Memory Lane: The Teamsters yesterday and today

They started me with a small truck and five close-by deliveries – a couple of pieces of galvanized pipe to a fence builder, a flange to one machine shop, and a few lengths of single random steel pipe for two others. Single random meant various lengths in the general area of 20 feet.

It was my first day at Charles Guyon Pipe and Supply in Harrison, N.J., just across the Passaic River from Newark. Guyon provided pipe and all manner of specialty metals, fittings, and equipment – valves, flanges, etc. Guyon had half a dozen drivers, all Teamsters. The place had a reputation as a good place to work.

The Teamsters were everywhere in trucking back then. That included private carriers like Guyon, where drivers earned just a little less than drivers working for freight companies. The Teamsters national Master Freight Agreement, while it officially applied to the freight industry, set a standard for driver pay for nonunion shops and private fleets. Master Freight wages tended to lift driver pay everywhere.

But Teamsters in some companies exercised power beyond the terms of their contracts.

At Guyon Pipe, for example, the trailers and bigger trucks were loaded and gone that Monday morning in 1967. The yard men took their time loading my few stops. I wasn’t ready to leave until 9 a.m. That’s when the shop steward gave me my orders.

“You don’t call in empty until 3. I don’t want to see you back in this yard before 4 p.m.,” he ordered. Four was quitting time.

But with five stops, all relatively nearby, I’d be done delivering before noon. What was I supposed to do for at least three more hours?

Nap. Go shopping. The shop steward didn’t care. This was about slowing things down and spreading the work around. I guess Guyon’s other drivers were working slowly too, so slowly they needed to hire another driver – me.

I was thrilled to have the job – until noon, anyway. That’s when I finished delivering. There was nothing to do, so I went to the movies. I forget what was playing that day or the next, when the same thing happened. By the time I walked out of the theater on Tuesday, I could clearly see this was not a job for me.

Even after the movie, I returned to the yard an hour early. The shop steward was pissed, but it didn’t matter. I had come back early to quit. I told the boss, the guy who had hired me, that between movie admission and the cost of popcorn, I couldn’t afford this job. I was only half kidding.

My second day at Guyon Pipe was my last.

After Guyon, I made the seniority list at a Teamster freight carrier where management demanded the union respect the contract and put in a full, productive day’s work. Not all carriers were as diligent. You could always find drivers playing cards in the diner long after lunch. Some boasted they would only do so many stops a day, never mind what management or shipper customers needed. I came away from those years skeptical of unions. Despite my Teamster membership, if I wasn’t downright antiunion, I was close to it.

I left trucking altogether in 1980 to write about it for Fleet Owner Magazine.

From there, I moved to a nontrucking magazine and then a newspaper. I came back to writing about trucking, this time for Heavy Duty Trucking Magazine, nearly 20 years later. I found a profoundly changed industry.

The freight business formerly ruled by the LTLs was now dominated by truckload. Even as Teamster LTLs failed one after another, truckload carriers proved all but impossible for the Teamsters to organize. The big union’s power faded as its membership collapsed. Meanwhile, the nonunion truckload sector grew rapidly as wage levels held steady or shrank. Even low inflation ate away at drivers’ buying power. The Teamsters were forced to accept contract give-backs to help keep their remaining LTL carriers afloat. Financially shaky LTLs failed anyway. The once-mighty Teamsters weren’t so mighty anymore.

But now, the abuses that had bothered me all those years ago seemed small and barely relevant in an industry that had gone from solid, middle-class driver wages to one that paid far less and demanded more. Whether or not the corrupt shop steward at Guyon and his like represented wholesale abuse of Teamster power, it was clear that same power kept driver pay high enough to buy homes and send kids to college.

In an industry now dominated by nonunion carriers, power had shifted from the Teamsters to the companies.

Instead of the occasional corrupt shop steward or those card players at the diner, hundreds of thousands of drivers now toil for low pay with work rules that favor the companies at every turn.

I don’t miss the abuses of union power I knew all those years ago, but they seem insignificant in this age of driver exploitation that spans virtually the entire industry. LL