The vote on the last and final contract was yesterday (fri, 9/19), and was voted down by an extremely wide margin. Local 200 and the international didn't release the any numbers, but a reliable source in the union told us it was an extremely wide margin. I was picketing and talking with them and it's a consensus that they want to stay in the central states pension, which is the main focus of the strike. As for the pay raise, they said that it's good on paper, but they're paid by the lift, and the real "takehome" pay depends on what stops you have. I can relate to what they're saying because it was like that at pepsi-americas, if a guy makes good money on his route due to him moving a lot of cases, the next bid season, he gets his route "re-divided" and doesn't make as much.

As far as them replacing them with perma-scaabs, I don't know if they are allowed to or not, but the "green team" scaabs that they have right now cant to the job for sh*t. They already had more accidents in a few weeks than the bargaining unit has had in years. One of the guys had a collection photos of all kinds of scaabs screw-up, ie. torn overhead wires, damaged buildings, dammaged corrals, drivers driving with their forks up in the air, etc..