Fired Truck Drivers Reinstated By Courts After Protesting Exploitation At Work

"Bosses steal more money from workers who earned it each year than is taken in every bank robbery and store holdup combined"




Fired Truck Drivers Reinstated By Courts After Protesting Exploitation At Work


The invisible class of contract workers that keeps the American retail economy running smoothly have won a significant courtroom victory in their long-running campaign to end a systematic violation of their labor rights.

Two short-haul truck drivers at the Port of Los Angeles who were fired earlier this year after protesting against wage theft and unfair treatment by their employer Green Fleet Systems must be reinstated and treated as full employees rather than independent contractors. The company had asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to intercede after a federal judge ordered Green Fleet to reinstate the drivers in early October. But the court declined Green Fleet’s request, and Mateo Mares and Amicar Cardona will not only get their jobs back but be properly classified as full employees of the company, with all the legal rights that entails.

“This ruling is a great victory not just for me, Amilcar, and our families, but for all drivers at Green Fleet Systems who have been too fearful to openly support our effort to become Teamsters, and for misclassified workers across America,” Mares said in a press release announcing the ruling.

The two men work in the drayage industry, which moves truckloads of goods from the ports where they are unloaded to the warehouses where they are unpacked and distributed to stores and internet shoppers. Minimizing the cost of transferring goods from the port to the shelf is a key part of how low-cost retailers like Amazon do business, and shrinking driver pay is one of the most effective ways to minimize those costs. Mares and Cardona are among scores of port truck drivers at Green Fleet, Pacific 9 Transportation, Total Transportation Services, and other drayage firms in southern California who have gone on strike repeatedly since the summer of 2013 to try to obtain full labor rights. The companies classify most drivers as independent contractors, meaning that a whole host of basic labor laws including payroll tax, minimum wage, and overtime laws do not apply to the workers.

The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that in actual day-to-day life, however, the companies treat the drivers as employees. Misclassifying employees as contractors can save a company about $4,000 a year and is alarmingly common in a whole host of industries. For truckers, misclassification means paying for upkeep on their trucks, tolls, insurance, gas, and a host of other charges that the company would have to cover if they were employees rather than contractors. The pile of charges can chew up more than half of a driver’s earnings, as the Washington Post’s Lydia DePillis found in a profile of the industry last spring.

As part of their broader campaign to establish a union and be treated as full employees, the port truck drivers have filed hundreds of wage theft complaints with the state alleging that they are owed millions of dollars in back pay.

These official complaints and the Teamsters Union organizing drive that goes alongside them present significant threats to the business model that Green Fleet and its fellow drayage companies rely upon to make money. In just one settlement back in April, Pacer Cartage Inc. was forced to pay over $2.2 million in back pay to misclassified drivers. The companies aren’t taking that threat lying down, and one anti-union Green Fleet driver who has been acting as an agent of the company made death threats against pro-union drivers and helped management retaliate against them.

The abuse of independent contractor rules is far more widespread than just drayage drivers and the broader retail sector. Adecade-old Department of Labor study found that at least one in 10 and as many as three in 10 workers are misclassified economy-wide. Recent high-profile misclassification cases have included FedEx delivery drivers and strip club dancers.

Wage theft through other, simpler means such as manipulating time cards or requiring off-the-clock work by full employees is even more common, with nine out of 10 fast food workers reporting some form of wage theft by their bosses. Bosses steal more money from workers who earned it each year than is taken in every bank robbery and store holdup combined.