The Union Plan to Control Ports

The Wall Street Journal reports:

President Obama gave a corker of a campaign speech yesterday at the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh, promising to deliver on his promise to ease the rules for union organizing. If you want to know what this means in action, consider the current Teamsters play to control California ports.

The dispute concerns the Clean Truck Program announced in 2007 by the Port of Los Angeles to ban the dirtiest trucks from carrying port cargo. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former union organizer, seized on the program as an opportunity to help his Teamster friends. Current law doesn't let the Teamsters organize independent truckers, some 17,000 of whom serve the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. So the mayor and his port authority pals wrote into their clean-truck rule a "concession program" banning harbor truck companies from contracting with independent drivers. The port would only allow "employee drivers," all of whom would be eligible for Teamster membership.

You'll want to read the whole article.