Negotiations between the Teamsters and United Parcel Service started April 17, and the Teamsters are warning members to prepare for a strike. The union’s new president, Sean O’Brien, has vowed that the union would go to the mat for key workers’ demands, especially abolition of the two-tier wage scale.

With 340,000 Teamster members at UPS, it’s the country’s largest current private-sector.

Abolishing the two-tier system — one pay scale for part-time drivers and a higher one for full-timers — is key for unionists nationwide. For instance, that’s also a goal of the Auto Workers in upcoming contract talks with the Detroit 3.

(The UAW this spring successfully achieved a contract with Caterpillar Inc. that will eliminate the divisive pay scheme.)

Bargaining and O’Brien’s election stemmed from the last UPS contract, which was defeated by members but imposed by the previous administration led by James Hoffa.

“We will set the tone for organized labor and the entire country with this contract,” O’Brien said. “We are not going to accept and take what UPS gives us. UPS Teamsters have fire in their eyes.”

Top U.S. Jewish labor leaders back Israel’s pro-democracy movement. Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, are backing the pro-democracy movement in Israel, where a one-day general strike March 27 shut down the nation. That momentarily stopped “a coup” by right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his “autocratic government” against the nation’s independent judiciary, as the two put it. But the PM vowed to try again.

Biden’s Willow Oil project OK upsets progressives, greens, but not Alaska’s unions. Democratic President Joe Biden upset progressive lawmakers, environmentalists, and even one Inuit group in Alaska by approving the massive Willow oil drilling project there on March 13. But Alaska State AFL-CIO President Joelle Hall praised the decision.

“Today, the Biden administration approved the #Willow Project! This is a big win for Alaska and Alaskan workers. We look forward to working with ConocoPhillips Alaska to ensure these new jobs are good-paying union jobs,” Hall said.

Environmental groups were angry with Biden’s OK of ConocoPhillips’s $8 billion plan to drill 199 oil wells on Alaska’s environmentally fragile North Slope. Change.org’s petition against Willow had 3.464 million signers within 24 hours.

— News briefs courtesy of The Labor Paper: “Like” us www.facebook.com/the-Labor-Paper