Trucking Official Sees More Port Trucking Battles

A trucking official says a judge’s ruling against owner-operator drivers at the Port of Los Angeles was just one skirmish in “a war” the industry is fighting with officials at the port.

‘“This is a war in which some battles are won and some are lost,” Curtis Whalen, executive director of the American Trucking Associations’ intermodal conference told the California Trucking Association Wednesday in Long Beach.

He said the Aug. 26 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Christina A. Snyder upholding the concession requirements in the Port of Los Angeles clean-truck program has implications that eventually will be felt throughout interstate transportation.

ATA in July 2008 challenged the Los Angeles concession agreement for motor carriers, especially the requirement that trucking companies hire drivers as direct employees. Most of the harbor trucking companies at ports across the country contract with owner-operators which, as independent contractors, cannot be organized by labor unions under federal law.

Whalen said Judge Snyder in previous rulings sided with the ATA in stating that harbor trucking is most likely governed by federal preemption law that prohibits states and local entities from enacting or enforcing a law that relates to the rates, routes and services of motor carriers engaged in interstate commerce.

However, Judge Snyder surprised many in the industry by ruling last week the Port of Los Angeles concession requirements, including the employee-driver mandate, fall under the “market participant” exception to the federal law. She said Los Angeles competes with other ports for business, and promoting a trucking fleet that is financially-viable and operates low-emission trucks over the long term is essential to its role as a proprietor.

The ruling sets up a complicated tangle of legal arguments around case the primacy of federal law in interstate commerce.

Whalen said representatives of the Teamsters union first revealed that strategy to him in 2006 as the labor officials outlined how they planned to promote their plan to labor-friendly mayors in seaport cities across the country, and in the process to attract motor-carrier buy-in, he said.

However, in rulings since 2008 by Judge Snyder and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, both the district and appellate courts indicated the market-participant argument would likely carry little weight in the Los Angeles case, Whalen said.