‘Teamsters officials didn’t listen to us and didn’t represent our interests in the workplace,’ a transportation-company employee said.
In 2021, the Teamsters celebrated their first-ever contract to represent drivers at the transportation company XPO. Now, XPO workers have voted to decertify them.
XPO is one of the largest less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers in the U.S., employing about 12,000 drivers. Most LTL drivers, like most truck drivers in general in the U.S., are not unionized. XPO had unionized drivers in Europe but not in the U.S. The Teamsters have tried for years to break into the American LTL sector but with little success.
The 2021 XPO contract in Hialeah, Fla., near Miami, was supposed to be a breakthrough. “XPO management said workers in the U.S. would never ratify a contract, but never is now,” said the triumphant then-president of the Teamsters, James P. Hoffa (son of that James Hoffa).
The contract was the conclusion of a “six-year battle” and contained “‘just-cause’ protections, a grievance process, successorship language, job protection language and retirement protections, among other improvements,” according to a Teamsters press release. It covered about 70 drivers at the South Florida location.
After two years of Teamsters representation, the drivers have had enough. Martin Garcia led a group of employees, with support from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, to call for a decertification vote. “Teamsters officials didn’t listen to us and didn’t represent our interests in the workplace,” Garcia said.
In 2021, sources told FreightWaves that the Teamsters-negotiated contract contained a lower pay raise than nonunionized XPO drivers were expected to receive. The Teamsters were more focused on work rules than pay rates during negotiations.
Union activists argue that if only workers are given the chance to unionize, they’ll see the benefits of unionization. This undergirds support for reclassification of independent contractors as employees with measures such as California’s A.B. 5, since employees can unionize and independent contractors cannot.
But we saw drivers for one trucking company in California vote against unionization by the Teamsters earlier this year. And now these Florida drivers, who had two years of experience with Teamsters representation, decided they didn’t like what they got.
The “union renaissance” is all PR. American workers do not see much value in having their paychecks skimmed by union bosses who will use much of that money to support political causes and have little concern for what workers want.