Teamsters v. Department of Transportation

Teamsters v. Department of Transportation, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (932 F.2d 1292), Decided April 26, 1991

Decision: The special needs of the government in promoting public safety and deterring workplace drug use outweigh drivers’ individual expectations of privacy, so the Department of Transportation’s drug testing regulations are constitutional.

Background: On November 21, 1988, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) published its final drug testing regulations, designed to “detect and deter the use of drugs by bus and truck drivers.”

While recognizing drivers' privacy concerns about the program, the FHWA concluded that "the clear public interest in assuring that commercial motor vehicle drivers perform their duties free of prohibited substances" outweighed the intrusion on drivers' expectations of privacy.

Following promulgation of the regulations, four unions (the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Amalgamated Transit Union, the Railway Labor Executives' Association, and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union) filed a number of suits challenging the validity of the regulations. The unions argued that the planned implementation of random, pre-employment, post-accident, and biennial drug testing violates drivers' Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches, and that the FHWA acted arbitrarily and capriciously in promulgating the regulations.

On January 6, 1989, a federal district judge in San Francisco determined that the random and post-accident drug test requirements of the FHWA regulations violated the Fourth Amendment. She therefore enjoined the implementation of those regulations but allowed pre-employment, biennial and reasonable cause testing to go forward, along with post-accident testing coupled with reasonable cause of drug involvement.

Court’s Opinion: On appeal, the Ninth Circuit reversed the lower court’s decision and upheld the regulations, finding that the special needs of the government in promoting public safety and deterring workplace drug use outweighed the drivers’ individual expectations of privacy, especially since the tests were not being used for law enforcement purposes.

The court applied the Skinner analysis to the case and considered the extensive nature of governmental regulation of driver conduct (e.g., physical examinations, road tests, hours of service requirements, etc.), concluding that the privacy expectations of commercial truck drivers are markedly less than those of the general public. As expected, the court relied heavily on its previous opinion upholding the constitutionality of random testing in the airline industry, as well as numerous other decisions upholding the constitutionality of random testing in other industries. In fact, the court expressly stated that “the concern for safety and deterrence exhibited by the FHWA at least parallels, if not exceeds, the government interest found to be compelling” in cases involving railways, airlines and customs agents. The court therefore concluded that requiring random and post-accident drug tests of DOT-regulated truck drivers was constitutionally permissible.

In a related development, on June 9, 1995 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denied a petition for review filed by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters seeking to vacate the alcohol testing requirements of the regulations on the grounds that they did not contain “split specimen” collection procedures for alcohol or require “reasonable suspicion” testing to be based upon the observations of at least two supervisors. The Court disagreed with both of these contentions and dismissed the case. (Teamsters v. Federal Highway Administration, 56 F.3d 242 (D.C. Cir. 1995)).