Welcome to Labor Union TV. This is our first interview with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and we're starting with James Hafa. He's the International President. Our first question is the misclassification of workers, support drivers here in Long Beach. All the shippers are misclassifying workers, so they can make them pay for the trucks and all that stuff. Well, one of the big things is we're organizing the ports, and the drivers are really exploited. And there are thousands. I mean, the port of LA, the port of Long Beach are the biggest ports in the country. Two-thirds of things come in for the whole country, come in from the West Coast. And these ports are so important. But they're exploiting the workers by basically making them, you know, basically, you know, slaves to their own truck and making them own their own truck and making them what they call independent contractors. When they only, they're not independent contractors, they're employees. So the battle is they are misclassified, and when they're misclassified, they are cheated. They're basically wage theft, they're underpaid. We had one guy worked 80 hours, and it was over. His check was $4. He owed all the money back like the company store. So we're changing that. And here in California, we've passed laws. We're bringing lawsuits to basically put these companies on notice that they can't misclassify their employees. So this has been a tremendous effort we're doing here. We're very proud of what we're doing. We've recovered millions of dollars for these workers, and we also made it illegal to misclassify. So that's the start right now, but we've got the Attorney General, we've got the governor, we've got everybody helping us out on this effort. So we made a lot of progress, but there's a lot of work to do. Great, but you've done some great work. Yeah, I was also going to say they shipped all the expenses of the trucks onto the... Well, that's right. And also a workman's comp. They're cheated on workman's comp, they're cheating on unemployment. There's a lot of injuries to all the deducts that you're supposed to have, and they shipped all that to the employee and that's wrong. Okay, the next question is the fight of the unions against the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And I was wondering what the teamsters are planning to do to stop this during the lame duck Congress coming up after the election. Well, we're making a lot of progress here because of unions, and because what happened with NAFTA, NAFTA was a disaster, no matter what anybody says. People here in California know that. We've lost over a million jobs. I can reel off 20 plants where we had hundreds of people working, closed down, and guess what? Those people were thrown on the street. Jobs went right to Mexico. Thousands of teams through jobs, thousands of UAW jobs, thousands of everywhere else. So we got to make sure that doesn't happen again. TPP is that again. It is NAFTA on steroids, as we say. And what it's trying to do is to basically come up with this huge market where multinational corporations can close plants and move it to Vietnam, Borneo or wherever else, the salt and the brunette, and it's unbelievable the scope of this. Plus there's a challenge in there that if they go hire a law firm, they can sue us because we have better standards here. Does anybody want to give up our food standards? Anybody want to give up our environmental standards for Vietnam? I say no. No. Now, the good thing is we basically have, you know, we had Bernie Sanders against TPP. We finally got Hillary Clinton against it, and we got Trump against it. So I think we've got it blocked, but we've got to be ever vigilant to make sure we don't have any more bad trade agreements. Let's keep American jobs here in America. Yes, sir. Thank you for that. That's great. Okay. The Bernie unions are really fighting it. I've talked to a lot of leaders of the international's, and so they're really ready. So you better get talking with them in terms of a good action. And then the next question for you, President Hava, is the many of the Republican states have done right to work legislation and voter ID legislation. The voters have to have some kind of picture ID, which you know excludes seniors who don't have it because they're not driving anymore. And also students don't have it. Also the right to work, which is right to work without a union. And we've seen that those states are going way down in their income, that the workers work for a lot less money than the unionized workers. So could you speak to that as what the teamsters are doing about right to work states? Well, it's amazing, you know, there's a reason why right to work is so important because they realize unions are the backbone of the progressive movement in America. And what they can do is to knock us out by basically knocking us out so we cannot have membership. And right to work is that. They just succeeded in my own state of Michigan. They didn't have a vote of the people. They just went into a room one day when the snow was flying, a lame duck session and they passed it. We were hammering on the doors. They tear gased us. That's what happened in Michigan. They're trying to do it in Missouri. They're trying to do it in New Hampshire. They're trying to do it every. That's the first thing they try. And we've been able to stop it and we're going to keep on working that way. Right to work is the worst thing because it takes away the voice of workers. Does anybody think they have power by themselves? But when you get people together, you have power. You have a union. And that's what people need right now. And so many people, I know people that are working three jobs and have nothing. They just run and run and run and I know one person working at a kennel washing dogs on the weekend. That's how bad it is out there. So we've got to make sure we fight back and we are doing a good job with regard to that. And the key thing right now is to elect people to the Senate and to elect people here to elect Hillary Clinton and to make sure we get people in office that believe like us against right to work and to make sure people have a fair, honest attempt to have a good life in America. Great. Thank you for that. Okay. And the last question is about the future of drone vehicles, drone trucks by Google, the robot trucks. I know it's not around the corner, but it's in the future because the future seems to come right tomorrow. And the thing is they are not safe right now, but they're going to rush these on. And I'm just thinking, what do you think about these trucks on the road if they were robot trucks? Well, there's a lot of publicity on that. I think it's generations away. I don't think you and I have to worry about it. And I don't think probably anybody was in this program. I mean, in the year 9,000, maybe they'll do it. But if you've ever been on the freeways here in L.A., do you imagine those trucks, I mean, all the cars, I'm amazing that they even get down the highway. And I don't think it's going to happen. But it does. They've tried this elsewhere. They've tried it with railroads. And then someday they're going to have an airplane with nobody flying the airplane. Does anybody want to be on that airplane? They'll be on the moon. Yeah, we'll be on, I mean, we'll get on that plane. We'll go up in the cockpit. There'll be nobody there. And they say, don't worry about it. It's drone. And I don't want to fly on that plane. It's the same thing here. You can't have big, you know, 18 wheelers with hundreds and thousands of pounds of things going down the highway. And make sure, wait a minute, there's a little malfunction in there and it runs over to somebody. Does anybody want that responsibility? So I think it's generations away. I'm not going to say it's ever going to happen. But I don't think I'm going to worry about it. I don't think anybody listening here should worry about it. Don't you think they ought to be safe deep of sight? You know, they just try to invent something without looking at safety at all. Well, that's always the story. And the answer is, we know what a savings they think there would be. But then you realize the employer say, well, I can get rid of all my employees. That's what behind it. What's behind all this is money. When you can't figure it out, it's money. And it's money. Basically, they think we don't have to pay the drivers. But then they got to go buy a truck. And they don't want to own trucks. They want to make the employee own the truck. And then they have to have all this apparatus on top of the truck and maintain it. And somebody are doing, how expensive that will be. That's why, and the insurance. And if the thing malfunctions and runs over somebody and kills a bunch of people, that's the problem. So we've got to make very sure that this happens. But I do think, in all honesty, I think it's generations away. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. And then James. Very good. This is Labor Union TV. And thank you very much, James Hoffa, for speaking with us today.