More deliveries for Teamsters

Workers at a DHL contractor in St. Joseph have voted to form a bargaining unit, the second delivery firm in the region to join a union as part of a nationwide Teamsters effort.
An election May 20 resulted in 15 employees voting in favor of the union and nine voting against the union at Mid-Continent Transport, said Dan Hubbel, assistant regional director of the National Labor Relations Board in Overland Park. Thirty-one hourly employees will join Teamsters Local 955.
No objections over the election were filed by Friday, according to Hubbel, and this most likely will mean that the results will be certified.
The owner of Mid-Continent Transport declined to comment.
Cairo Potts, Local 955 business representative, said workers at Mid-Continent were concerned with wages, benefits and seniority.
“They definitely needed this,” he said.
The vote in St. Joseph was the second time this month that area Teamsters officials successfully organized a company making deliveries for DHL, the express-delivery company owned by Deutsche Post. Earlier, more than 30 employees at Great Plains Transportation Inc. in Kansas City voted in favor of joining Teamsters Local 41.
The Teamsters said more than 1,300 U.S. employees at ground-delivery subcontractors for DHL had voted to join the union. The union overall represents about 10,000 DHL workers.
However, the union said nearly 400 workers around the country had lost their jobs after DHL severed their contractor agreements with local delivery firms following the decision to organize. A Teamsters delegation went to Cologne, Germany, earlier this month to meet with German and other union officials over these moves by the U.S. DHL subsidiary. The meetings coincided with Deutsche Post's annual meeting.