Teamsters Eyeing Port Truckers

The Teamsters union, after decades of on-and-off campaigns to organize owner-operators in the nation’s seaports, is preparing for another shot at the brass ring.

Over the last couple of months, the Teamsters have been working to take advantage of widespread discontent among container haulers at ports on both coasts. Beginning with Vancouver, British Columbia, and spreading south to Seattle and Tacoma, Wash., and the California ports of Oakland and Los Angeles-Long Beach, the union is an increasingly visible player on the harbor intermodal scene.

The rub, as it has been for years, is that federal antitrust law bars unions from organizing workers considered independent contractors — in essence, one-person companies. Teamsters organizers have been emboldened recently, however, by a series of court and Internal Revenue Service opinions that found port owner-operators were de facto employees.

“For tax purposes, the IRS doesn’t recognize these guys as independent contractors anymore, and for unemployment insurance, there’s some evidence the courts don’t recognize them as independent contractors anymore,” said Chuck Mack, west coast international vice president for the Teamsters and secretary-treasurer of Local 70 in Oakland. “So the trend is to say that the attempt to use the Sherman Antitrust Act that was put into place because of Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan as a means to control independent truck drivers is a rather bizarre and unfair thing to do.”

For the full story, see the Dec. 6 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.