On the Waterfront: Trucking re-regulation becoming a national i...

You should get out of your office once and a while.... the Ports are dead.... 179 is done...49 is done... 206 has used cars going to Japan..... and the list goes on....Go down to the hall..."A" books are getting out 3 or 4 days a week.. causals arent getting out at all....SSA 206 is doing cars 3 days a week .... Iam dissapointed that you slant the news to increse costs at a time like this.... Actully leave your home or office...come down here...I wil show you around....so you can see what you are getting paid to report on..

This run to Congress is the last stand by the Change-to-Win labor group who is the real leadership behind the Teamsters Port driver campaign. They created this clean truck plan/employee-mandate to ban the owner operator trucker by using the issue of cleaning up the air at the seaports. They couldn't make it happen in LA even with buying the support of the corrupt LA mayor because they under estimated the ability of the ATA to interfere with their plans in court. So now they go to Congress to push their agenda while claiming individual truckers from coast to coast are behind them with their full support. The truth is they have no grassroots support from truckers any where although they have spent millions of Teamsters membership dues money and that of the other CTW labor membership groups to try to persuade these drivers to join with them. The problem for the coalitions trucker organizers is intermodal drivers who actually do the work don't want this to happen. Sure truckers have many problems that need to be solved but the majority of drivers don't want any one messing around with their right to ownership. Thousands of individual truckers who own their trucks are opposed to this labor backed green coalition's plan to ban the owner-operator trucker from hauling port or rail cargo. It will be a sad day if Congress allows this so-called green coalition of people to influence the amendment of the federal transportation laws of this country thereby taking away the right of individual American citizens owning a small business. Lets not socialize the trucking industry wiping out the small trucker while hiding behind the color of green. There are other ways to clean up the environment as well as corruption within this ocean shipping industry without destroying the freedom this country was founded on.

Charlie, well said. The simple fact is that the unions are fighting to achieve governmental union mandates for workers in various industries, as they have attempted to do with hotel workers here in Long Beach. Why? Because the workers doing the jobs don't want to be unionized. Why would a trucker who owns his business, owns his rig, want to join the Teamsters and become an employee of some large trucking firm? The fact is that they don't want to join a union, or to become someone else's employee. If they did, they would simply join the union. Where is the major place that you see unions being successful these days? Public employees, including teachers, as required by our elected officials, politcians, and bureaucrats, all supported by money from the very same unions which those officials support in turn, and which those officials require government employees to join. To my mind, it's all a matter of graft and corruption.

Hey ris: why didn't you write about the settlement between the PORT OF LONG BEACH and the ATA? Seems like you favor the union activity at the Port of LA.

I am a truck driver and no i can not pay for this new truck. it cost too much money. so you all are wrong we want to work we want to drive the trucks and deliver the loads but we do not want to be paying a lease payment and insurance and diesel and everything else.

you say i own my own business but i don't. the company calls us independents just to get us to pay for the new trucks. the company says they are following the rules and cleaning the air but they are NOT. They are making us pay for the trucks so we are the ones cleaning the air.

They make all the money and we are the ones that pay for everything.

Deregulation has totally screwed us over. I live in long beach and suffer from asthma because of all the pollution from the port industry. For over thirty years, those of us that live here have paid the price with our health. I've supported the clean trucks program from the beginning mostly because the health crisis in our community is real.

The problem is we have a huge pollution problem from the trucks, the trains and the ships etc. It has to be cleaned up because people are dying! Period. But who is going to pay for it?
It is my understanding that the truckers can't afford the upkeep of the new trucks.
I think it should be the companies making millions from the business at the docks and not the little guy who can't afford it.

Whatever system we've had obviously didn't work. we got pollution, health crisis and a mess at the ports. It now has to be fixed.

For too long big business has gotten away with murder - literally! I am glad to see that Mayors across the US are actually working for the people and not special interest and their money.

Maybe the companies should just start paying the wages that professional truck drivers should actually make, instead of less than they did 30 years ago. Maybe provide health care, since the job is so dangerous and they are exposed to port emissions. That's one incentive if they want their workers to say no to the union, and one that I don't hear a lot of companies doing - because right now they are free to exploit them. That's why its got to change.

truck driver wrote:

I am a truck driver and no i can not pay for this new truck. it cost too much money. so you all are wrong we want to work we want to drive the trucks and deliver the loads but we do not want to be paying a lease payment and insurance and diesel and everything else.
you say i own my own business but i don't. the company calls us independents just to get us to pay for the new trucks. the company says they are following the rules and cleaning the air but they are NOT. They are making us pay for the trucks so we are the ones cleaning the air.
They make all the money and we are the ones that pay for everything.

well driver right now you have a choice, park it and do something else if you cannot afford the payments. i am a trucker too but i learned a long time ago not to get involved with leasing a truck from the carrier your working for. that was your choice to make doing that. so why take away my choice to ownership of my own truck which i have been doing for twenty five years because you feel you want everyone to drive a company owned truck. you want to drive for a company fine go drive for a company but don't make that choice for everyone else out here. right now we have that freedom of choice here but if this teamster la plan is implimented everywhere we no longer are allowed to pursue our dream of small ownership. no one said it was easy out here but i wouldn't trade this to live in a socialized environment. these other posters keep holloring about the air pollution here but this never was about the air from the start. it's all about big labor involvment making it easier to add new members to the teamsters union and forcing hardworking truckers out of there trucks to make that happen.

Re-regulate? The trucking industry is heavily regulated and taxed which is passed to the consumer. The sheep in this country believe everything the media and the government tells them.

Kris-- Great article. This is one of the clearest pieces of writing in the popular press about the nature of what's going on at the ports. Unlike most such pieces, you give meaningful context (temporal, geographic) about the ports' trucks plans, and you actually explain the connection between the environment & the economic condition of port drivers.

This is an example of actual reporting-- pretty rare in this day & age, where what passes for reporting is usually a cut & paste job from competing press releases, and what passes for balance is usually he-said/she-said.

Keep it up!

truck driver wrote:

I am a truck driver and no i can not pay for this new truck. it cost too much money. so you all are wrong we want to work we want to drive the trucks and deliver the loads but we do not want to be paying a lease payment and insurance and diesel and everything else.
you say i own my own business but i don't. the company calls us independents just to get us to pay for the new trucks. the company says they are following the rules and cleaning the air but they are NOT. They are making us pay for the trucks so we are the ones cleaning the air. They make all the money and we are the ones that pay for everything.

Boy, doesn't this sound like a union hack wrote this? Quit trying to "dumb down" owner operators my Teamster friend, it won't work.

Resident wrote:

For too long big business has gotten away with murder - literally! I am glad to see that Mayors across the US are actually working for the people and not special interest and their money.

Funny how truckers purchase trucks in the marketplace that have been approved by government regulations. Just as any consumer that buys a car or a pickup. It's up to the government to mandate how the manufacturer's equip the vehicles that we drive on our roads. Maybe the government wasn't doing their job to protect us.
Why put the burden on the back of the consumer after the fact? It's not fair to force anyone to pay thousands of dollars to upgrade their vehicle when it was perfectly fine when purchased. Don't you think there would be a revolution in this country if each car owner would be required to do the same to their vehicles?

It's suprising the lack of support these green clowns have from the very truckers they claim to represent. This California clean truck plan all got started by the Teamsters union as a way to get around the independent contractor status. They figure they'll do their dirty work in the name of environmental change inlisting every tree hugging nut availible. So far it has worked other than the American Trucking Association stopping them cold in court. Now the labor backed coalition is cashing in on their built up political capital in Washington behind closed doors. They are trying to head off a California court decision in Feb on the clean truck employee+mandate by pressuring key lawmakers to convince others to change transportation rules governing the ports. What makes me sick is the continued back room dirty politics of taking away the right of small truckers to own their own business. Even if the driver is in a situation that he is not making what he should make or deserves that is still his choice to make last time I checked. The problem with this green coalition's media propaganda is that it's unnecessary to destroy the freedom of choice of a small businessman to clean the air we breath. According to a new study on several large seaports the total of dirty air contributed entirely by diesel truckers is as low as 4% at the major northeast ports of NJ-NY. California is worse at 27%. This study included all trucks operating at ports not just drivers who own their truck but also company owned trucks so what good does this green coalition plan accomplish by banning the owner-operator trucker?

Hell in New Jersey your lucky to find the harbor because of the toxic air pollution from all the refineries, chemical plants, and major airport along side heavily traveled I-95 across from the port. So please explain how does the NJ/NY legislators figure banning the owner-operator trucker with an employee mandate will clean up their toxic soup? This whole green plan is a truckload of manure being spread by the coalition of greed.