Teamsters’ 3-Year Pact Reworked

WASHINGTON —  The Teamsters union and the trucking industry have reworked a tentative contract to shift some wage gains to pension and other fringe benefit increases and unfreeze wages for part-time “casual” workers, officials said Thursday.

As presented to representatives from 277 Teamster locals meeting in Chicago, the new National Master Freight Agreement would provide annual 35-cents-an-hour wage gains this year and again in 1989 and 1990 to some 200,000 workers.

When signed a week ago by negotiators for the union and the industry’s chief bargaining arm, Trucking Management Inc., the tentative three-year pact had an immediate 50-cent hourly increase followed by 35-cent raises the last two years.

The 15-cent difference the first year is being switched to contributions by employers to the union’s pension and health and welfare funds. The union’s pension fund now provides retirees with a monthly pension check of up to $1,500.

Instead of an annual 20-cents-an-hour increase in contributions to the two funds, trucking companies will kick in 35 cents an hour more the first year.

“We had the general settlement last week,” Duke Zeller, a union spokesman, said Thursday. “But there were always some i’s to be dotted and t’s to be crossed. Obviously, pension matters were of primary concern and the negotiators responded to the dictates of what the membership felt was important.”

If ratified, the contract would raise the base rate for truck drivers from the current $14.71 to $15.06 an hour retroactive to April 1, followed by similar 35-cent hourly raises in 1989 and 1990.

Unlike the earlier agreement, part-time “casual” workers now paid about $3 an hour less than the top scale also will get the same hourly wage and benefit increases under the renegotiated pact.

Rank-and-file opposition to allowing the gap between the top-scale drivers and the casual workers to widen to $4 an hour was behind the change, said Ken Paff, an organizer for a small dissident faction called Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

‘Myth’ of More Cash

“Union pressure caused them to renegotiate,” Paff said. “This is a very high overtime industry; nobody works just 40 hours. In wages, the government just takes it in taxes, but not with benefits.”

Richard Belous, a labor market analyst for the Conference Board, a business research house, said rank-and-file Teamster desires to redivide the pie more in favor of benefits contradicts the core beliefs of conservative economists.

“The idea has been that with lower tax rates, people would want more cash,” he said. “But it’s a myth. Given the choice between cash and security, workers, once they reach a certain level, tell their negotiators to go back and get more security.”

The contract also recoups for Teamsters some of the concessions the union yielded to the industry in 1985.

A two-tier wage system in which new hires started out at 70% of the base scale and rose by 10% a year to 100% at the end of three years is diminished by half.

Under the new accord, new hires will start at 85% of the top scale, rising by 5 percentage points every six months until they reach 100% after 18 months.