The supposedly pro-worker Julie Su is running into opposition from workers.
The supposedly pro-worker Julie Su is running into opposition from workers.
T he Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) wrote a letter to Senate labor committee chairman Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and ranking member Bill Cassidy (R., La.) to oppose President Biden’s nomination of Julie Su to be the next secretary of labor.
The media has tried to portray Su as “pro-worker,” but really she is just pro-union. The vast majority of truck drivers in the United States are not unionized, and many are small-business owners. The OOIDA represents 150,000 independent owner-operators all across the country.
When Su was labor secretary for the California state government, she supported A.B. 5, the California law that restricted independent contracting and that hit trucker drivers especially hard. As the association said in its letter, A.B. 5 “essentially requires that an owner-operator working with a carrier through a lease agreement must be classified as an employee. This is contrary to decades of practice as well as federal laws and regulations that allow for owner-operators to be independent contractors.”
The letter recounts comments Su made in 2019 about A.B. 5:
When asked about AB5 in an interview, Ms. Su responded that it was meant to address misclassification that has “resulted in the day labor-ization of our economy.” She continued, “Instead of the steady, consistent, reliable work, people end up basically in odd jobs and you’re hustling all the time, right? So AB 5 is meant to address that kind of misclassification so that we can bring more people who should be under the protection of our labor laws back on that floor.”
As the letter goes on to explain, that completely ignores owner-operator truckers, who work full time and are paid quite well. “For the tens of thousands of truckers who have enjoyed a successful career as an owner-operator, it would come as a surprise to learn that their business represents an ‘odd job’ in need of fixing,” the letter says.
But of course, that’s how progressive ideology works when applied to the economy. The government knows best, and its agenda is one-size-fits-all. That mentality contributes to groupthink around ideas that aren’t even true, such as the idea Su expressed, that independent contracting is mostly odd jobs.
As Ilana Blumsack and Scott Lincicome point out in the book Empowering the New American Worker, only 8.6 percent of independent contractors in the U.S. are “gig workers.” Independent contractors are in almost every industry, and they are frequently well paid, full-time workers. Survey data show that independent contractors overwhelmingly prefer their working arrangement over a traditional employment arrangement.
Trucking is a great example of how this is true. According to the OOIDA’s membership survey, the median owner-operator truck driver had a net income of $72,000 last year. The top reason owner-operators give for driving independent is the ability to be their own boss. They treat their trucks as investments. When they do well, they might consider buying another truck and hiring another driver. DOT statistics show that 50 percent of fleets are one-truck operations, and 90 percent have ten or fewer trucks.
The top challenge they named wasn’t the inability to unionize or lack of benefits or the need for more protections from labor law. It was complying with government regulation.
The OOIDA letter talks about the difficulties of complying with A.B. 5 in California. “For months after the law was enacted, OOIDA sought guidance about how the law would apply in the trucking industry and how small businesses and independent contractors could potentially comply,” it says. “Despite our efforts, we were left with essentially no guidance before the law took effect. The law and its haphazard rollout has forced independent contractor truckers to leave the state of California, become an employee, attempt to reconfigure their business, operate under a cloud of uncertainty, or abandon the trucking profession altogether.”
“If Ms. Su is confirmed to lead the Department [of Labor], we fear that we will see a repeat of what’s happened in California,” the letter says. That’s an entirely reasonable fear to have, since the Department of Labor was already taking steps to federalize something like A.B. 5 under the previous secretary, Marty Walsh. With Su in charge, that process is likely to continue and may even come to fruition.
Politicians talked a good game about how truckers were vital to the economy during Covid, but progressives never stopped their regulatory assault on the trucking industry. Promoting Julie Su after her abysmal record in California shows that Democrats have learned nothing from that state’s failures. The Teamsters endorsed Su in glowing terms, and federalizing California’s independent-contractor rules might make them happy, but it would hurt most of America’s truck drivers.