Law in the Campaign for Clean Trucks
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Cummings_production v8 (clean) (Do Not Delete) 1/13/2015 10:12 PM Preemptive Strike: Law in the Campaign for Clean Trucks Scott L. Cummings* Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 940 I. Law in the Development of the Ports ..................................................................... 945 A. Local Power: Annexation and Autonomy ........................................... 947 B. Federal Power: Industrialization in the Shadow of Regulation ......... 955 C. Global Power: The Logistics Revolution, Free Trade, and Deregulation ............................................................................................... 959 D. Local Impact: Community, Labor, and the Environment ................. 972 II. The Port As a Unit of Legal Analysis ..................................................................... 981 A. Local Governance ..................................................................................... 981 B. Nonlocal Governance .............................................................................. 984 C. Preemption ................................................................................................. 987 III. Resisting the Ports: Activism in Separate Spheres .............................................. 989 A. The Hundred Years’ War: Community Mobilization Against Port Expansion .......................................................................................... 989 B. Labor’s Municipal Strategy: Contracting Around the Independent-Contractor Problem ........................................................ 1001 C. The Turning Point: China Shipping and the Clean Air Action Plan ............................................................................................................ 1010 IV. Reforming the Ports: The Campaign for Clean Trucks ................................... 1042 A. The Alliance: Forming the Coalition .................................................... 1042 1. Personnel ........................................................................................... 1042 2. Partnerships ....................................................................................... 1047 3. Policy .................................................................................................. 1056 B. The Affirmative Phase: Mobilizing Local Law .................................. 1059 * Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law. For their critical feedback and support, I am grateful to Rick Abel, Sameer Ashar, Catherine Fisk, Robert Gottlieb, Sean Hecht, Michael Klarman, Doug NeJaime, Sanjukta Paul, Ben Sachs, Noah Zatz, and Jon Zerolnick. I am deeply indebted to the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment for its generous and enduring support. And I could not have completed this project without the excellent research assistance of Michael Fenne, Doug Smith, and Alyssa Titche, and the incredible efforts of the law review editors, particularly Amy Bowles, Anne Conley, Catriona Lavery, Margaux Poueymirou, Marco Pulido, Joseph Roth, and Thomas Worger. 939 Cummings_production v8 (clean) (Do Not Delete) 1/13/2015 10:12 PM 940 UC IRVINE LAW REVIEW [Vol. 4:939 1. The Outside Game: Developing the Program, Exerting Pressure .............................................................................................. 1059 2. The Inside Game: Mobilizing Legal Expertise, Moving Policy .................................................................................................. 1067 3. The End Game: Passing the Clean Truck Program ................... 1079 C. The Defensive Phase: Responding to Federal Law ........................... 1094 1. Private Litigation I: The Injunctive Phase .................................... 1094 2. Public Litigation: Federal Agency Intervention .......................... 1108 3. Private Litigation II: The Merits Phase ......................................... 1112 4. Private Litigation III: The Supreme Court Phase ....................... 1118 D. The Aftermath: Maneuvering Around Preemption ........................... 1123 1. A Legislative Window—Closed .................................................... 1124 2. Law and Organizing—A Renewed Challenge ............................. 1130 a. Misclassification Litigation ...................................................... 1130 b. Union Organizing ..................................................................... 1141 V. Analysis ...................................................................................................................... 1146 A. Context ...................................................................................................... 1146 B. Campaign .................................................................................................. 1150 1. Scale .................................................................................................... 1150 2. Opportunity ....................................................................................... 1152 3. Strategy ............................................................................................... 1154 4. Lawyering ........................................................................................... 1155 C. Outcome ................................................................................................... 1156 1. Constraint .......................................................................................... 1157 2. Countermobilization ........................................................................ 1159 3. Adaptation ......................................................................................... 1160 4. Accountability ................................................................................... 1162 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 1164 INTRODUCTION This Article recounts and analyzes the epic campaign to raise work and environmental standards at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. This campaign emerged as a fight over air quality, but developed as a struggle over the conditions of short-haul truckers, whose precarious economic status as independent contractors contributed to poorly maintained trucks that were a key cause of air pollution. The campaign itself thus became a moment of labor-environmental interest convergence and an opportunity to rebuild a historically frayed alliance. It was also viewed by labor as a chance to test a new strategy of investing in campaigns around regionally sticky industries in order to advance a more ambitious project of citywide economic change. The campaign rested on an innovative legal hook: the port, as a publicly owned and operated entity, had the power to define the terms of entry for trucking Cummings_production v8 (clean) (Do Not Delete) 1/13/2015 10:12 PM 2014] PREEMPTIVE STRIKE 941 companies through concession agreements—essentially private contracts permitting trucks onto port property. The campaign therefore hinged on how these agreements treated truckers and what types of standards the agreements set. Labor and environmental activists formed a coalition with residents of low-income communities adjacent to the port. Together, they sought to make new law that would convert truckers into employees of their companies (thus enabling unionization), while requiring the gradual upgrading of trucks to reduce pollution. Lawyers working with the coalition crafted that law to minimize ex ante legal risk and ultimately defended it—with mixed results—against a federal preemption challenge. This Article uses the story of the campaign to examine how contemporary labor law is made, unmade, and remade—and the consequences (sometimes unintended) of doing so, both positive and negative. In broad terms, it focuses on how social movements mobilize law to change economic conditions for workers and how countermovements use law to limit—and even reverse—movement gains.1 The campaign is, in the end, a story about the shifting geography of legal power and how movements and countermovements seek to use legal tools at different levels of regulatory authority within the structure of federalism to advance their ends.2 In Los Angeles and Long Beach, the ports were initially built through assertions of local power to advance regional industrialization in the context of strong federal regulation and limited global trade. Port authorities were given autonomy to promote industrialization and succeeded in facilitating manufacturing- led regional growth, while the rise of the federal regulatory state in the New Deal era empowered labor to share in its benefits. Beginning in the 1970s, globalization disempowered local governments, which lost their manufacturing base, and federal deregulation disempowered port truckers, who lost their union representation. Federal labor and transportation law, created in part to benefit workers, became a hindrance to them by decentralizing industry control and affirmatively preventing collective worker action by truckers—who were recast as independent contractors 1. By focusing on this movement-countermovement dynamic, the Article builds upon scholarship in the burgeoning law and social movement field. For the classics, see, for example, JOEL F. HANDLER, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE LEGAL SYSTEM: A THEORY OF LAW REFORM AND SOCIAL CHANGE (1978); MICHAEL W. MCCANN, RIGHTS AT WORK: PAY EQUITY REFORM AND THE POLITICS OF