Driving a Soft Bargain

Teamsters Local 638, representing more than 100 drivers of those big green Star Tribune trucks, gave the thumbs-up last week to a four-year contract only a penny-pinching corporation's mother could love.

Some veteran drivers took exception when they learned that the union negotiated the elimination of as many as 14 non-union jobs in the Star Tribune's circulation department. Duties such as fixing broken paper dispensers, collecting the coins, and managing accounts with stores who keep a rack by the register are being transferred to drivers.

Gregory Kujawa, who has been a driver for 28 years and served on the union's bargaining committee, says the concession is "embarrassing."

"I don't think organized labor ought to be in the business of eliminating other people's jobs," he says. "That's corporate behavior. We should be organizing those people."

Robert Moore, a spokesman for the union, says Local 638 tried to organize the circulation workers four years ago and were turned down. "My job was to negotiate extra work" for union members, Moore says.

According to Kujawa, he raised this issue with a member of the Local 638 bargaining committee before the vote. The response, he says, was a four-and-a-half word essay on Teamster leadership: "Fuck 'em, they're non-union."

Republican celebrates historic female party member by calling her a man

The Republican National Convention website features this historical nugget: The RNC in 1892, held in Minneapolis, was the first to allow female delegates. More than a century later, the GOP picked a woman—Jo Ann Davidson—to share leadership duties at the Republican National Committee. Now Davidson, with a political career that stretches back to the '60s, is the lead planner for next year's convention in St. Paul.

Davidson doesn't fit the Republican mold. She's been a longtime advisor to Republicans for Choice, and as head of the Bush campaign in the Ohio River Valley in 2004, she took no public stand on same-sex marriage. On the side, she runs an institute dedicated to getting more women into Republican politics.

If she's a bit of a maverick, you wouldn't know it from the RNC website, which includes a bio that mentions nothing of her work with women in politics and introduces her, in big blue letters, as "Chairman"—stopping just short of calling her Mister Davidson.

So if you bump into her around town—she'll be the one with the silver hair and the GOP standard-issue stick-on mustache—tell her you're looking forward to the party.

Wedding Crashers

On Sundays, the Saint Paul-Reformation Church often holds informal soup and bread gatherings to discuss congregation business. It was at one of these meetings about two years ago that Jim McGowan, a member for more than two decades, proposed that the church stop marrying straight couples.

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All's Fare

Local cab companies were dealt a blow last week in their ongoing efforts to underserve the last-call holdouts and stranded citizens of the city of Minneapolis.

Last year, the City Council voted to expand the number of taxis in Minneapolis, which had been capped at 373. The reforms promised to add 180 cabs to our streets by 2011, boosting the city's backseat confessionals by half.

But the Minnesota Taxi Owners Coalition, which represents 53 cabbies, found this experiment in free market capitalism oppressive. The group filed a lawsuit seeking to preserve its monopoly.

Last week, U.S. Magistrate Franklin Noel tossed the suit, ruling that "license holders do not have a constitutionally protected freedom from competition."

Crossing Borders

Mark Cangemi became the youngest anti-smuggling agent in America in 1979. He was already several years into a career in law enforcement, where he was following in his father's prodigious footprints. Peter Cangemi had joined the Border Patrol in Michigan in 1940 after seeing a recruiting poster, and was stationed on the Mexico-Arizona border the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

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