The Stealthy ‘Healthy Ports’ Plan

What’s a Healthy Ports program? The Biden Administration hasn’t laid out its details. But at the state level the model has been used to force independent truck drivers into the Teamsters. A case study is the Clean Trucks program adopted by the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in 2007, ostensibly to reduce diesel emissions. The plan banned trucks made before 1989, phased in higher emissions standards, and imposed a new cargo fee.

But the Port of Los Angeles gave the real game away with a provision banning independent owner-operator truckers. Within five years only employees of big trucking companies would have had access to the port, on the fact-free claim that these firms would invest in cleaner trucks. The plan also required trucking companies to sign a “concession agreement” that essentially gave the port control over employment practices.

This was a gift to the Teamsters. The feds deregulated trucking in 1980, and it has become a thriving bastion of blue-collar entrepreneurship. Most drivers prefer the flexibility and opportunity of the owner-operator model, and an estimated 80% of truckers that service the LA and Long Beach ports are independent contractors. Unions can’t legally organize them. The ports’ ban was a bid to re-regulate the industry under the guise of environmentalism.

The American Trucking Associations sued, and in 2011 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the port ban. In 2013 the Supreme Court struck down provisions in the port’s concession agreement, ruling that federal law pre-empts local port rules. The trucking industry has relied on federal pre-emption to beat back similar mandates, and a big worry is that Mr. Biden’s Healthy Ports plan will water down those federal laws, or even impose a ban on independent truckers.

Weston LaBar,

CEO of the Harbor Trucking Association that represents West Coast port truckers, says California shows the many ways officials can use a healthy ports plan to coerce non-union workers. This includes equipment and emissions standards that price out smaller operators, and provisions that restrict state or local grants for cleaner equipment to pro-union entities. The LA and Long Beach ports are now pushing a plan to require that all harbor trucks have zero emissions by 2035. “What we see here is the constant linkage—in most regulation and policy—between environmental and labor programs,” says Mr. LaBar.

Ports between the coasts have more common-sense approaches to emissions, balancing environmental improvement with a competitive trucking industry. U.S. ports could use upgrades. But not at the price of using green mandates to punish non-union workers for the care and feeding of the Teamsters.