Do you think the union companies, past and present, were started with the union being present from the first second?
No... it has never happened that way.
Every union company at one time or another had to be organized. Back in the day, it was a lot easier due to the regulated environment trucking operated under and the fact that the labor laws had not been totally turned against organized labor yet, and the fact that unionism was a strong driving force amongst blue-collar working men.
The fact of the matter is simply this: under federal labor laws, you have a right to form and/or join a union for the purposes of collective bargaining and representation.
Now, some people who go to work for non-union companies came from union jobs in the past, and have various motivations for seeing their new jobs go union. This could range from seeing their new fellow employees getting a raw deal to wanting to get back into a Teamster retirement or medical plan.
So, the question is: why not go to work for a union company instead of trying to advocate a non-union company into going union? Sometimes it's due to lack of union companies in a particular area; sometimes it's due to a lack of available union jobs, and sometimes, it's because many of us recognize the fact that the more union trucking companies there are, the less they can play the game of paying inferior wages and benefits, and then due to their lower operating costs, go out and slash their freight rates so that no one else can come close to competing.
Supposedly this is "market economics", but it's really just a way to compete unfairly while the working men and women of those particular companies bear the burden of lower wages and benefits. Eventually, the carrier with the higher labor costs lose out. We've seen this cycle repeat over and over again since deregulation, which is exactly what the business community wanted in the first place.
Sure, carrier have become more efficient, but at what cost? Real wages in trucking are stagnant or declining when inflation is factored in, and that is a large part of the reason the industry finds itself in such pickle when it comes to finding new drivers. They aren't out there, because the wages and benefits are not, on the whole, competitive with other industries, and certainly do not make up for the sacrifices that have to be made in this line of work by the drivers who actually haul the freight.
It's past time everyone pulls their heads out of the sand, and realized that a rising tide lifts all ships. More organizing in trucking equals more leverage at the bargaining table which in turn equals better wages and benefits for the workers. This will attract more workers to the industry, which will be good for the unions and the employers.
The pendulum has been swinging away from the blue-collar middle-class worker fro decades in this country, and unionism is one solid way of swinging that pendulum back...
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