If you read many of the articles in the Business Journal or these commentary pages, including the two op-eds on the following page, it may seem that the business community here is preoccupied with organized labor. Maybe even opposed to it.
I don’t believe that’s true. But if it seems so, it’s because a fair number of businesses here feel they’re being rolled over by political organizations that take their orders from organized labor. Environmentalists and other groups sometimes join in, creating a power formation against business.
Examples abound. L.A.’s Community Redevelopment Authority recently required contractors with the city to hire union workers. The Los Angeles City Council, at the behest of the Unite Here union, is dogged in its determination to make hotels along Century Boulevard give their workers a raise.
Even the L.A. Unified School District board has weighed in for the union on the hotel issue. As Gary Toebben asks in the editorial on the next page, doesn’t the board have enough critical matters to tend to? I guess the board figures that since it’s done such a fabulous job with the school district, it has a right to tell others how to run their business.
The most egregious example is the plan to clean up the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The overarching goal was to find a way to cut back on the heavy pollution that comes from ships and trucks that cluster at the twin ports. That’s fair and fine, and I suspect most businesses are willing or able to work toward that goal, despite the higher costs and greater hassle.
But the politicians couldn’t resist. The part of the plan to replace old fume-spewing diesel trucks with cleaner new ones quickly got contorted into a master plan to get the Teamsters rooted at the ports.
They did that by coming up with a plan last year that would result in the extermination of 1,000 or so small trucking companies that serve the ports. But who cares about small businesses when the unions want something? Politicians were far more interested in converting the independent owner-operators of the trucks, who cannot be union members, into employees of big companies so they could unionize. The plan, by the way, was favored by the Teamsters.
The Port of Long Beach recently decided to break with its neighbor, the Port of Los Angeles, and not require that the truckers be employees. Incredibly, the Natural Resources Defense Council is threatening to sue because it wants the truckers-as-employees plan. Such a suit, of course, will delay the port clean-up plan but will advance the cause of unions. So the council appears less interested in defending the environment than in promoting unions.
By the way, I’d bet few business people here would say they’re “against” labor or even organized labor. Businesses, obviously, need good workers and they need to treat them decently and compensate them fairly. And for what it’s worth, I’ll add that I think it is fine for workers to organize into a union and negotiate for improvements, if they think they’ll benefit. I’ve been a worker all my adult life, and I was once (albeit briefly) a member of the sheet metal workers union.
I don’t think businesses here are opposed to labor or unions. I do think they’re opposed to being rolled over by a powerful consortium.
Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at
[email protected]
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