Today we revisit the Long Beach port truck scheme. Commissioner Mike Walter repeatedly asked environmental skeptics if they understood the "benefits" for drivers. The Road will debunk the bogus health care "entitlement" another day, but for now we reveal one of those so-called bennies is actually a new, unfunded mandate on drivers.

Companies will be required to provide workers' compensation insurance! the Port proclaims. Except what the plan actually says is that motor carriers must ensure that drivers have it, but legally motor carriers cannot provide workers' comp to the overwhelming majority of drivers because the companies claim they are independent contractors.

Workers' comp is for employees, by statutory definition. Thus the Port is forcing an additional cost on already underpaid drivers by asking motor carriers to enforce it as a condition of their leases with the so-called independent truckers. This is also flatly illegal, as Mayor Foster and Harbor Commission President Mario Cordero, who been involved in workers' comp legislative efforts in the past, almost certainly know.

The Port of Long Beach trumpets "trucker choice" on its leaflets. Nowhere is that claim more Orwellian than the workers' comp mandate, which green-lights a terrible "blame the victim" policy for drivers who average just over $29,000 a year to self-insure.

The only way to sustain clean-up and solve this conundrum is to require concession motor carriers to employ their drivers through the model the Port of Los Angeles rightfully followed through with. By law, the employers would then have to provide workers' comp. But instead, Long Beach has opted to make low-wage drivers (who will be forced to take out hefty truck loans to clean up for the industry polluters) to pay for it themselves. Wow, Dr. Walter, that's some fringe benefit. Where can one sign up?