A Heavy Load - The ports say they have a plan for cleaner, safer trucks. But do they have a plan for the truckers?
Submitted on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 2:48pm
Disclaimer - The opinions of the author do not necessarily match those of the IWW. The image pictured to the right did not appear in the original article, we have added it here to provide a visual perspective. This article is reposted in accordance to Fair Use guidelines.
Before sunrise on a Monday morning, outside a sterile office park in
Compton, a convoy of small, beat-up cars, none of them newer than 1995, arrives
at the offices of the trucking firm Calko Speedline. One by one, the car's
drivers emerge, ranchera and mariachi and est?s escuchando a Piol?n por la
ma?ana! competing from their radios. They buy coffee from the taco truck that
follows them in, and assemble in small groups, huddled in circles among their
big rigs - hulking red, green, blue and white mammoths lined up along the curb,
their diesel-burning engines grumbling into action one by one.
The drivers' day of waiting begins.
"My name's Chicho. Everybody knows me. You can ask anyone, 'Do you know
Chicho?' and he'll say yes."
Chicho, born Hernan Robleto, is short, round, nearly bald and, when he
speaks, energetically animated. His English is nearly indistinguishable from his
Spanish; sometimes, while listening to him, it's possible to lose any conscious
sense of which language he's speaking. At the Calko office, he paces among the
various groups while office personnel inside quietly field calls from terminal
operators at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach about ship traffic and
schedules; later, they'll give each of the men directions to their first load of
the day, a container of goods destined for an intermediate shipping facility
somewhere inland or farther down the coast, where it will be transported still
farther, to distribution centers all over the country, by truck or
train.
"I am from Nicaragua," Chicho tells me, with a sideways look and suspense
in his voice. "I came here 25 years ago. It was a revolution; they were killing
everybody. If you could leave, you did." He said goodbye to his family and began
the thousand-mile journey over two borders to the U.S., where he went to the
ports and looked for a job.
"I went into one company and said, 'I want to be a truck driver,' and they
say, 'Okay, let's go get you a truck.'" He jumps back and forth as he tells the
story, acting out both sides of the conversation, turning one way and then the
other as he switches characters. "They take me to the place where you can buy a
truck, and we pick one out. I have no credit - no trucker has credit, and the
ones that do have bad credit - but they sign for me, and I have a
truck."
It still works this way. Trucking companies act as co-signers on lending
agreements so long as the trucker works exclusively for that company and carries
its logo on the truck's driver's-side door. Truckers cannot enter the port
without a specific pickup assignment from the dispatcher at the trucking company
that "leases" their truck.
"But still they say we are independent workers. I don't understand this.
How can we be independent if we can only do what one company tells us to
do?"
While Chicho talks, his friend Honorio Rivera takes out a sponge mop and
goes to work on his 2004 Freightliner as the sun comes over the horizon. He
washes the windshield, the hood, the doors, then lifts the hood and wipes down
the insides of the engine with a rag. The white metal gleams in the day's new
pinkish light.
"It was an expensive truck," Rivera says. "I have to take care of it. It
cost me $69,000."
If port truckers like Chicho and Rivera are lucky, they can squeeze in two
or three loads a day, at anywhere from $70 to $180 each, depending on the
shipper and the route (trucking lines such as Calko pay drivers per load, a sum
first determined by the shipper; 70 percent goes to the trucker). At most, a
driver earns about $300 a day, including the fee for returning the empty
container. Working 50 weeks a year, he can gross close to $80,000. But since
drivers work as independent contractors - or "independent owner-operators"
according to industry euphemism - they pay their own fees, taxes, insurance and
fuel. These expenses, combined with monthly payments on that $69,000 truck,
easily whittle a trucker's salary down to around $30,000.
Which means that Chicho, after 25 years of hard work as an independent
contractor without health care or retirement, has never been able to buy a
house. He can't even rent one in Los Angeles. Instead, he lives in a
$700-a-month two-bedroom apartment 180 miles away in Morongo Valley with his
wife and two children, 5 and 14. He has never taken a vacation, he has never
seen a doctor.
"I am tired," says Chicho, who says he is 50, but looks a decade older. "I
am at the point in my life where I want to be taken care of. I am also at a
point in my life where I wonder who will take care of my wife if I
die."
Now Chicho and his fellow truckers have a new set of worries. With the
nation's attention fixed on the ports - just last week Homeland Security
Secretary Michael Chertoff came to Los Angeles to announce new security
procedures for the ports, including screening all containers for nuclear
materials - the drivers' lives will no doubt become more complicated, with
longer waits and more bureaucracy than they already claw through today. In the
name of security, air quality and global trade, the ports are due for an epic
shift: Checkpoints will be put into place, technology upgraded, and new machines
put on the roads at considerable expense and effort, all to move huge crates of
goods off foreign ships to big-box stores. But no one has bothered to ask the
men who do the most to move those goods - the truckers - whether the changes
make any sense to them.
Sixteen thousand truckers serve the state's ports, 10,500 at the local
ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, though that number is by no means
scientific and shifts depending on the source. What is known, however, is that
most of the ports' trucks are more than a decade old, even though many truckers,
including Chicho and Rivera, bought their trucks through a Port of Los Angeles
program called Gateway Cities, created to help replace drivers' pre-1992
vehicles with newer, cleaner models. The port fleet is still considered the
oldest and dirtiest-burning in the state.
"This is where trucks come to die," says the Los Angeles port spokesperson,
Arley Baker.
At the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach alone, diesel trucks belch out
47 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxide and 1.4 tons of particulate matter each
day - more commonly known as soot - around 12 percent of the daily soot and smog
load at the ports, which the California Air Resources Boardand the South Coast
Air Quality Management District agree aggravates more than 10,000 cases of
asthma and kills, statewide, approximately 2,400 people per year.
You can observe container trucks stacking up in the mornings and afternoons
in the far-right lanes of the 710, 91 and 110 freeways, making their too-fast,
sooty and dangerous way out of the ports hauling 40-by-20-foot metal boxes full
of everything from Converse tennis shoes to Patagonia jackets to Chaco sandals
to Coleman tents - just about everything that seems U.S.-made but really isn't.
Caltrans says heavy-duty trucks were involved in more than 6,000 L.A. County
traffic accidents in 2005; 62 of them, according to the National Highway Safety
Traffic Administration, were fatal, accounting for close to 9 percent of the 750
deadly accidents in the region that year. Last year, for example, a container
slipped off its chassis and toppled over the 91 freeway overpass onto another
truck on the freeway below. Observers concluded that the crushed driver had been
killed instantly by the appearance of his arm dangling out of the
window.
But the pathetic brutality of port trucking often goes unnoticed amid the
glory of the ports, where international commerce converges and then trickles
across the map of North America like little rivulets of blood, a network of
arteries and capillaries feeding the country's big-box retailers its cheap,
high-demand goods. The containers bear the names of those thriving international
companies that transport goods on massive ships from Asia to the ports of the
U.S. West Coast: South China Shipping, Evergreen, Hanjin, Maersk. All but a
handful of the people at the wheel, however, made their way here from Central
America over the last quarter-century, some literally crawling over the border
as they fled civil wars inflamed, in many cases, by official U.S.
policy.
Like a lot of drivers, Chicho resents that his income has declined while
the port economy has boomed, multiplying several times over the last decade. He
understands that official government and port policy has consistently favored
the big shipping companies over the small owner-operators when it comes to
raising money for port and highway infrastructure - business at the combined
ports has gone from $100 billion to at least $256 billion per year since the
U.S. relaxed trade barriers with China in the late 1990s.
"If they need money for the roads, they give the bill to the truckers. If
they need money to fix the terminal, they give the bill to the truckers.
Everything they need to pay for here, they say, 'Oh, let's make this man pay for
it!'?" Chicho plays a port official as he says this, turning to face an
imaginary trucker much shorter than himself.
It has been 27 years since President Jimmy Carter freed trucking companies
from the anticompetitive rate setting that once allowed them to maintain a
well-paid, unionized work force, most of it organized by the International
Brotherhood of Teamsters and fiercely protective of its market share and wages.
The old protections on rates were considered a tax on the consumer; at the time
when he signed the new law, the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, Carter believed it
would have "a powerful anti-inflationary effect, reducing consumer costs by as
much as $8 billion each year."
For that reason, Ralph Nader battled ardently for deregulation, as did many
environmentalists: The act eliminated federal control of routes, so that
trucking companies could collect goods anywhere in the country, which meant
fewer trucks would squander fuel driving home empty.
"All the citizens of our nation will benefit from this legislation," Carter
declared. Even "labor will benefit from increased job opportunities."
Carter was right about one or two things - thanks in part to deregulation,
you can buy shoes from China much cheaper than you could in 1979. But
deregulation was ruinous for labor. As trucking companies negotiated rates with
shipping lines, a bidding war began that forced the 18,000-some existing
trucking companies to cut their expensive unionized staff as fast as they could.
Nonunion carriers sprung up like weeds: By 1990, more than 45,000 trucking lines
were licensed by the Department of Commerce - more than twice as many as there
were before deregulation.
Now the business model for port trucking may be about to change yet again,
and in the shuffling for power and influence, everyone, from environmentalists
to state regulators to the Teamsters, wants a piece of the drivers' action.
Minders of the state budget don't want to lose the truckers as a source of
revenue: Over and again this past decade, a large portion of the cost of
maintaining the ports' infrastructure has been shouldered by the underpaid
truckers rather than the shipping industry. Governor Schwarzenegger has
repeatedly vetoed state Senator Alan Lowenthal's bills to charge the steamship
companies a fee on containers coming into the ports, and the federal government
has refused to regulate the rates trucking companies charge to ship
containers.
To the Teamsters, who lost some 200,000 or more members in the 1980
deregulation of the transportation industry, truck drivers are a potential
source of new members - desperately needed new members to replace the tens of
thousands more lost as Asia continues to supplant U.S. manufacturing.
To environmentalists and community activists in San Pedro, Wilmington and
Long Beach, diesel exhaust from dirty trucks causes asthma attacks and lung
cancer; as the state air board puts pressure on ships to burn cleaner fuel while
in the harbor, they hope a fleet of new, clean trucks returns their air to its
crystal-clear, natural state.
For port officials eager to accommodate what they predict will be a
tripling of business in the next 20 years, the dirty-truck problem appears to be
one of the more manageable pieces of the overall puzzle of port air pollution, a
problem that has stood in the way of expansion since 2001, when community
groups, supported by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Coalition for
Clean Air, successfully sued the Port of Los Angeles to cease construction on a
new terminal for China Shipping, citing concerns for the health of local
residents. Three years later, the terminal opened with electrical hookups for
ships parked in the harbor (visiting trucks, however, still pollute), and port
officials are predicting that newer, cleaner trucks will reduce air pollution
sufficiently to mollify the litigious environmental and community groups.
United under the single banner of the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports,
environmental and labor groups have lobbied hard for an overhauling of what's
known as the "port drayage" system. This, they say, is needed to repair
dangerous highways, reduce air pollution and even shore up the state's
deteriorating infrastructure. And in April, they announced something of a
victory: The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, now engaged in a coordinated
effort to clean up the air, agreed to integrate a Clean Trucks Program into
their ballyhooed and historic Clean Air Action Plan.
Under the new trucks plan, slated to begin its first stage in January 2008,
existing port trucks will be gradually replaced with newer models, funded by
$1.8 billion in subsidies from a variety of sources, including port revenues and
state bond moneys. By 2012, the plan aims to have every pre-2007 truck off the
port-adjacent roadways for good.
"It's a very ambitious schedule," admits Port of Long Beach Planning
Director Bob Kanter. "But we must make these radical changes, and we must make
them now."
But there's another catch to the Clean Trucks Program, one that isn't as
simple as upgrading the trucks: To gain entry to the mighty ports of Southern
California, say port officials, trucking companies will have to sever their
relationships with truckers as owner-operators and bring them onboard as
employees. With health care. And vacation.
"We're landlords and we're going to start acting like it," Harbor
Commission President S. David Freeman tells me at a rally for the truckers last
March. "No more of this owner-operator business; we're putting an end to
that."
For now, the ports have agreed to a 60-day study period to determine the
economic impact of the program, but both Freeman and Port of Los Angeles
Executive Director Geraldine Knatz insist that the labor provision of what they
call "the concessionaire model" will not change, no matter what the study
determines.
"There just hasn't been any other model proposed to us that's going to be
able to deliver what we need," Knatz says.
Freeman is more direct, and when asked whether the plan isn't just a
softhearted liberal concession to the beleaguered drivers, says, "We can't very
well be giving away new trucks to just anybody, can we? We need people with deep
enough pockets that we can hurt them if they do something wrong."
It's no surprise that the California Trucking Association, which represents
the 1,800-odd trucking firms that serve the ports - some no bigger than 10
workers strong - plans to sue to stop or drastically change the plan. "We don't
think they have the jurisdiction to make these kind of rules," says Patty
Senecal, voluntary spokesperson for the CTA, at a recent meeting of the state's
air board at the Port of Los Angeles. "Are we saying now that cities have more
power than the state to regulate air quality? More than the federal
government?
"It's re-regulation," she adds. "And it's more than likely going to
court."
Not all truckers at the ports believe the Clean Trucks Program is the
answer to their woes either.
"They haven't told us anything - how much they're going to pay us for our
trucks, how much they're going to pay us for work, nothing," says Paul Ventura,
a driver from Mexico who's been working the ports for five years. Ventura is
standing along the railing outside a meeting held for the truckers at Banning
Landing in Wilmington, listening cautiously. I ask him in Spanish whether he
thinks the majority of the truck drivers at the ports want to be
employees.
"I don't think so," he says. "We worry that we won't have any control over
work, over prices. They're just doing this so they don't have to fix the real
problem, which is the long lines at the port, and those are caused by the
longshoremen and the clerks not doing their jobs fast enough. They make us
employees, but we'll never get paid as much as the longshoremen. And the
longshoremen can just keep doing whatever they want."
Rivera shares his concerns. "What are they going to pay us?" he asks.
"Fifteen dollars an hour? That's not enough. Will they pay our insurance? The
insurance we have to pay on the load?"
"How much will they pay us for the old trucks that we own?" Chicho wonders.
"Will they be thinking about the old people who are working when they hire
people, or will they just be looking for young guys?"
"They talk about the trucks, the trucks, the trucks," he says. "But does
anyone care about the drivers?"
"See it lean?" says Miguel Lopez, the port representative for the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He points toward a container truck
pulling out of a dirt lot in San Pedro, just across from the China Shipping
terminal. "If you were up close, you could hear the noise it makes. It's that
kind of thing that can flip over on you on the freeway."
It's a windy morning in the spring of 2006 when I meet up with Lopez, who
wants me to see how bad port truckers - and by extension the residents of
Southern California - need the Teamsters. "These guys would put their trucks
back together with cardboard and glue if they could," he says. "They ?can't
afford to think about safety."
In the dirt lot we find Alejandro, a slight, thin man from El Salvador who
works for the truckers the way the truckers work for trucking brokers - job by
job. Alejandro pulls his pickup truck close to the back wheels of a 1999
Peterbilt semitrailer container truck owned and operated by a Nicaraguan
immigrant named Carlos. With an implement that looks like a tiny crowbar,
Alejandro hand-carves new ridges into the tires' treads. He works slowly and
carefully, etching a zigzag pattern in the tires with his treading knife and
then pulling out the long string of loose rubber. At the end of the day, the
ground will be littered with rubber rickrack, the detritus from a hard day of
Alejandro's work. If the California Highway Patrol pulls Carlos over for an
inspection, his grooves will meet the legal eighth-of-an-inch
standard.
"That's illegal," Lopez says gruffly. "It's not safe to retread tires this
way; they're supposed to get them replaced. But they can't afford it, see? These
men don't make enough money to feed their families. They don't have $3,000 to
spend on 10 new tires."
Alejandro, who only speaks Spanish, smiles and continues his painstaking
work on Carlos' truck, for which he gets paid $35 per tire. (Carlos, for his
part, offers to help me find a boyfriend on the lot, someone to help me speak
better Spanish. "Truckers, you know," he says, "we don't have time for
wives.")
At the time when I first met Lopez, the union, along with another labor
consortium with a name reminiscent of sweepstakes or sports challenges, Change
to Win, had been working hard for months to call the public's attention to the
problem of ports and port trucking, without much luck. But last winter, their
efforts were given a boost when Dubai Ports World announced its intent to
purchase 22 U.S. ports from a British firm, P&O. Neither Long Beach nor Los
Angeles was among those 22 cities, but the news put ports in the media
spotlight: A rash of stories about post-9/11 security and keeping America's
ports out of foreign hands (even though all-American ownership disappeared years
ago) made it easier for men like Lopez to call attention to the risks associated
with a work force of immigrant labor, all in business as independent
owner-operators.
"I'm trying to make the public aware of this situation, that it puts us all
in harm's way," Lopez says. "And once we make them aware, we're going to
leverage that awareness to get something in place to stabilize this work force.
Industry has to change the way it does business."
Lopez talks to a tall, curly-haired man named Armistedes. He listens
carefully to Lopez's pitch, then shows us his Department of Motor Vehicles
registration card, proving that he pays $1,987 on his own truck plus $1,158 per
year on the shipper-owned chassis. "I don't know how it happened that we have to
pay this," he says. "One year, it's just the truck, the next year, it's like
this. We don't know why. How did this happen?"
Lopez explains that the road tax was added in 2001 to fund the repair of
California's freeways, which have been overburdened by heavy freight coming from
the bustling ports. The cost might have been more rightfully borne by shipping
companies such as Maersk-Sea-Land, Evergreen and China Shipping. But as the
international megabillion-dollar shipping industry pays lavishly for lobbying in
Sacramento, the burden, like so many others, got shoved onto the truckers.
"We get no money, no workers' comp, no disability, nothing," says
Armistedes, stretching his hamstrings by setting one leg on his wheel well and
bending his body toward it. "But it's our fault, because we're not united. For
instance, we don't get together and demand that rates go up. If fuel goes up,
the rates should go up. But the rates just keep going down."
"You need to understand that everybody is in the same position as you are,"
Lopez says to him. "And you can't fight it by yourself. Everybody needs to be
together to make things better."
Another cluster of drivers listens in from a few feet away, warily
interested in what Lopez is saying, clearly unsure what to make of this stocky
man with neatly slicked-back hair wearing a blue T-shirt and jeans, a man who
for some unknown reason wants them so badly to stick up for their rights. They
say little.
Continued from page 4
"You have to be careful," one of them tells me as he takes me over to see
his bald tires, laughing a little at their sorry condition. "El due?o puede oir
todo" - "the boss can hear everything."
Lopez seems to have a natural rapport with many of the drivers stopping by
the dirt lot, and he knows a lot about their circumstances - working conditions
and government laws that are, by any measure, unfair. But as the months wear on,
the organizing drive seems to hold more sway with local environmental groups and
port officials than it does with the truckers themselves.
After deregulation in 1979, the new trucking lines that emerged hired
independent owner-operator truckers; federal labor law prevented these drivers
from joining a union or otherwise organizing as a work force. Still, over the
years, they tried: In 1996, 6,000 drivers participated in a work stoppage led by
the Communication Workers of America, a strike that went nowhere and cost
truckers huge losses as shippers and trucking lines simply went about their
business with a skeletal crew. In 2006, on May 1, the Day Without Immigrants
kept 90 percent of the drivers out of their trucks, and for a day, freight
simply didn't move.
But the Teamsters have been far less successful, holding one underattended
rally after another, each with a strangely Potemkin-village feel to it: A single
rally last spring with free food and water peaked at 200 truckers, but previous
rallies, such as a convoy that circled Long Beach City Hall last November, lured
only a dozen, and another action in late June of this year, billed as a stunt
that would shut down the 110 freeway with 100 dirty trucks, pulled together only
30 trucks, and traffic didn't slow at all.
Honorio Ramirez blames the problem on the truckers' unwillingness to
organize. "Nobody wants to stop working," he says. But another man I meet at the
port, who asks not to be identified, puts it in more descriptive terms as he
observes the buff and energetic Teamsters organizers prowling the dirt
lot.
"These [Teamster organizers] come down here in the blue T-shirts and nice
haircuts, and right away I knew they weren't truckers. They're too big! I
thought they were police or FBI. They must take a lot of
vitamins."
In the late 1930s, a gas-station entrepreneur turned trucking magnate named
Malcom McClean watched rectangular cotton bales being loaded onto trucks by
crane and wondered whether a truck trailer could be filled with goods and then
transferred in its entirety - without intermediate unloading - from ship to
truck. Nearly two decades later, in 1956, he tried it out. With $12 million in
annual profits from his trucking business, he bought a tanker ship, the Ideal-X,
pulled it into a port in New Jersey and loaded it with 58 truck bodies crammed
with goods. When the ship arrived at port in Houston, 58 trucks with newly
minted chassis were waiting to receive them. It was an act that changed
everything - the way we dress, shop, eat, work; who we trade with, who we don't,
how much we pay for our sweaters and how little control we have over our imports
(the recent spate of China recalls, in fact, could never have happened without
the container revolution).
"Before the container," writes Marc Levinson in his book The Box: How the
Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger,
"transporting goods was expensive - so expensive that it did not pay to ship
many things halfway across the country, much less halfway across the world."
After containerization, "the cost of bringing raw materials in and sending
finished goods out had dropped like a stone."
The advent of containerization also, eventually, changed the map of the
world: No longer were New York Harbor and Liverpool chief points of entry for
imported goods in their respective countries. Too small to handle the huge
container ships like McClean's Ideal-X tanker, and too crowded to accommodate
the towering gantry cranes so essential to container transfer, these historic
ports gave way to more modern harbors at Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, and
Felixstowe in the U.K. As both the price of doing business with Asia dropped and
trade regulations relaxed with China, the combined ports of Los Angeles and Long
Beach inched up to occupy the No. 5 spot on the list of the busiest container
ports in the world.
None of this happened instantly. The benefits of container shipping over
the traditional "break-bulk" way of shipping goods were obvious to most
manufacturers - it meant they didn't have to pay leagues of dockworkers to
unload shipped goods box by box (all the while hoarding a few boxes for the mobs
that ran the waterfront); they only needed a crane operator to pick up the
container and maneuver it onto a ship. But both labor unions and the old ports
themselves fought hard for the status quo.
It would take 20 years for containerization to take hold over the global
economy. It would also take a war: Just as Phineas Banning put San Pedro Harbor
on the map in the 19th century supplying Union troops in West Coast outposts
during the Civil War, McClean only managed to prove the merits of his system
during the Vietnam War, when his new shipping company, Sea-Land, ponied up for a
container terminal at Da Nang Harbor to resupply the military there. By the end
of the 1990s, container shipping accounted for nearly all of the ship traffic
entering the San Pedro and Long Beach harbors.
It's hard to overestimate the impact of McClean's invention on the modern
world - almost every exaggeration about it turns out to be true.
Containerization obliterated the tight-knit communities of workers on the docks
and replaced them with a much smaller staff of machine operators and clerks, and
thus revolutionized the business of moving goods from one point to the next. As
containerization overtook break-bulk cargo handling, shipping companies looked
for more ways to increase profits, including re-examining a labor force that in
some ways had become obsolete.
Continued from page 5
The dockworkers, with their formidable union, the ILWU, managed to hold
wage and price protections in place as well as increase their membership by
drawing new members into their union, such as shipping clerks and office
personnel. Because you couldn't build a new port overnight and staff it with
nonunion workers, the longshoremen could keep pressure on an industry that
wanted nothing to stand in the way of its rapid growth. Crane operators, the
"cr?me de la cr?me" of the port work force, now make upward of $100,000 a year;
clerks $30 to 40 an hour, or $70,000 to $90,000 per year.
But the Teamsters had no such luck with truckers. The rapid deregulation of
the transportation industry coincided with a period of bloody civil war in three
Central American countries, and while trucking companies scrambled to dismantle
their expensive work force, they were greeted by people who had just made their
arduous way out of war-torn Central American countries and were willing to work
hard without asking too many questions. If you threw a camshaft into the crowd
at the dirt lot on Knoll Street, you would likely find a man who had come over
from Nicaragua, El Salvador or Guatemala 20 to 25 years ago because his village
had been burned to the ground and, anyway, there was no work.
People like Honario Ramirez (Nicaragua, 24 years ago), Wenceslao Rodriguez
(Guatemala, 25 years ago) and the very drivers the Teamsters would like to
organize now came in as scabs in the 1980s, desperate for work they could take
without verifying their citizenship.
There is widespread concern among the current crop of drivers that many of
them will lose their jobs once the ports' plan goes into effect. Outside a
meeting at Banning Landing in early June, I ask Patricia Castellanos,
co-director of the ports' labor campaign for a group called the Los Angeles
Alliance for a New Economy, whether the plan to replace the port trucks and make
drivers employees would protect the jobs of the current port truckers.
"Preferential hiring" of the existing work force has been built into the
program, but labor protections for existing workers typically apply only to
workers making the transition from unionized employee to non-unionized employee
- not to independent contractors making the jump to employee status. Castellanos
insists that the drivers would be hard to replace.
"If you listen to them, you'll hear that most of them have been driving for
20, 25 years," she says. "It seems unlikely that the trucking companies would be
able to find qualified drivers to replace them." She notes that requirements for
commercial licenses were stringent, and that "driving at the ports is like
nothing else." She also cites the nationwide shortage of short-haul
truckers.
But if working conditions improve, will the shortage continue? And what
about undocumented workers - by some estimates 25 percent to 40 percent of the
current port trucker population - who somehow manage to secure commercial
licenses without documentation?
"They'll fall off anyway because of TWIC," says Arley Baker. TWIC, the
Transportation Workers Identity Confirmation program, will require as of January
2008 that everyone working in the business of containerized trade and transport
have federal certification, a process that will require certification of U.S.
citizenship, legal-resident status or a work visa. "They won't be able to come
and go as they please anymore."
Baker shrugs off the truckers' worries about their future as employees.
"There's a lot of flexibility in the working hours," he says. "I remember when
everyone hated PierPASS. Now they're used to it, and 39 percent of the goods
move at night."
Most truckers, though, hate PierPASS, the program instituted in 2004 to
relieve congestion at the ports by extending terminal operating hours. The
program benefited shippers by allowing the loading and unloading of freight at
all hours of the night and day. The ILWU likes it because it increased
possibilities for overtime hours. But for truckers it just meant more waiting:
Loads that used to be concentrated into 10 or 12 hours were now spread out over
24. Truckers now say they commonly work 16 hours a day - lying in their official
log books - to pick up enough loads to pay their bills. And the long waits at
the terminals have not abated.
"I have someone good for you," Saul Vasquez says. "He wants to talk, and he
speaks English pretty good."
Vasquez runs the lunch truck at the dirt lot on Knoll Street, where, except
for him, the scene changes slightly every day. Sometimes there is Mary, a
petite, attractive redhead who stands behind a folding table stocked with little
white bottles of pills and foil packets of powders, including HerbaLife vitamins
for better eyesight, and effervescent drink tablets - "por la energ?a," she
tells me - which, by my own anecdotal testing, puts Rockstar to shame. On other
days, a man sells sweatshirts and pants from a truck, because, he says, truckers
often can't make it home at night before they start work the next day, and need
to change clothes.
Juan Moreno, 39, is dressed impeccably in a white T-shirt and neatly
pressed jeans, his black hair gelled into a spiky do. "I like my job," he says.
"I'm my own person. I make pretty good money and I'm good at it. I'm a good
driver.
"But I don't like the way I'm treated inside," he says, referring to inside
the terminal, where drivers interact with clerks to pick up their loads. "They
don't treat me with respect. They get mad at me almost every day. And it doesn't
ever make sense what they get mad at you for."
Continued from page 6
It turns out to be a common complaint, one shared by port truckers who
could rattle off a list of troubles, and others, like Juan Moreno, who refuse to
carp about pay and worker's comp but do gripe about the clerks. To enter the
terminal to pick up a load, a driver has to give certain information to a
shipping clerk stationed at an intercom at each terminal. One bit of information
is the driver's commercial driver's-license number; the rest - the chassis
number, the destination and the name of the vessel delivering the cargo - he
gets from the trucking firm.
"They don't call you by your name," says Marcos, another one of Vasquez's
finds. "We don't speak English well, most of us, and there are technical
problems sometimes with the speakers. Sometimes they ask you to repeat your
driver's-license number 10 times."
"Most drivers speak only Spanish, or their English is broken, so they learn
by heart what to say: the container number and the driver's license number,"
explains a driver named Melvin, a 40-year-old who came to the U.S. from El
Salvador when he was 8. "But if the person in the speaker asks them something
different, they don't understand it. And then the yelling starts."
It used to be worse, Marcos attests. "You used to have to park your truck,
get out of your truck and go inside an office" to pick up a load. "Now that's
changed. Now it's all electronic. And you have to be honest - things have gotten
better. Evergreen and APL are still bad. But at Maersk sometimes, they even use
your name."
Like many of the drivers at the port with this problem, Melvin thinks the
conflict is a racial issue: Most of the clerks are women, and most of them are
black, while nearly all the drivers are Spanish-speaking men.
"Black people like to intimidate us," he says. "There's competition between
the races, because white people control everything."
Melvin insists I need to sneak in with a trucker to witness these
interactions. But having already been in his share of trouble, he isn't willing
to host me. Instead, I find another trucker, a 57-year-old grandfather named
Felipe, who agrees to pick me up at the dirt lot one morning and let me crouch
in the back of his truck undetected to hear what really goes on.
"As long as it's not a hot day, you'll be okay," says Felipe, whose truck
has no air conditioning.
But Felipe stands me up. When I run into him a few days later at the lunch
truck, I ask him what happened. "Something terrible," he told me. "A man brought
his 16-year-old son in to help him, and let the son drive the truck."
Marcos explains the story to me later in the day. He circles around his
truck, a tractor unhinged from any chassis, and stands in between the chassis
and the cab.
"The father was standing here," he explains, gesturing at his chest with
both hands. "And he told his son, 'Back up the truck as close as you can.' The
son backed up and cut his father in half."
The Port of Los Angeles confirms the incident: On November 2, a trucker
brought his 16-year-old son along in his cab. While the driver was on the
ground, adjusting his 40-foot chassis to carry a 20-foot container, the son put
the tractor into reverse and crushed his father.
"He got caught in the mechanism [of the chassis]," says port spokesperson
TheresaAdams Lopez. "It was a pretty horrible accident."
Several drivers tell me that that accident has heightened security inside
the terminals, which was already getting tighter - sneaking someone in isn't as
easy as it used to be. "We were trying to tighten up even before that," Lopez
says, "but I would say that incident made it more difficult [for truckers] to
bring people in."
Beyond basic human dignity, the tension between the truckers and clerks has
safety implications. In a 2004 study conducted by Kristen Monaco and Lisa Grober
for Cal State Long Beach, the authors write that "several drivers mentioned to
the survey team that they were hassled by workers at the terminals if they
refused to take bad chassis too often, or if they spent too much time inspecting
the chassis themselves." In addition, nearly 50 percent of drivers reported that
they had been given a chassis that was not roadworthy in the 30 days prior to
taking the survey. More than 20 percent of drivers admitted that they took the
bad chassis on the road.
"I don't take no shit," Chicho tells me over the phone, as he sits at the
APL terminal, his wait stretching past two hours. "You have to take three or
four loads a day to make enough money to survive," he says, "and you can't when
you have to wait three hours to pick up a load. The longshoremen take breaks,
they come back a half-hour late - they don't care." Clerks have yelled at him,
threatened him, even tried to make him haul an overweight or unsafe
load.
"If they are rude to me, I get out of my truck with my picket sign," Chicho
says. "I say, 'No more! You cannot treat us this way!' If they try to make me
take an overweight container, I say no. I feel it when I drive away, and I say,
'I don't want to take it.'
"They say, then, 'You don't work for a day.'
"I say, 'I don't care.' I feel it overweight, I drop the load."
To Mike Mitre, president of ILWU Local 13, it's the shippers and terminal
operators who create the waits - as well as the friction between the work forces
- by understaffing the terminals.
Continued from page 7
"No longshoreman or clerk wants to make anyone wait," says the union
president. "The smoother things go, the better it is for everyone. But the
terminal operator sets the manpower rules and standards. And often there just
aren't enough people on the job."
Chicho doesn't buy it. "They treat us ?like garbage," he says. "They make
it so that everybody is against everybody else. This is the way everything has
run in this place forever. And nobody cares."
Chicho knows that if he becomes an employee, he will need a union. But he
worries about which one will win the fight to organize the truckers once they're
in a position to be legally organized. The International Longshore and Warehouse
Union, now caught up in contract negotiations for the shipping clerks, claims to
have no interest in organizing the truckers, despite a 1997 agreement with the
Pacific Merchants Shipping Associationto bring drayage jobs under its influence.
Still, Chicho worries the Teamsters will prove no match for the ILWU
locals.
"The longshoremen have a lot of ideas, they have power," Chicho says. "And
whoever organizes the truckers - Teamsters, Wobbly, whatever - they choose the
driver. If the longshoremen could take over the drivers, that would be powerful.
Then they have all the power. But right now, the way things are, the
longshoremen is afraid to share with the driver his economy.
"Who controls the drivers controls the pier, and who controls the pier
controls the container. And who controls the container," Chicho concludes,
"controls the economy in this country."
Oscar Domingo, a short, dark, mustachioed trucker, stands alone at a
meeting of the air resources board, speaking Spanish to a young woman who
translates his words haltingly into a microphone. He does not pretend to have
the answer to this puzzle of clean air, labor rights, poverty and profit for the
ports; he does not propose, as one man did, that the state of California spring
for a couple of huge fans to blow the smoke out to sea. He simply pleads with
the board, as everyone does, to consider his life.
"Are you thinking about the 8,000 or 9,000 families that will be affected
by whatever you do?" he asks. "Do you understand what will happen to
them?"
Sadly, despite all the rallies, the meetings, the organizing efforts and
the official port programs, out of all the associations and trucking firms and
environmental groups and new companies with new technology to save old trucks,
Domingo is the least likely to be heard. No somos unidos, as one trucker told
me. We are not united. And so far, no group has been up to the task of
uniting.
There's yet one more possible outcome of the struggle to fix the problem of
port trucking, one in which the truckers don't become employees, the trucking
companies continue meting out work in parcels, the shippers continue to bid down
rates, and the residents of San Pedro and Long Beach continue to breathe the
ports' dirty air: an outcome that ties up regulations in the courts for
years.
In early July, the California State Air Resources Board announced its own
plan to clean up the state's ports, one that would apply to the Port of Oakland
as well as Long Beach and Los Angeles, would address air quality in the Inland
Empire and San Diego as well as the ports, and one that makes no demands on the
industry except that it clean up the ports' air. According to the plan, all
trucks at the port would have to display a special sticker verifying the use of
modern emissions-control technology by 2010. The air board would secure bond
funds to help subsidize retrofits and the purchase of new trucks, most of which
(an undetermined sum) would be distributed through the individual
ports.
In another world, the trucking companies and manufacturers might have
fought bitterly to resist the ARB's plan. They would take the agency to court,
the way the shipping industry has done, and the automobile industry has done, to
stop it from doing a job they think only the federal government will do (and
under the Bush administration, at least, the federal government won't do). But
with the ports' more stringent and sweeping plan looming over their bleak
futures, the ARB's looks pretty good to the trucking firms. In fact, the ARB
itself looks like an ally - at a public workshop to explain the rules to the
public, those owners of trucking firms took the microphone to beg the air board
to somehow exert its authority to stop the ports from taking matters into their
own hands.
Over and over again, the ARB's technology manager, Michael Miguel, refused.
"We support what [the ports] are doing as long as it meets our minimum
requirements," he said, "which they seem to be going above and beyond. It would
be silly for the state not to allow that."
"But their plan is veering into the very dangerous territory of free
enterprise," pleaded Roger Ramirez, the owner of a company called InterCity
Trucking.
"We're an air-quality board," Miguel answered. "Our goal is to clean up the
air."
"You can't put some control on them to say that they can't add on labor
issues?"
"We're setting emissions standards," Miguel reaffirmed. "As long as they
meet the minimum emissions standards and reporting requirements, we give them
the money."
"Help us," said another trucking-line owner. "We need your help."
Another trucking-company owner claimed he'd already seen business diverted
in protest to the Port of New Orleans; yet another wondered why trucking lines
should upgrade their equipment now if they can't weather the ports' changing
business plans. "We're just going to be thrown under the bus," he said wearily.
"Why should we comply?"
The CTA's Patty Senecal vowed once again to sue: "If there's pending
litigation, does that stop ARB giving the ports money to upgrade the trucks?" In
other words - would it be possible with one, long lawsuit to keep port trucking
exactly the way it is, at least for a few years?
The answer wasn't certain. But it wasn't no.
"We'll take your valid concerns back to our bond staff," one ARB staffer
finally allowed. "And we'll see what we can do."