The Legal Fight For Trucker Bathrooms
I try to keep my articles non political, but I am going tell you the story of a first of its kind law in the country. While this story will be about the new law, it’s more about the ins and outs of lobbying, how industries who publicly call truck drivers “heroes” actually treat drivers when the cameras are off, and the fact that we literally need a law for something so simple, which is to be able to use the bathroom at places we pick up and deliver to, and the legal fight to force the ports to provide drivers bathrooms, which most ports refuse to do. Yes, I have video.
This is the story of Washington House Bill 1706. I’ll start this story from the beginning: I am the guy who got the bill written. The bill was a HUGE deal for trucking from the minute it was written, as nothing like this has ever been done in this country.
Here is the link to the bill, it gives all the info on the bill, from original bill to the end.
I’m a Teamster, and a Teamster delegate to my county Labor Council. In December of 2021, I was in a COPE meeting with two state legislators, and I brought up the issue of truck drivers having no bathrooms to use at the ports, and how some shippers will deny drivers the right to use the bathroom just because they can. Both legislators were shocked at this, and one of them suggested that maybe we need “a right to pee bill” for truck drivers. I said that sounded like a great idea, and I truly expected to hear nothing more about it. I have brought the issue up to other legislators in the past, and was always told “We’ll look into it,” and that is where the conversation has ended. So I expected this to be more of the same. I was shocked a couple weeks later when Rep. Mike Sells (D-38) sent me an email with proposed legislation. It was a GREAT bill, and addressed every problem I had raised. The session had not started at this point, but I was already farther along than I ever thought I would get.
When the legislative session did start, the bill dropped as HB 1706, with 22 co-sponsors. Again, I was shocked. This was not a Teamster sponsored bill (I did have the support of every labor organization in the state, but it wasn’t sponsored by any labor organizations), it was literally me bringing up a problem to a couple of legislators, and them listening to me. Keep in mind, I am literally a nobody. I ran for office once, and got beaten badly, I’m not a union official in any way, I am just a Teamster delegate to my local Labor Council. While I do know more people than the average person because of being a delegate, I’m still just a rank-and-file Teamster and truck driver. I don’t have any special connections. I did ask my local’s political coordinator what the chances of this bill passing were, and she told me a first-time bill in a short legislative session has a very LOW chance of passing. There were a couple of trucking lobbying associations who supported this bill, mostly the Owner Operators Independent Drivers Association(OOIDA), and the Washington Trucking Association. I spoke to the OOIDA after the bill was originally dropped — they were shocked that I got a bill like this written, but after that, I never heard from them. I never talked to the Washington Trucking Association. I wish both groups had contacted me while this was going on, the three of us could probably have strategized better if we had worked together, but they never did. The OOIDA had my number and email, and my employer is a WTA member, and my employer was keeping me updated on what the WTA was saying in their emails about the bill. I don’t know what they did behind the scenes, and it’s sad, because we could have been more effective if we had worked together.
I was also naive enough to think “Who could be against this?” As it turns out, a LOT of people were, and we have them on record.
This video is directly from the legislative website. Download it and start it at 19:51. My testimony and other driver/trucking organizations begins at 27:40. The opposition, who is clearly opposed, doesn’t even have the decency to say they’re opposed, but always label themselves as “other,” begin at 37:09. They are the Washington Retail Association, Washington Hospitality Industry, Association of Washington Business, and the Pacific Maritime Shipping Association. ALL of them are clearly against this bill, but don’t want to publicly say it.
Also, if you want to watch my testimony and read an article by The Stranger, a Seattle alternative newspaper, written in a way only The Stranger would write it, read this. It’s a fun article.
The Pacific Maritime Shippers Association (PMSA) are the operators for nearly all of the deep water ports on the west coast. I will talk about the “safety and security” issues they brought up, but suffice to say these issues do NOT exist. However, this is a prime example of why we have a shipping crisis, as the PMSA will go to any length to avoid spending ANY money they don’t want to, even though they get billions a year in TAXPAYER money from all levels of government ($17bn for ports in the federal infrastructure bill alone). Any dollar they can save, from hiring one gang of longshoreman when they need at least five gangs, chronic understaffing that delays billions of dollars in commerce, to lobbying against legislation that would require them to provide porta potties for their thousands of drivers a month, they’ll do it.
Does lobbying work? In this case, sort of. The retailers successfully got written out of the bill. However, Labor & Industries extended ALL the rights customers have at businesses to truck drivers. In Washington, legally (and all this had to be legislated in prior years), if you have a right to be on the premises (as a customer), you have the right to use the bathroom, and this definition was extended to truck drivers. Drivers can now report business violators to L&I. They will be given a warning, and a $250 fine for every violation thereafter. In essence, I won on this issue, as the fine is more than if it had been legislated into the bill. I don’t know why the Retailers/Hospitality lobbyists fought so hard to get an exemption, as the result for them is actually worse than if they had stayed in the bill.
So, the retailers got successfully written out of the bill, and the legislature rewrote a substitute bill. Remember, I’m a truck driver, not a legislator. I didn’t even know they could do this. This new bill came about five days before the bill had to be out of the House, or it would die, and I couldn’t even see it until about three days before the bill would have died. When I did finally see it, I was horrified.
Washington has a weird exemption in state law that makes port districts exempt from most other laws in the state. When it comes to bathrooms specifically, ports are the only place in the state where such rules don’t apply. Every other place in the state, from stadiums, construction sites (no matter how large or small), concerts, etc, all have to have the proper number of bathrooms based on the number of people at the site/event, and the requirements are different for things like concerts/stadiums versus truck drivers. The standards are set out by law and health code for the proper number of bathrooms. Literally, in Washington state, there are remodel permits that require a porta potty for ONE person working at your home. The new bill, in theory, did away with this exemption, but the PMSA tried to make sure this didn’t happen.
What did the PMSA do? They lied. They got a legislator to write an amendment, and it is on Pg 2 of the original substitute bill, lines 11–13 where it says “and when access does not pose so obvious safety risk to the drayage operators and other workers in the area and does not violate terminal security requirements.” I lost my mind. I knew this issue had nothing to do with safety and security. But it was going to be PMSA’s way of letting the bill pass by making sure they didn’t ever have to install bathrooms due to “security” issues. So, I did exactly what the PMSA didn’t want me to do: I told legislators (and I will tell you) what port security in the Puget Sound Area is like.
Lack of bathrooms for drivers in the ports is a nationwide
problem, and port operators use “security issues” as the excuse, because once the public and legislators hear this excuse, that is normally where the conversation ends. Nobody follows up with, “What is the security issue letting people use the bathroom?” When this is pointed out to legislators, only then do they start asking the same question.
I had about three days after I saw the substitute bill with the horrible amendment to get this issue fixed. So, I told the legislators what port security is like. It’s like showing a parking pass to the private security guard at a parking garage, or at best having a ticket scanned to get into a concert. One port literally only has a single guard, and none of these guards are armed. As with everything else at the port, security is done as cheaply as possible. Both hiring armed guards and hiring an adequate number of guards is too expensive. Nobody is checking your truck, nobody is checking empty containers, all the ports really care about is that the right container goes on the right carrier, and the containers weighs what they should. Even though all drivers have been through a federal background check (TWIC card) to get into the ports, most of the time these are just glanced at by a guard while the guard is 5–10 feet away. A driver hangs his card out the door while moving at 5mph, 99.9% of the time, and nobody takes your ID to actually verify the ID matches the driver. In the eight years as a port driver(twenty years driving overall), I don’t think I have ever had it happen to me. This is what “port security” is. Now consider how absurd the PMSA argument is. The inbound security sucks due to the PMSA not wanting to spend money on security, but they are using this nonexistent security issue to say the facility is so “secure” that they can’t even let thousands of drivers a day use the bathroom.
Unfortunately for the PMSA, I saw them coming. I had three days to point out what the lie and I went into overdrive. I wrote another 100 emails or so explaining the situation to legislators. I told them the issue is akin to having a football game with 50,000 in attendance and saying that due to “security” issues, there were only bathrooms for the players. Think about how airline travel would be if you went through all the security, and after — even before you got on the plane — you were told that you couldn’t use the bathroom until you got off your flight and got out of your destination airport. The PMSA isn’t even smart enough to figure out that if a driver does breach security to get into the port, that is a failure of port security, not the driver.
I’m a former Navy Reserve cop, now driving a truck for twenty years. I have seen many different types of security. There are businesses with far more security than the ports I have to deal with, and bathroom use isn’t prohibited at these places. Even the Manhattan Project let people use bathrooms, there were no “security” issues around it, because issue does not actually exist. There will never be a breach of port security due to drivers being allowed to use a bathroom inside the ports, because they have already gone through security at that point. If there’s a breach, the security failed long before the driver uses the bathroom. I also pointed out to legislators that drivers only seem to become “security” risks when its convenient for the ports. Whenever the ports want us out of our truck, for any reason, whether it’s going to the trouble window, hooking up a chassis, or whatever reason they deem necessary, we pose no security risk, and they literally let all drivers sit in line, unguarded, for hours on end. But we instantly become security risks when we need to use the bathroom. Laughable.
I lost on this issue, however, but only partially. I made all these faux security issues very clear to the House legislators, but Rep. Sells (who wrote the bill) emailed me and told me it had to pass the House this way, or the bill would die. He did say he would try to get it pulled out in the Senate, but it had to pass the House the way it was. I thought the bill was going to die at this point, but it unanimously passed the House on the last possible day. Now it was going to the Senate.
Here is the link to the public Senate Testimony on HB 1706. I was scheduled to testify but ultimately didn’t get to. The Senate suspended the rules on the bill. It was supposed to go first but didn’t. I stayed in this committee for an hour or so hoping they would get to 1706, but eventually I left due to time constraints. When they did get to 1706, even though I didn’t get to testify, they mentioned the emails I had sent them in the opening testimony. It shows how much the process is tilted towards professional lobbyists, as regular people may sit in hearings for literally hours before they get to testify. Lobbyists get paid to sit there, the rest of us don’t.
HB 1706 testimony starts at 1:31:30
https://tvw.org/video/senate-labor-commerce-tribal-affairs-committee-2022021369/?eventID=2022021369
At this point I had a little breathing room to work on this issue with State Senators. I sent all Senators the same emails I sent the House members, especially regarding the “security” issue. In the House emails, I offered to take any legislator that was interested on a tour of any port in the area to show them how “security” worked, and I could do it all from the street. I did have a legislator take me up on this offer, so I took a Saturday and gave her a port tour from a driver’s perspective. Even though the legislator had been on port tours with port commissioners before, those types of legislative tours don’t reveal how anything works, and certainly don’t talk bring up security issues. To further make my point, it happened to be a port with a single security guard. At the end of the tour, I asked her if she understood the claim of how “security” issues prevented drivers from using the ports, and she agreed it was non-issue. She became one of my best allies in getting the issue resolved and was also the legislator who put in an amendment for a place for drivers to pump breast milk. I then took a vacation day and did Lobby Day with my Teamster local, where we lobbied individual legislators about our concerns. My political coordinator lobbied for official (Teamster sponsored) Teamster issues, but let me in to bring up 1706 even though it was not officially a Teamster bill. I think we got to about six legislators that day, and we only got to lobby legislators representing areas our local had members. At this point, I’m 600 emails or so in, down a vacation day, and I got up really early on a Saturday (when the bill dropped in the beginning) to count the number of driver accessible bathrooms at most of our ports. None of the ports, no matter how large or small, had more than four bathrooms, and almost all were at the in-gate/trouble window. None had bathrooms inside the ports, and only one had a bathroom that was driver accessible after they had gone through the out gate. For comparison, four is the number of bathrooms at the Seattle Tacoma International Airport Cell Phone Waiting lot, and a lot fewer people will use those daily, plus the people in that cell phone lot will not be there anywhere close to the length of time drivers will be in the ports.
But I did make progress on the issue. I got Senators to realize what the PMSA was doing, and they agreed with me. They changed the PMSA “terminal security requirements” amendment to “FEDERAL security requirements,” killing the poison pill the PMSA had installed in the House bill. As written by the Senate, the ports would now be regulated like any other employer when it comes to bathrooms. It passed unanimously in the Senate. It now had to be reconciled in the House, but we were 90% of the way there, and had gotten much farther than I ever thought we would. I can’t thank my Teamsters political coordinator enough (sorry for the hundreds of texts, emails, and calls Debbie).
After passage of the Senate version, I sent another 100 or so emails back to House members telling them the bill was now a good bill, and to please support it. I only had a few days left before it died. It eventually passed 97–1 on its last day. Even the legislator who put the horrible PMSA amendment in the House bill voted for passage in reconciliation, and one legislator who voted for it in the beginning voted against it in the end. It was signed by the governor, and is now the first law of its kind in the country.
To those who helped me, THANK YOU. This is a huge deal for the trucking industry. From the very second this bill was written, it garnered national attention in trucking circles. This law, and this article, are both road maps for how to do this across the country.
I hope this law spreads like wildfire.
