Independent truckers are fellow workers. The fact that they own their rig—basically an expensive tool—does not change that reality. They need a union to defend themselves in face of the long work hours, decreasing real wages, and dangerous conditions imposed by the profit-hungry trucking capitalists.

Firms having their own fleets of trucks often keep a surplus of rigs on hand and hire individual owner-operators, who usually find themselves payless, despite the time put in, when they are not actually hauling something. Shipping companies thus compensate for fluctuations in business volume at the expense of independent truckers and to the profit of the fleet owners. Many of the costs of trucking operations are shoved onto the owner-operators, cutting into their income.

It’s no wonder that independent truckers in Miami and elsewhere have protested over the past years over rising costs—especially for fuel—and unpaid time they are subjected to at many ports.

The trucking bosses seek to take advantage of ambitions that sometimes develop among independent truckers to expand their holdings and go into business for themselves. They foster illusions that such prospects are open to all individual owners in order to trick these workers into identifying themselves with the problems of management. To the extent that such schemes work, they promote divisions between owner-operators and the drivers of company fleets and undermine unionization of the industry.

Employers across the United States have intensified their attacks on working people to shore up declining profit rates—an offensive begun in the early 1980s. Pressing factory by factory, industry by industry, they have cut wages, increased differentiation among wage earners, and diluted seniority. The bosses have intensified speedup, extended hours of work, and made pensions and medical care more expensive, less secure, and narrower in coverage. In doing so, they have kept weakening the union movement. The squeeze on independent truckers is part of this profit drive.

As the Teamsters campaign to organize owner-drivers in Florida develops, militant workers will find it invaluable to study the lessons of similar battles that the Teamsters waged under class-struggle leadership in the Midwest in the 1930s. They are described in the book Teamster Politics by Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the Minnesota Teamsters during the 1934 strikes, the subsequent campaign to organize tens of thousands of over-the-road drivers, and other union battles in the Midwest throughout the 1930s. An appendix to this book, entitled “How the Teamsters union organized independent truckers in the 1930s,” draws out these lessons. (Teamster Politics can be ordered at www.pathfinderpress.com, along with the three accompanying volumes in the Teamster series by Dobbs. A portion of the article referred to above was reprinted in the May 25, 2004, Militant and is available at www.themilitant.com.)

As a growing number of independent truckers in Miami sign up with the Teamsters and demand that the shipping companies register with the union and employ drivers through its hiring hall, the labor movement should extend them solidarity in action.
 
 
Related article:
Teamsters organize truckers in Miami
Open hiring hall for independent owner-drivers
Major U.S. unions to found new labor federation focused on organizing
Join drive to sell subscriptions to ‘Militant’!  
 
 
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