labor movement. It means each worker must be “a consummate warrior” ready to “fight ruthlessly” for the cause without hatred, since hatred sets you back.

Reacting to Trump’s win, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka commented, “More than anything, this election is an indictment of politics as usual. For too long, the political elites have embraced economic policies that hold down wages, increase inequality, diminish opportunity and ship American jobs overseas. Voters in both the primary and general election have delivered a clear message: enough. The President-Elect made promise on trade, on restoring manufacturing, on reviving our communities. We will work to make many of those promises a reality. If he is willing to work with us, consistent with our values, we are ready to work with him. But make no mistake; we can never back down from our values. The presence of racism, misogyny and anti-immigrant appeals caused damage in this campaign and we must all try to repair it with inclusion, decency and honesty. We will never stop striving to represent everyone, fighting for basic human dignity, expanding our diversity and growing our ranks to give working people a strong, united voice.”

News briefs courtesy of The Labor Paper