Long Beach Port has been blasted by an environmental group and labor organizations, such as the Teamsters, for its willingness to treat independent truckers fairly under the Clean Trucks Program. According to The Journal of Commerce, the Natural Resources Defense Council wants Long Beach City Council to review the settlement between the port and the American Trucking Associations (ATA) last month.
NRDC wrote a letter to the council opposing the registration agreement, which would allow compliant owner-operators and independent truckers to load at the port. The group said the settlement “erodes the environmental benefits of the clean truck program,” and wants the concession agreement reinstated, like at the Los Angeles Port. A convoy to protest L.A. Port’s harsh stance recently rolled up I-710 and past the L.A. City Hall, trying to bring attention to the unfair requirement.
The Oct. 19 settlement dropped the controversial motor carrier concessions requirements, which force drivers to become employees of larger companies. Instead, the truckers would still have to meet strict emissions standards, but would still retain independence. Under the concession requirements, owner-operators and independent truckers would be shut out from the port by 2013, whether or not they make costly upgrades or purchase new, environmentally-compliant equipment.
The heart of the matter may the unionizing issue. Direct employees can be unionized, explained the JOC article. Owner-operators legally can’t. David Pettit, lead attorney for the NRDC in Los Angeles, said the employee-driver requirement isn’t an issue with their complaint, but rather that the harbor commission failed to review the settlement’s compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act, as state and city law requires.
Both the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the federal district court in L.A. ruled earlier this year that forcing independents into employment by motor carriers was illegal. The Long Beach deputy city attorney is looking into the complaint.
Source: The Journal of Commerce: Environment Group Wants Clean-Truck Review
Once we start using politics to force people to unionise, I think we are loosing our fundamental values as Americans? In fact without the independent operators out there to compete against the unions, drivers might be stuck with whatever unions decide to pay you? I don’t believe that being American involves manipulating the political system to effect the economy, since when politicians fail, it can take years to fix the problems, instead of weeks when private citizens control things?
A lot of people end up in unions because they get hired, I don’t think people always end up in unions simply because they want to join a union. At some point the union can become as manipulative as the company employer, which is why I believe that union membership is so low in the United States (why pay dues when you end up with the same predicament)?
Most of us have held our peace, but we may be witnessing the fact that Americans for the first time, may be loosing the relatively high wages we have enjoyed for years if we follow those who wish to create a global union environment? Chinese workers get paid .75 cents an hour, minimum wage, and they are on the higher side of the pay scale world wide? US workers are gambling loosing that advantage by enabling union leadership more political power?
Environmentalists are also finding themselves on the side of business disputes with claims of bad science, and all this rapid change might be good for special interests, but not much good for us dads with bored teenagers? We’ll find better ways of doing things when it financially rewards us to do them, and we’ve already tried heavy handed economic policies in the past and watched them fail miserably?
Environmentalists and union leaders don’t seem to care what the equipment costs, but the bottom line is that increased equipment costs means less head room for increased driver pay, even if you become more productive? That is not a business cycle, that is poor planning? Business plans take years, not months?
I don’t expect or even want a reply to this comment, I just want whoever read this to ask themselves these questions honestly for themselves, before they ask themselves in the future, what happened?
Nice politics ~ I can only hope that most of America will wake up and see the light before it is too late. But no matter, unions always self destruct eventuall anyway. As a matter of fact, we are witnessing that right now in US History.
Keep up the good work
Perhaps you guys should learn what unions really are. This is absurd ignorance! The union workers earn 50-60,000 dollars per year plus benefits. Regular company drivers earn 20-40,000 dollars peryear with mediocre benefits. If the union was left in charge of the trucking industries, our freight rates would have adjusted with inflation and we wouldn’t be getting paid (as owners) 80-90 cents per mile. Nafta would never have been allowed if the transportation industry maintained unions. So since you guys got rid of unions 40 years ago, we are still getting paid wages and benefits from 40 years ago. And Nafta was allowed to be instilled because there were no unions to fight it which took jobs, lowered freight rates, not only in trucking but manufacturing as well! The unions could have fought that and won! Then the US wouldn’t have a 10 percent unemployment rate, now would it? There’s something to think about.
Star makes a good point. Without some form of collective bargaining for working Americans (especially truckers), wether through unions or political action groups, wages will continue to decline. There are many ways to measure this trend. One is called the Gini coifficient, which can be used to measure the concentration of wealth in countries (if 1 individual owned all the wealth the gini would be 1, whereas if wealth were spread equally across the board it would be 0). The lowest GINI index recorded was in ’68 (at 38.6) – a time of high employment, strong unions, and high wages. We recently posted our highest GINI index in 2006 of 47. Whatever you think of unions, it can’t be denied that as they have declined so have wages and earning power of workers. It is logical to make the assumption that as wealth and power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, as it is in America, the wage earners will become the losers. Corporate managment would like nothing better than to see unions completely disappear. Why wouldn’t they? More power to squeeze more profit out of their operating budget.