By Transport Topics Staff
This story appears in the April 30 print edition of Transport Topics.
The National Labor Relations Board on April 20 certified the Teamsters union as the bargaining agent for port truckers who are employed by Toll Global Forwarding Holdings in Los Angeles.
Confirmation of the 46-15 vote by drivers in favor of unionization was provided by the federal agency that oversees trucking union elections to Transport Topics by e-mail.
The vote is the first sign of success in the union’s long-standing effort to unionize drayage workers. The union began its port driver organizing campaign nearly four years ago, claiming 88% of port truck drivers on the West Coast were independent contractors who should be entitled to union representation.
By law, independent contractors are not employees and therefore cannot be organized, a situation that the union challenged in Los Angeles by supporting efforts by port officials and the city’s mayor to require that port truck drivers be classified as employees.
Curtis Whalen, executive director of American Trucking Associations’ Intermodal Motor Carrier Conference, told TT the recent vote was not a precedent-setting event.
“The drivers that voted to unionize were, in fact, employees who can under current law be organized,” he said.
“Toll Brothers had some apparent operational issues — no restrooms for drivers, etc. — which caused employee unrest,” Whalen said.
Union spokesman Galen Munroe didn’t respond to requests for comment. Neither did Toll Global Forwarding offices in the Los Angeles area or corporate headquarters in Melbourne, Australia.
“These first-rate truck drivers decided to form their union after being treated as second-class citizens under third-world working conditions for too long,” Teamsters Vice President Fred Potter, who is port division director, said in a statement.
The union vote was the latest development in the controversy over the employee/contractor status of port truckers.
“The issue ATA is concerned about is attempts to organize port trucking by mandating that port drivers be considered employees, not independent owner-operators, as they are now,” Whalen said.
That issue arose in the port trucking arena after Los Angeles inserted the employee status requirement in its Clean Truck program, a move that would make it possible for unions to represent workers. Los Angeles’ move banned owner-operators, who currently can’t be unionized, from pickups and deliveries at the biggest U.S. port.
In response, ATA sued in 2008, contending that the port had no power to mandate the employee status for those workers.
A U.S. Appeals Court in September backed ATA’s position and overturned a lower court ruling that favored the port’s stance, which was backed by the Teamsters (10-3, p. 1).
Some of the issues raised in the case still may reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
The trucking group has asked the nation’s highest court to review aspects of the lower court ruling, such as the port’s contention that it had the power to regulate workers’ status because the agency is a “market participant.”
