A port trucking firm in Carson has been ordered to turn over nearly $7 million in back pay to 38 drivers, the latest in a series of recent wins for port drivers and the Teamsters union that has been trying to organize them.
The state Labor Commissioner’s Office ruled this month that the drivers at Pacific 9 Transportation were improperly treated as independent contractors rather than as employees. It ordered the company to compensate drivers for illegal paycheck deductions, back wages and legal costs, payouts that amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for some.
According to the report in the Los Angeles Times, the decision affects just a fraction of the nearly 12,000 drivers who haul cargo at the local ports. But the order shows that labor organizers are having some success in using employee classification claims to push trucking firms to treat drivers as employees – who, unlike contractors, are allowed to unionize.
Disputes between trucking companies and port truck drivers have become common in recent years, but typically state labor regulators handle classification complaints individually or in small groups. But the recent case involving Pacific 9 – as well as two others involving trucking firms – was heard en masse, with the Labor Commissioner’s Office ruling in favor of dozens of drivers at once. These larger actions could spark an acceleration in the number of claims against trucking firms at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, most of which say their workers are independent contractors, according to labor organizers.
“There are hundreds of trucking companies at the ports, and the vast majority are misclassifying drivers,” said Julie Gutman Dickinson, an attorney who has represented the Teamsters union and is on the advisory board of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, a labor-backed advocacy group that represented drivers in the Pacific 9 case.
Labor Commissioner Julie Su said 720 truck drivers have filed complaints with her office since 2012. The office has ruled in three cases affecting more than 100 drivers since July. “In this industry, we have found misclassification routinely in the case we’ve heard,” she said.
It is likely that these misclassification situations have an adverse effect on workers’ compensation premiums for the trucking industry.