Shippers battle Teamsters, LA-Long Beach port truck restrictions

AMERICAN shippers have joined the protest against costs arising from a planned shift of road transport from federal to the local authority, with the Teamsters union and California ports ready to pile on new taxes and rules to restrict waterfront trucking.

Some 30 major shipper groups sent an angry brief to Minnesota Democratic Congressman James Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, demanding his committee reject efforts to alter rules governing trucking in the new Federal Aviation Administration Authorisation Act (FAAAA).

The shippers oppose the Teamsters and the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which would exempt harbour truckers from the FAAAA and put them under the local control and impose eco rules and taxes.

"If successful, these efforts will not improve air quality, but will re-impose a fragmented, local, patchwork regulatory structure on foreign and interstate commerce, contrary to the US Constitution," said the shippers.

The Port of Los Angeles clean-trucks programme bans older trucks and taxes every truck move using equipment that fails to meet 2007 US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emissions standards. At the behest of the Teamsters union, the rules also ban independent owner-operator drivers, thus creating a monopoly for more easily unionised employee drivers.

Said the shippers: "It is our belief that restrictions that are designed to eliminate competition from small independent businesses in favour of larger market participants are bad public policy considering the precarious position of the economy."

Last year the American Trucking Associations sued the Port of Los Angeles, claiming that its clean-trucks scheme intruded on federal authority, and the courts mostly agreed.

"Accordingly," said the shippers, "the ports now seek to expand the exceptions to federal pre-emption legislatively to accomplish by statute an objective that the courts found unlawful."

Among the signatories of the letter are the American Apparel and Footwear Association, American Association of Exporters and Importers, American Import Shippers Association, National Association of Manufacturers, National Association of Waterfront Employers, National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America, the Waterfront Coalition and the World Shipping Council.
 

(www.schednet.com)