Truck Drivers

This chapter examines the monumental campaign to raise labor and environmental standards in the trucking industry at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. Building on the blue-green coalition launched in the CBA and big-box contexts—and incorporating central lessons from a decade of community–labor organizing in Los Angeles—the Campaign for Clean Trucks emerged as a fight over air quality but ultimately advanced as a local policy struggle over working conditions for roughly sixteen thousand short-haul port truck drivers. For these drivers, the central problem was their misclassification as independent contractors. Misclassification forced drivers to bear all the costs of operation—contributing to poorly maintained dirty diesel trucks causing air pollution—while depriving them of the right to organize unions to improve labor conditions. Restoring drivers to the status of employees was the mutual goal bringing together the labor and environmental movements in this campaign. It rested on a novel legal foundation: The ports, as publicly owned and operated entities, had the power to define the terms of entry for trucking companies through contracts called concession agreements. The campaign—led by LAANE, the Teamsters union, and NRDC—leveraged this contracting power to win passage of the landmark 2008 Clean Truck Program, which committed trucking companies seeking to enter the Los Angeles port to a double conversion: of dirty to clean fuel trucks (thus reducing pollution) and of independent contractor to employee drivers (thus enabling unionization). However, the program’s labor centerpiece—employee conversion—was invalidated by an industry preemption lawsuit that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. As a result, the policy gains from a blue-green campaign built on mutual interest were split apart and reallocated, resulting in environmental victory but labor setback. Why the coalition won the local policy battle but lost in court—and how the labor movement responded to this legal setback through an innovative strategy to maneuver around preemption—are the central questions this chapter explores.