Here's an interesting piece of verbiage in a trucking dispute. A number of ports are starting to bar old, more polluting, from the docks in order to clear the air in the area. The Teamsters are generally in favor of such rules, not primarily because of any environment benefits, but that the older trucks tend to belong to independent truckers who aren't part of a union; they don't like the competition and the downward pressure on wages that such owner-operators represent.
The Coalition for Healthy Ports, a labor-environmental group, told the FMCSA that if the New York-New Jersey sticker plan is declared invalid, port programs to ban older trucks in Southern California and elsewhere "will be in jeopardy."
The coalition urged the FMCSA "not to succumb to the pressure of the NJMTA and (American Trucking Associations) to undermine any and all efforts to clean the air and promote economic justice in the port trucking industry."
"Economic justice." Justice often depends on vantage point. There are a variety of definitions, but the one that seems to come close to what the CHP folks are after is "being what is merited: deserved."
Do truckers deserve $X/hour? If you're a Teamster used to that going rate, having OOs come in and do the job for $X-3/hour, yes. Blocking the cheap labor to preserve your wage would seem just.
However, the guy being told he can't bring his truck onto the docks because he isn't part of the union doesn't think that's just. One of the proposed regulation would ban OOs from working in the ports; non-unionized corporations could do business, but the chance of them being unionized is higher than the zero percent of OOs.
Justice as used above often means "seeing it my way." Relative merit is not what people are after when they use that phrase.
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