The Left insists that workers really want unions, if only given the chance. California passed A.B. 5 to get more independent contractors reclassified as employees, partly to allow them to unionize. The Teamsters supported that law because many truck drivers are independent contractors, not employees.

But the Teamsters aren’t doing very well with employee drivers in California, either. The results of a unionization vote that happened last summer were unsealed last week, and they were not close. Port drivers working for STG Cartage LLC rejected the Teamsters by a vote of 165–76 in the representation election. Nineteen ballots were challenged and twelve were voided, out of 299 eligible voters, so turnout was high and the challenged ballots won’t make a difference in the final result.

The Teamsters successfully challenged the employment status of the STG Cartage truckers before the National Labor Relations Board last summer. The NLRB ruled that they were employees, not independent contractors, and therefore eligible for unionization. This effort began before A.B. 5 took effect, but it still represents the Teamsters getting what they wanted: independent contractors reclassified as employees and then given the option to unionize.

The workers didn’t take that option, but it couldn’t possibly be because they don’t want to join the Teamsters. The Teamsters said in a statement to Law360, “We had a clear majority of support among XPO’s courageous workers, but XPO refused to recognize the union and instead delayed the process and violated the law with impunity through its egregious unfair labor practices.” Except the results show that they didn’t have a majority, clear or otherwise.

Unions have done this before, as Charlie Cooke has written about with respect to Amazon workers in Alabama back in 2021. After the workers there voted against unionization, the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) claimed that workers needed to be able to vote again based on flimsy claims of “intimidation” by Amazon. It couldn’t possibly be that workers didn’t want to join the RWDSU. Well, the RWDSU got its do-over, and workers rejected unionization again in spring 2022.

The supposed renaissance of organized labor is little more than PR, and the union membership rate of 10.1 percent for 2022 is the lowest on record. If unions claim that all they want is for workers to have a chance to join, they need to abide by the results when representation elections don’t go their way. For good reason, most American workers don’t view their services as helpful.