Hot Cargoes Cooled

Among the blackjacks of power that Jimmy Hoffa's 1,400,000-member Teamster Brotherhood uses to dominate the U.S. trucking industry are collective-bargaining clauses barring trucking companies from transporting "hot cargoes." A hot cargo can be anything at all, even frozen food; what makes it hot is that, somewhere in the course of its travels, it has been handled by a company that is nonunion or is having union trouble. By forcing trucking firms to contract not to handle hot cargoes, the Teamsters make it more difficult for other truckers to hold out against Teamster pressure.

Last week Washington's eleven-member Interstate Commerce Commission struck the hot-cargo weapon out of Hoffa & Co.'s hands. Ruling on a case in which nine trucking companies operating out of Oklahoma City had obeyed hot-cargo clauses in refusing to handle goods transported by a nonunion Texas trucker, ICC firmly declared that licensed "common carriers" operate under a "statutory obligation to serve the public" without discrimination--and that this "absolute" obligation cannot be set aside by any labor contract.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.