Your opinions on unions in trucking.

ABF_FREIGHTHAULER

Well-Known Member
Before I start I'd like to put forward that I'm a member of the Teamsters union. I'm not trying to push my opinions on anybody. Also I'm not in total agreement with everything that is in our contract. As a matter of fact I probably give up close to a thousand dollars a year by not charging my employer for all that I could, just because I don't agree with certain work rules.
Where I see that being a member of a union helps, is with driver pay. Not only the typical mileage pay but pay for all work performed. Also employees of other companies that aren't union benefit by their employers keeping wages at or near union scale. This is evident by the fact that more than a couple non union ltl companies cut their workers pay and retirement contributions after the largest union ltl carrier asked for and recieved wage concessions by their workers.
Where I see that a union presence could help the industry is in the TL segment. I talk to drivers and have read comments from drivers on this forum about the way they're treated and compensated that makes me feel this way. Also I've dealt with similar treatment at one of my previous employers. The wages that a lot of these large carriers are paying are unacceptable to me. The treatment of drivers by these companies is disturbing also. Promises are being broken when it comes to home time and delay pay among many other things. Too many companies are forcing drivers to break the law when it come to the HOS regulations. And maybe the most disturbing thing to me, is the pay and treatment of new drivers to the industry.
Now on to the changes that I think that more of a union presence could help bring. First is the mileage pay for drivers. No driver should be behind the wheel for less than .35 per mile. If carriers would just stop trying to cut each others throat buy slashing their rates and hauling freight for almost nothing it could help a lot with getting pay up for drivers. Drivers should be compensated for all on the job duties performed. There is no reason a driver couldn't be paid a flat amount for fueling the employers truck, somewhere between $5 & $7 dollars sounds fair to me. Drivers should be given hourly compensation for break down pay, and not have to give up an hour or two before being paid. After all it's not the drivers truck that broke down its the employers. Drivers should be paid for all delay time spent at the shipper or receiver if they make their appointment time. When I pulled flat bed I'd spend hours on end waiting to get loaded or unloaded with out a nickel of delay pay and that would frustrate me to no end. Any tarping, chaining or load securement duties performed, a driver should be compensated for. And any time spent laying over waiting for dispatch instructions should be paid unless the driver is on his ten hour break. Also if a company makes home time promises there should be a penalty paid if those promises are broken.
It isn't that I'm just all about being pro union (I'm really not) its just that I don't see these types of changes getting made in the industry without the assistance of a union. Im pretty sure that my employer wouldn't be paying the same wages if they weren't collectively bargained and I doubt the non union companies would be paying what they are in the ltl segment if there wasn't the possibility of their employees voting a union in. I think if just one major trucking company voted for union representation it would drive up compensation for all the others too.
I know there are plenty of people with strong opinions about this topic and I look forward to hearing your responses. All I ask is that we try and keep it civil. My goal posting this isn't necessarily to promote unions it's to try and get ideas on how to make the industry better for all drivers, I just think that unions may be the answer for trucking specifically.
 
Labor Unions are all about wages, benefits and working conditions.

And true, even workers in non union positions benefit from the collective bargaining of their union peers.

I was a member of the IBEW for 30 years, and AFSCME for 8 months. The former was and is a strong union that works tirelessly for the membership. The latter is a poor excuse for a labor union. The thing is, a union is only as good as the membership, as it is run by and for the members.

As for companies forcing drivers to break the law, i.e. HOS rules, that is going away. With more and more companies going to EOBR's and e-logs, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to get creative with the funnybook.

For drivers (non union) that work for mileage pay, the incidental things such as fueling, loading and unloading are more or less part of that pay. Some flatbed companies pay for tarping, and many LTL companies pay for additional stops when picking up and delivering.

If my company was organized I wouldn't have a problem with it, but like you mention, many non union employers keep pay high enough to prevent employees from trying to (or wanting to) organize.

About the only things that my company does not offer that a union company might is sick leave and holiday pay. I get vacation pay. I get reasonably decent mileage pay. I get extra stop pay. I get tarping pay. And when newer trucks become available, the company asks the drivers who have been with the company longest first if they want to change to them. Same for dedicated runs and local positions. So even though they are not bound by a union contract, they behave as if they were.

So for my current company, I don't really see much benefit in having union representation..
 
Well when I drove for Roadway my union steward told me that if I don't get that Bush/Cheney '04 sticker off my car and put this "Teamsters for Kerry/Edwards" sticker on instead, that something might happen to my car in the parking lot when I was on the road, so yeah, ... I'd say unions and politics go together like mashed potatoes and gravy.
 
Well when I drove for Roadway my union steward told me that if I don't get that Bush/Cheney '04 sticker off my car and put this "Teamsters for Kerry/Edwards" sticker on instead, that something might happen to my car in the parking lot when I was on the road, so yeah, ... I'd say unions and politics go together like mashed potatoes and gravy.

I don't present my political alignment on my car, or here. Some have accused me of being on the Donkey side, likely because I speak so glowingly of the Elephants, but truth be told, I think they should all be neutralized, and we should start over.

Yes, I felt a certain political "pressure" from some of my union brethren when I was a member, but I never played my hand, and voted as I saw fit.

So unionism and politics did not go hand in hand for me.

But if you think about it, politics enter just about every aspect of our lives, and not just the kind that involve our government either. Like the politics of the workplace, for instance.
 
well i have generally worked for non-union shops..the ONE and ONLY union shop i worked for, seemed the not be as supportive at times as i would have liked it to have been.

true, i did get nice benefits and a decent pay, but it did seem like the union after that was only good for the times you wanted your vacation weeks or days..if you had seniority..?? you could bump another driver. you could not ask for another route or run till bid time came around, AND THAT a few times, was at the discretion of the terminal..>!!! sometimes, it would go past the usual 6 months time limit....one year, i think it was closer to the 1 year limit..!!! so what gives with that..??

i am not denouncing unions, but i feel as though at least in trucking, they are NOT as powerful as they once were....

but if someone likes the union(s) and gets what they want, then fine, i support their take on a unionized shop..

but for me, when i seek out employment..?? i do not make it MY MISSION to go strictly for a union shop. if iits' got a union, fine..if it does not...fine....

besides, that weekly union dues, goes a long way in filling up my gas tank......
 
The companies that I think could use a union are the large "trucker mills". I know there are a lot of good companies where I don't think they are necessary. Because such a large portion of the industry is dominated by companies like Swift, CRST and Werner where I constantly hear horror stories from drivers about compensation and treatment, I feel like the drivers only hope at companies like this would be the threat of a union. Unfortunately though I don't think an organizing push should be very successful because of the high amount of driver turnover at these companies.
I could list a hundred things I don't like about working in a union shop but in the long run I'm glad I do. We have a group of employees where I work that realize that the union works for us and not the other way around. I never really agreed with people when they say that unions put companies out of business. Greedy employees who strangle a company with stringent work rules and absurd wages along with poor management put companies out of buisness. Now where I work I have the option on weather to enforce some of the work rules that I find to be excessive, and I don't push them. Neither do a lot of my coworkers, that in itself helps keep ABF profitable in a difficult economy. Also I think we probably have the best upper management in the entire industry. But this is all beside the point I wanted to make I suppose.
I just wanted to see if others thought that the mega fleet portion of the industry would be better off with some type of union representation.
 
I have trouble sticking to either side of the fence on this issue, so I will continue straddling.

There is much about Unions that I don't like. Mainly the Greed. What starts out as improving wages and work conditions ultimately gets carried away and gets jobs pushed out of the United States.

That said, trucking needs something. Back in 2008, we had countless grass roots efforts to somewhat organize the trucking industry, but like very other time, each group had their own agenda and nobody would truly work together. Truckers are like the Wall Street Protesters when it comes to taking a stand, think about it. (everybody is yelling for something different)
 
Unions are like any other movement or organization originally set up to address an injustice or something they perceive as a problem that must be corrected.

The organization appoints a leader, or leaders, and their job is to lead the fight on the behalf of those who had suffered an injustice. Their initial goal is to stop whatever wrongs are being made and fight for a permanent solution to those injustices.

But once they acheive their objective, they don't know when to stop. They have no brakes. The mentality of the members remains the same, they will never feel justified, and will always think they're being cheated somehow. And their leaders feel they will lose their positions if they don't keep fighting the cause.

That's why today's union leaders and their most vocal picketers act as if they're still being forced to work in coal mines for 26 hours a day for 1/10th of a cent. Those injustices have been stopped long ago but the fight will never stop. When I drove for Roadway, many of the union members actually seemed to believe that Roadway had somehow committed a CRIME against them by offering them a job.

As a result, lots of manufacturing jobs have gone overseas or their employers have gone bankrupt because they can't afford the demands from the unions and their share holders dumped their stocks because they're not making any profit.

People like Jesse Jackass and Al Sharpton seem to have inherited the cause of civil rights and fight as if they still represent people who are forced to use separate drinking fountains and ride in the back seats of a public bus. The result is simply shifting the oppression from one race onto another as they continue to attempt to fix injustices that don't exist any more.

Environmentalists who were upset over littering and air pollution never backed off when they achieved their goals and today we are burdened with ridiculous laws regulating the use of light bulbs and preventing human progress in the name of saving some endangered species of cockroaches.

So with unions, their very existence is justified, due to the low wages and dangerous working conditions at the time the unions got started. But their continued demands for more, more, more, .. is actually self-destructive when the jobs they're demanding pay increases for are lost when the company goes bankrupt or has to hire foreign workers because they simply can't afford to pay the FINES AND PENALTIES for employing Americans.

There still is a need for unions, but not at most of the companies they currently control. As ABF FREIGHTHAULER said earlier, the mega-fleets are a perfect example of workers who need to organize and demand better pay and better working conditions.
 
But once they acheive their objective, they don't know when to stop. They have no brakes. The mentality of the members remains the same, they will never feel justified, and will always think they're being cheated somehow. And their leaders feel they will lose their positions if they don't keep fighting the cause.

Remember.

Unions are for the members, by the members.

Usually the staff at the union business office are former workers from the very company that the union represents.

If they don't know when to quit it is up to the membership to step up and reign them in.

After all, the union works for the membership, not for the union.
 
Remember.

Unions are for the members, by the members.

Usually the staff at the union business office are former workers from the very company that the union represents.

If they don't know when to quit it is up to the membership to step up and reign them in.

After all, the union works for the membership, not for the union.


This is the exact point I try to make when I hear people say that "the union is going to do this or that". The employees are the ones that vote on the leadership and what gets put into a contract.
 
Unions are what they are . They can and have been very helpful for workers union or not. Sometimes protection for dog ****ers, But I don't think thats the case in trucking as much as other fields of employment.

But Unions themselves are also in business and they must keep the money coming in from it's members. Even resorting to propaganda tactics on it's devoted members.

Performance should dictate wages and job security, After all the better an employee perfoms for a company the better the company will do.

I'm not anti-union, I have belonged to a few over the years. They have advantages and disadvantages.
 
This is the exact point I try to make when I hear people say that "the union is going to do this or that". The employees are the ones that vote on the leadership and what gets put into a contract.

Remember.

Unions are for the members, by the members.

Usually the staff at the union business office are former workers from the very company that the union represents.

If they don't know when to quit it is up to the membership to step up and reign them in.

After all, the union works for the membership, not for the union.

I know. But the members get this mentality among them that they're so terribly underpaid and overworked. It's like they brainwash each other. I've been in that situation. When I drove for Roadway I would often have to team with these guys. I noticed that the newer they were to the union, the more normal they were. But the older guys with more seniority, more time in the union, would bitch and moan and complain all the way to California and back, non-stop complaining about every little thing. And those guys who have all the seniority are seen as authority figures by the younger or newer employees so they end up either believing all that crap or feel intimidated into voting the way the "big time union" guys want them to.

Though the older drivers made me feel safer and I got better sleep when they were driving, due to their experience, I couldn't stand riding with them. I preferred the younger guys just because they didn't constantly bitch about how much the job sucks and how much he wishes the union would demand this or that.
 
I know. But the members get this mentality among them that they're so terribly underpaid and overworked. It's like they brainwash each other. I've been in that situation. When I drove for Roadway I would often have to team with these guys. I noticed that the newer they were to the union, the more normal they were. But the older guys with more seniority, more time in the union, would bitch and moan and complain all the way to California and back, non-stop complaining about every little thing. And those guys who have all the seniority are seen as authority figures by the younger or newer employees so they end up either believing all that crap or feel intimidated into voting the way the "big time union" guys want them to.

Though the older drivers made me feel safer and I got better sleep when they were driving, due to their experience, I couldn't stand riding with them. I preferred the younger guys just because they didn't constantly bitch about how much the job sucks and how much he wishes the union would demand this or that.

From my 30 years as a union member this can be true for some union members. But the local I belonged to seemed to have more members who "came there to work" and I didn't see so much of the mentality that is so commonly associated with labor unions.

As for the workers who constantly bitch about how much the job sucks, I always had two things to say to them.

1) If you don't like the good wages, benefits and working conditions here, you are always free to go work down the street for a third of the pay you are making now, without benefits, and little or no overtime.

2) If you don't like what you are doing, go find something to do that you like to do. This isn't the only job in town.


Find a job and you will work every day of your life. Find a job doing something you like to do and you will never work another day.
 
Unions were once a necessary and good thing. These days they're nothing more than a strong lobbying arm of the democrats who use legal extortion methods to bleed companies dry and charge more for what they do. I was a seven-year union member and I'll flip burgers at McDonalds before I ever work for a union company. I don't like being told what I can and can't do with my job (as in all the union people who won't do anything that isn't specifically laid out in their contract). I also don't like being told who to vote for and I don't like being threatened for my political leanings or my choice to keep drawing a paycheck.

I'm sorry if I've offended anyone, but my union experience has been universally negative, both as a member and as a truck driver dealing with union members on docks. Unions have become no different than the companies from which they are supposed to protect us. Their one and only priority is making money to perpetuate themselves. To do so, they'll give the illusion of being there for their members but they'll cut your heart out in a nanosecond if you don't toe their line and do what they tell you.

I've crossed enough picket lines and literally fought enough union members to know a bunch of money-hungry thugs and gang members when I see them. You can have them.
 
I know what you're talking about. And pulling reefer like you I've been to many of the same places where the dock workers are all either Teamsters or Longshoremen. I've heard all the jokes about the Teamsters. Well the Longshoremen make the Teamsters look like workaholics.

Gloucester terminal, or Port of New York @ Staten, .. they'll have 6 "supervisors" doing nothing but sitting around on a desk bitching about how hard they're working, while 2 or 3 younger guys are the ones actually loading trucks. And even the rookies on the forklifts doing the loading will take breaks every 30 minutes or so, leaving the drivers standing around waiting on them. I hate those port loads and it's the reason I refuse to get a TWIC card. Not having one makes my dispatcher hesitant to send me to those places, because of the ridiculous fees they charge to rent you the red vest instead of the green one.

One time when I was driving for Roadway I got chewed out by one of the "big time union" guys because he saw me hand in a receipt for $50 in diesel fuel and get reimbursed for it. I had gone to Memphis and they hadn't put enough fuel in the truck to make it there. We were not given fuel cards because the day cabs are supposed to be fueled at the terminals.

Another time I was doing a pre-trip and spotted a mud flap hanging by one bolt. Rather than write it up and wait an hour for the mechanics to fix it, I pulled out a couple of zip ties, tied it up and took off. One of the mechanics saw me do that and filed a grievance because I was "stealing his work" or something. I said 'FAHHH CUE" to the guy at the hearing and he tried to attack me but was held back by the steward and some other guy I'd never seen before. And that was the same day I was threatened by another guy in the break room because I was handed a "Kerry/Edwards 2004" sticker and I put it in the trash can.
 

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