If you believe the FedEx spin doctors, the
only reason their employer decided to fork over $27 million - after
nearly 10 years of litigation and in the worst economy since the
Depression - to settle the Estrada case is that it just wanted to "put
the matter behind us." They claim that their decision to call it a
decade in the biggest FedEx labor and employment case ever had nothing
to do with the merits of the driver-misclassification case.
What's more, FedEx said that the agreement in the landmark case "has no
bearing" on any other pending legal case, such as the huge Federal
misclassification litigation on behalf of 27,000 drivers working its
way through U.S. District Court in Indiana.
Is FedEx to be believed in its post-judgment rhetoric? No! As anyone
who has been following the FedEx follies knows, the company has long
lived in a state of fantasy and denial when it comes to trying to
defend in court and then publicly rationalize its sham, independent
contractor model. Even in the face of a $27 million, final stipulated
judgment in California, it continues to misrepresent what has occurred.
Free of any sugar-coating or spinning, here are the facts behind the
Estrada judgment:
The 203 drivers will receive a total of
more than $14 million in documented damages, which comes out to about
$70,000 on average per plaintiff. The minimum reimbursement is $2,000
and the maximum is about $280,000. Part of the drivers'
recovery is pre-judgment interest from the date the drivers paid for
FedEx's operating expenses.
Those reimbursement amounts were
determined after the Court-appointed retired judge painstakingly
reviewed thousands of pages of records, including expense receipts for
everything from the purchase of insurance, fuel for trucks, tires and
oil. These were all business expenses that the drivers should not have
had to pay, and would not have paid for if they had been properly
classified as employees.
The legal fees that FedEx likes to focus
on are being paid by FedEx, not the drivers, for work by counsel during
nearly ten years of litigation. The company conveniently fails to
mention that no driver ever paid out-of-pocket for their legal
services, and that all attorneys fees were reviewed and preliminarily
approved by the Court, who commended the Plaintiffs' lawyers for
ensuring the drivers got the full measure of their damages without
reduction for legal fees.
The relevance of Estrada to the Federal
class action will not be determined by the FedEx PR department but by
the U.S. District Court Judge overseeing the huge, multi-district case
in his Indiana court, where single work area and multiple work area
drivers are included in the certified class and are challenging - right
now - FedEx's business model.
The Plaintiffs have asked the Court to
rely on the Estrada judgment in determining the drivers' employment
status, so FedEx's claim that the California case is irrelevant is
wishful thinking. Ultimately, FedEx faces an exposure in the
billions - not millions - for its misclassification practices across
America.
FedEx has once again tried to sidestep the
real issue -- how it treats its drivers like employees, refused to pay
taxes and provide benefits that all employers are required to provide.
Clearly, this strategy failed in Estrada and we believe it will fail at
the Federal level, as well as before the IRS when that agency completes
its full tax audit for the years under scrutiny.
In
September 2007 then-Senator Barack Obama introduced legislation that
would close the
safe harbor
loophole that the messenger industry relies upon to exploit labour
laws. The
messenger courier industry was a pioneer in misusing
independent contractor status to exploit child labour in the late 19th
and early 20th century.
Now
that Obama will be president on January 20th there will be a renewed
focus on the misclassificaltion of employees as independent contractors.
Here is the information once again on Obama's bill:
Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) introduced the "Independent Contractor
Proper Classification Act of 2007 (S. 2044)," which addresses the issue
of classifying employees v. independent contractors.
Behind the introduction of the legislation is Obama's belief that
employers misclassify workers as independent contractors rather than as
employees to avoid compensating for minimum wage, overtime pay and
benefits.
His legislation closes a perceived loophole in the tax code that occurs
if an employer has been consistently reporting workers as independent
contractors to the IRS and if the employer can verify its
decision-making based on reasonableness in that the employer relied on
the advice of an attorney or accountant's interpretation of the
statute.
Sponors include Senators Durbin, Kennedy, and Murray. The bill
introduced on September 12, 2007 addresses what the sponsors view as
weaknesses in the current laws regarding independent contractors. The
bill would:
allow
the IRS to require employers to reclassify workers misclassified
as independent contractors;
authorize
the IRS to issue regulations and revenue rulings establishing
standards for properly classifying workers as independent contractors;
eliminate
the ability of employers to rely on industry practices
as a reasonable basis for classifying workers as independent
contractors;
require
the IRS to develop a procedure by which employees could
challenge their classification as independent contractors;
provide
protections against retaliation for workers who take
advantage of the challenge procedure;
require
IRS audit of employers that have misclassified workers
and require misclassifications to be reported to the Department of
Labor;
require
DOL to investigate industries that are revealed by IRS
data to have high rates of misclassifications;
require
the DOL's FLSA poster to inform workers of their right to
challenge their classification as independent contractors;
require
employers to notify independent contractors of their federal
tax obligations, of their right to obtain a determination of their
independent contractor status from the IRS, and of the labor and
employment law protections that apply only to employees; and
require
employers to keep certain records relating to independent
contractors for three years.
From the 1960s to the '90s, CBS News
correspondent Charles Kuralt was "On the Road," looking for stories and
people where no one else was looking. Kuralt died in 1997, and many of
the people he discovered are gone as well. But the stories haven't
ended. That's why we sent CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman to
follow Kuralt's trail, "On the Road … Again."
In a city known for crazy drivers, he may have been the craziest. He
was a guy who cheats death by sometimes just a fraction of an inch …
just like he did when Charles Kuralt met him 23 years ago.
Back then, Kuralt asked David Leopold, a New York City bike messenger:
"You don't stop for red lights?"
"I don't stop for red lights," Leopold said.
"You don't stop for pedestrians," Kuralt replied.
"I go against traffic. People go, "gasp gasp," he said. "All day long I
hear that."
As Kuralt said in his original report: "At 24, David Leopold is an
outlaw legend - the fastest and the flashiest of Manhattan Island's
last romantic adventures - the bicycle messenger. He passes trucks, he
passes busses, he passes mounted policemen as if they were standing
still - and all taxi cabs."
“IT’S Russian
roulette every day,” said Cassandra Castillo, a tough, tattooed
26-year-old who is one of the city’s handful of female bike messengers.
“Every day we’re two paychecks away from disaster.”
Each morning, Ms. Castillo removes her bike from its hook on the
ceiling of her apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, pulls her short dark
hair into a ponytail, checks Weather.com (“Messengers live by
Weather.com,” she said) and hopes that the day’s hustle will treat her
well.
According to the New York Bike Messenger Association, of the city’s
approximately 2,000 bike messengers, 50 to 100 are women. The
messengers, however, say they know of only about 30 women, and Ms.
Castillo estimates that a mere dozen of them work full time.
Many of them know one another, if only by the color of their bikes or
the type of bags they carry. Carmen Burkart, a slight, tight-bodied
43-year-old who smokes and drinks only hot coffee for hydration, even
in the summer, can think of only five women who ride full time.
The International Federation of Bicycle Messenger Associations (IFBMA)
is pleased to announce that Copenhagen messenger Martin “Banana” Larsen
has been awarded the 2008 Markus Cook Award. The Cook Award is
presented annually to “to the courier who inspires and empowers the
wider messenger community, the messenger that puts all of us before
themselves.”
The MCA was conceived as a way for the international messenger
community to thank it's most dedicated workers. Nominations are sought
from the messenger community for those individuals who have done most
for us.
Martin is a veteran messenger who as IFBMA president, Andy Duncan,
notes “is “known for tireless hard work, organizing messenger races and
pulling people together.” Messenger championships all over the world
have benefited from his sacrifice and dedication. From Copenhagen, Oslo
and New York City to Sydney, Dublin and Toronto, Martin’s influence is
not only upon the Championships but also the messenger community.
Through his leadership in the IFBMA, the Copenhagen Bike Messengers
Association and the Toronto Bike Messenger Association, Martin has
fought to improve living and working conditions for all messengers.
At much personal and financial sacrifice, he spent much of the past
year in Toronto helping to organize the 2008 Cycle Messenger World
Championships. His experience, his diligent efforts and most of all his
example were a gift to the city, its cycling community and its
messengers. Before Martin left six months later he laid the ground work
to unite the struggling community and rebuild the city’s Bike Messenger
Association.
2006 Markus Cooke winner, Kevin “Squid” Bolger lauds Martin’s work at
the 2002 CMWC. “I was blown away with dedication and attention to
detail that he exhibited in producing the main event. I asked him to
show me how it worked and he gave me his completed notes and
instructions in a leather binder.” He also “helped enormously with the
main event. His ideas and execution were invaluable.”
Squid echoes the entire messenger community when he says “I am happy
and proud to be a part of awarding the Markus Cooke Award to Martin
'Banana' Larsen!!
October 9th is
Messenger Appreciation Day! Let's congratulate all bike couriers
on the benefits they bring to our cities:
a solution to the problems of pollution,
congestion and gridlock faced by large urban centres
reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the
downtown core
take up less space on the road and do
less damage to the roads than cars resulting in better conditions and
streets for all road users
increase the safety of pedestrians
compared to cars.
provide a value added service that
continuously improving firms seek out as a means to reduce costs and
improve efficiency
are ambassadors of goodwill for the city
year round cyclists who promote the
bicycle as a viable form of transportation and economic development
The
mayor of Toronto proclaimed Messenger Appreciation Day every year
from 1997 through 2007.
This is the first time in 11 years the city has not proclaimed it. Other
Messenger Appreciation Day celebrations in New
York City, Chicago
(proclamation)
and San Francisco.
Bicycles offer a healthy, hassle-free
alternative for entrepreneurs to deliver their products.
When Daniel Corno opened his Pita Pit
franchise five years ago in the heart of Washington, DC, he knew
deliveries would provide an important revenue stream. The only question
was: How to get hot food to customers' doors in a dense, urban
neighborhood with snarled traffic and few parking spaces?
Pinched by both logistics and expenses, Corno shifted gears, settling
on the lowly bicycle as the best way to pedal his pitas. His riders are
a common sight on the streets and sidewalks of the Foggy Bottom
neighborhood, and teaming up with DCSnacks, another bicycle-based
delivery service, helped boost his sales by $2,000 a week.
Besides more timely deliveries and fewer parking tickets, Corno found
there were definite economic advantages to the low-tech distribution
method. First, salary expenses went down because he didn't have to
build the cost of gas into his drivers' wages. Secondly, with no
motorized vehicles to worry about, his liability insurance plummeted.
And finally, much to Corno's surprise, turnover decreased.
"A lot of drivers think the money looks good until they get their gas
bill, do the math, and decide they're not making enough," he explains.
With gas
prices hovering around $4 a gallon, Corno is glad he made the decision
to park the delivery van, and it seems other entrepreneurs are jumping
on the two-wheeled bandwagon, as well. Courier services from coast to
coast are adding newfangled bikes to their fleets and touting the cost
savings of going gas-free.
Most of the tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan who have lost
legs to land mines have no way to make a living other than begging.
But one group of "mine survivors," as the United Nations calls them,
has come up with another way to feed its families. It operates a
bicycle messenger service in Kabul.
On a recent morning, Afghan bicycle messenger Amin Zaki hands out
documents to be delivered from a Kabul park that he calls his office.
Fellow messenger Abdel Sabur tells his colleagues where they'll be
working.
Normally, the messengers would also divide up pizza delivery duty. But
as it's the holy fasting month of Ramadan, the work on this day is
limited to documents.
A few minutes later, the messengers get up off the grass and walk to
their bikes. One is on crutches and the others are limping.
Each of the men has only one leg. But they don't see the loss of the
other one as a problem in their line of work.
The transportation of goods and children through an urban landscape is
a universal need. In Copenhagen many our of citizens choose the
self-propelled transport option and cycle to work, school and on
errands.
On any given day you'll see people moving things about on their bikes.
A ladder, a newly-purchased bean bag for the living room, heavy bags of
groceries dangling from the handlebars. It's what we do.
In Copenhagen, however, we have our own version of the SUV. We call it
'ladcyklen' or 'the cargo bike'. Often there are goods too large or
cumbersome for convenient bicycle transport and if you have a child or
two or three, they have places to go and things to do and you are the
one who has to get them there.
In Denmark the three-wheeled cargo bike is the vehicle of choice for
moving things about and the cargo bike market here continues to enjoy
steady growth. A cargo bike is a generic term for any bicycle that is
designed to carry 'stuff,' whether it has two wheels or three.
The necessity for cargo bikes is as old as bike culture itself. Since
the early part of the last century, cargo bikes have moved things
around the city. A little sub-cultural group formed rather quickly in
cities, namely 'svejerne'. They muscled their heavily-laden cargo bikes
through the streets and were known for their rowdy tone and for
whistling at girls. Half a century before the modern bike messengers.
Indoctrination into the cut-throat bicycle
messenger world, where time
is money and money comes per delivery, can be daunting.
Lindsey Welsh lucked out, and she knows why.
"I'm the new kid on the block," said Welsh, 29, of the South Side, who
six months ago became the only full-time female bicycle messenger in
Pittsburgh. "I get treated very well, because I'm the only girl. I
didn't get the normal rookie treatment; they had to be nice to me."
About 15 riders work full time for Pittsburgh's four bicycle messenger
companies: Steel City Delivery, where Welsh works, Jet Messenger, Quick
Messenger and Stat Courier.
Brad Quartuccio, editor of Bloomfield-based cycling magazine Urban
Velo, said Pittsburgh's messenger scene is like those in most other
cities.
"Messengering has always been a male-dominated thing," said Quartuccio,
27. "It's a boys' club that tends to be jockish."
It’s midday, and I’m sitting with a group of bike messengers at the
Beach – a hangout known by most passersby only as a cement bench near
Place Ville Marie. At the moment I’m speaking to Papa, who, at 47, is
one of the older messengers in the group. He’s standing a few feet away
holding his bike and a joint, and telling me how he quit his job at a
rubber factory to become a messenger.
“At this job, you’re outside; you have central control over what you
are doing,” he says. “Me, I can smoke my joint a couple of times a day,
and no one bothers me. I can smoke it all day long, that’s it. Couriers
aren’t in boxes.”
The bike messenger business is changing. Electronic document transfer —
especially for legal documents — has cut into the business. But now,
high gas prices and new bikes that can carry bigger loads mean that
bike messengers are branching into bigger deliveries.
New York City’s bike messengers remain a fixture on the streets, having
weathered the advent of the fax machine and, of course, e-mail. Now,
with the cost of gas pummeling courier companies that rely on motorized
vehicles, a few enterprising cyclists are using the opportunity to
generate more business.
A small but growing number of pedal-powered messengers are outfitting
their bicycles and, in some cases, tricycles, with boxes and flatbeds
on which they can load hundreds of pounds of cargo.
“Eighty percent of the jobs done in a van I can do,” said Hodari
Depalm, the owner of Checker Courier, a cargo messenger company in
Manhattan that says it can move up to 200 pounds of documents by bike.
Mr. Depalm said his two-man messenger business had increased by 20
percent within the last year.
Auckland
City Harbour News, Friday, 15 August 2008
2008 Cycle Messenger World Champion Jenna
Makgill
The St Lukes resident was the best woman rider in the Cycle Messenger
World Championships held in Toronto during June. The 22-year-old, who
works for Urgent Couriers, says she wasn’t expecting to come away a
winner. But riding around the hilly streets of Auckland gave her the
edge on the competition.
"Auckland is one of the hardest cities to courier in. Here couriers are
more aggressive and people aren’t used to having bikes around," she
says.
The competition involved riding a set course for three hours dropping
off and picking up packages at different checkpoints, while locking up
her bike in-between deliveries. And just to make things that little bit
more difficult, Jenna had to deal with unpredictable weather.
Atlanta's bike messengers count about 10 of
their kind on the roads.
They ride Downtown to Midtown sometimes a dozen times a day to deliver
documents with the urgency of e-mail and the gravity of paper. Some
couriers say they expect business to go up to keep gas costs low. Some
say their workload will shrink as more businesses and government
agencies figure out how to do their work online.
For now, this is their job security: cars can handle the long haul and
fragile cargo, but in Atlanta traffic, a bike gets there faster.
Ottawa's 2ndNorth Side
Polo Inviational (NSPI) takes
place August 2 - 4, 2008. Here is the Gobal National
story
on Bike Polo featuring Ottawa's Mallets of Mayhem
and Los Marcos.
Ten years ago
on July 23, 1998, Toronto messenger Wayne Scott made tax law history.
For the first time a court decision made it possible for bike and foot
messengers to deduct their extra food expenses as a business expense
equivalent to "fuel". After a lengthy 18-year battle, the court
ultimately agreed with Wayne's argument that the extra food required
by messengers to perform their jobs was similar to the gas required by
car couriers to perform their jobs.
The orginal court decision allowed couriers to deduct $11 per day as a
fuel expense for food. As of 2008 the current deduction permitted is
$17 per day. The automatic deduction is based on the number of days
worked and it is not necessary to submit supporting receipts unless the
courier attempts to deduct an amount greater than the daily limit.
Revenue Canada underestimated Wayne's grit and determination. After
losing early battles in the Tax Court, he appealed to the Federal Court
of Canada where he was finally successful.
The current limit amounts to a tax deduction for food of about $4,250
every year
for every bike and foot messenger in Canada.
Two lines of four people square off across the parking lot, each
balancing on their fixed-gear bikes with only the heads of their polo
mallets resting on the ground.
This is urban bike polo, a game that's hijacking empty lots, basketball
courts and sometimes parking garages across the country and world. Here
in Sacramento, it's played twice a week in the parking lots beneath the
freeway on X Street.
Here is a great pitch
reel for New York City's
CycleHawk
Messengers . This is a demo reel for a proposed TV series about the
world of a New York City based bike messenger company. Produced by
Steinway Productions.
The few, the proud, the otherwise unemployable. Welcome to the chaotic
world of bike couriers on the rugged streets of Toronto . See the
cumulative effects upon this invisible minority after years of working
too hard for so little. Experience the desperation, the humanity, the
fear and the dreams of Silver and Stinky. These two characters view
society from down in the underground economy. It is not always a
pleasant viewpoint, but still, they find ways to have fun. Watch as
they wrestle with issues, both personal and world-changing. Silver and
Stinky are veteran bike couriers. Theirs is a nine-to-five job for
misfits. This play marks the first time actors Kelly Fanson and Greg
Dunham have worked together.
Ottawa police
are stopping outlaw cyclists after an elderly man was knocked down by
one who was riding illegally on a Pretoria Bridge sidewalk last week.
Constables Steven Lewis and David Zackrias were downtown yesterday
handing out warnings, fines and information pamphlets to cyclists
breaking a myriad of rules.
