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    Teamsters Struggle to Unionize Amazon and FedEx Delivery Workers

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    The Teamsters union has made little headway in organizing workers at Amazon and FedEx despite wage and other gains it secured at UPS last year.Last year, two unions representing workers at three large automakers and UPS negotiated new labor contracts that included big raises and other gains. Leaders of the unions — the United Automobile Workers and the Teamsters — hoped the wins would help them organize workers across their industry.The U.A.W. won one vote to unionize a Volkswagen factory in Tennessee last month and lost one this month at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama. The Teamsters have made even less progress at UPS’s big nonunion rivals in the delivery business, Amazon and FedEx.Polling shows that public support for unions is the highest it has been in decades. But labor experts said structural forces would make it hard for labor groups to increase their membership, which is the lowest it has been as a percentage of the total work force in decades. Unions also face stiff opposition from many employers and conservative political leaders.The Teamsters provide an instructive case study. Many of the workers doing deliveries for Amazon and FedEx work for contractors, typically small and medium-size businesses that can be hard to organize. And delivery workers employed directly by FedEx in its Express business are governed by a labor law that requires unions to organize all similar workers at the company nationally at once — a tougher standard than the one that applies to organizing employees at automakers, UPS and other employers.Some labor experts also said the Teamsters had not made as forceful a push as the U.A.W. to organize nonunion workers after securing a new contract with UPS.“You didn’t have that energy that you saw with the U.A.W.’s leaders,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist who studies labor at Washington University in St. Louis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Custodial Witnesses Affirm Basic Facts in Trump’s Hush-Money Trial

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      They have provided some of the more quotidian testimony in a trial populated by porn stars and presidents: a series of witnesses who have discussed such matters as FedEx labels, Sharpie usage and stapling protocol.But each of those witnesses has provided a link in the chain of custody of the 34 business documents at the heart of the case against Donald J. Trump, whose trial is completing its fourth week on Friday.Mr. Trump is accused of disguising those records as payments for legal services to cover up a reimbursement to Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer. Mr. Cohen in 2016 had paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress, to bury her allegation of a sexual encounter with the former president.Such witnesses, known as custodial witnesses, are used to authenticate documents and events that have not otherwise previously been agreed to — stipulated, in legalese — by prosecutors and defense lawyers.Witnesses this week have included Madeleine Westerhout, a former executive assistant to Mr. Trump during his time in the White House. Ms. Westerhout, who spoke affectionately of Mr. Trump and broke into tears on the stand on Thursday speaking about her 2019 firing, testified about having received checks for Mr. Trump to sign, which he sometimes did in the Oval Office.Jeffrey S. McConney, the Trump Organization’s former corporate controller, also described in painstaking detail how Mr. Cohen requested the checks by invoice. They were then cut by Deborah Tarasoff, an accounts supervisor at the organization, and sent via FedEx to the White House by Rebecca Manochio, a junior bookkeeper at the company.Those checks left Mr. Trump’s headquarters in New York stapled to Mr. Cohen’s invoices and arrived in Washington, making their way to the White House through two of Mr. Trump’s aides, including Keith Schiller, Mr. Trump’s personal bodyguard, at their home addresses.A defense attorney, Susan Necheles, sought to downplay the sending of checks to an outside address, suggesting in questioning Ms. Westerhout that such an arrangement was simply “a workaround” to avoid things getting delayed in a crush of mail being received at the White House. Ms. Westerhout agreed.Once the checks were signed by Mr. Trump — often in Sharpie, according to testimony — they were sent back to New York, and eventually to Mr. Cohen, who is expected to be a key witness for prosecutors, beginning on Monday. More