A brewing fight out in La-La land. The Los Angeles Times reports:
Monday is shaping up to be a bad day for the Teamsters, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and a handful of environmental groups, whose efforts to unionize port truckers will probably be squelched by a federal judge. That’s just as well, but we’re afraid the mayor and his union backers won’t take no for an answer.
The clean-truck program at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a long-overdue attempt to reduce the diesel pollution that sickens and kills thousands of Angelenos every year, forces truckers to buy cleaner, more modern vehicles and imposes a fee on shipping containers that pass through the ports in order to help pay for them. None of that is controversial, and if that were all the program did, it wouldn’t be enriching an armada of lawyers. But it also contains concession agreements that the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has determined will probably be ruled unconstitutional.At the Port of Los Angeles, the program would eliminate independent truckers, insisting that they all be employees of drayage companies by 2013 (opening the door for the Teamsters to unionize them). The Port of Long Beach doesn’t insist on employee truckers, but it does impose other requirements that may not pass legal muster. That’s because U.S. law forbids local jurisdictions from making rules that affect the price, route or service of motor carriers.
The rest here.