| "When you're an immigrant, you come here, and want to live the American dream. But it has become the American nightmare for the port drivers," Ruiz said. It had been different before deregulation.
"Truck drivers used to be the king of the road. It meant getting out of the bad neighborhood. After deregulation, everything went into the gutter."
Bensman's report explains why,"There has long been a vein of economic thought characterizing unregulated transportation markets as inherently destructive. According to this analysis, once an independent truck driver delivers freight to a customer (the front haul), it makes sense for him to agree to accept a low rate from a shipper to send freight back to the driver's point of origin (back haul). Eventually, these low backhaul rates become the market price. Competition tends to drive this price down to the driver's cost for the return trip. Since the rate is not high enough for the trucker to pay his maintenance bills, lease payments, and licensing fees, drivers skimp on service and maintenance, work excessive hours, and frequently leave the industry. The port trucking market has mirrored this analysis since passage of the Motor Carrier Act."
If anything, that clinical description paints a rosy picture compared to what Ruiz and thousands of others like him experienced first hand. It says nothing of contemptuous attitudes of trucking company owners and managers, the illusions that come with "being your own boss" when the reality is that you have no choice whatsoever, and the utter lack of power drivers experience, since their misclassification as independent contractors makes it illegal for them to collectively bargain or strike.
And yet, out of sheer desperation, Ruiz saw four strikes in his fourteen years serving the docks. The first was in 1986, his first year there. By the time the next one came, he was ready to get involved. "'88 was my first strike," Ruiz recalled. The cause? "Lack of good pay, and increased cost of living, spending too much time to make too little money." The chronic problem was increased containerization, leading to astronomical wait times- up to eight hours according to an LA Times article covering the strike. But Ruiz recalls that an increase in fuel cost was the last straw.
"When that happens," Ruiz said, "they never come to you and say, 'You know, we see the price of fuel went up, and we're going to pay you another $20."
At the same time, the truckers actually joined forces with the California Trucking Association to formally request that the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) force terminals to pay truckers for long wait times, to offset the costs of running a truck. The FMC rejected the claim, citing a lack of "hard facts to support the request." Precisely because of their desperate straights, truckers could only hold out so long. Three weeks was their limit, and the strike collapsed.
The 1993 strike was similar to 1988 both in origin and length, but it differed in timing, coming in early November, with Christmas shipping at full tilt. The LA Times quoted Port of Long Beach spokeswoman Yvonne Avila saying there was "a drastic reduction in the number of trucks at the harbor," with an estimate that traffic was running 90 percent below normal. Still, the large corporations might lose business. Truckers' families would starve. And so the strike ended with a token $5 increase to cover fuel price hikes. "We had asked for $15," Ruiz recalled. "Then, when they find who the leaders are they get rid of them." Even that $5 gain was short-lived. "Then they said, 'the insurance is going up; we need to charge you $10 dollars.'"
The 1996 strike was different. "That went on for three months. The CWA [Communications Workers of America] came in and they tried to organize us. That was the biggest organizing drive that happened."
Still, it was not enough. Perhaps most tellingly, there was no pre-strike coordination with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union-coordination that could easily have made all the difference.
This time around, the Teamsters are taking a stepwise approach-first working to change the rules, ending the misclassification of truckers as independent owner operators-as part of a broad coalition, the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, that includes environmentalists, public health advocates and communities of faith. Their argument is that impoverished truckers can never be part of the clean air solution-only financially secure truckers can be.
"If you give a truck to me," said Ruiz, without any change in truckers' finances, "within 5 years, I guarantee all I'm going to have is an old used truck. So what is the point of spending $1.2 billion, if within five years we're going to be back on square one?"
Two separate teams of economists-Beacon Economics and Boston Consulting Group- reached the same conclusion in early 2008, which is why the Port of LA is committed to a model making all port truckers employees-a battle that's now moving to the national stage, with a lawsuit in federal court and lobbying in DC for legislative or administrative law changes to allow the plan to go forward.
Then, at least, union organizing will be legally possible.
"If you don't attend to the problems of the truck driver, and the fact that under the status quo they have no rights, you're never going to fix anything," Ruiz said. "That's why the Port is taking it to the highest level."
"Otherwise, there is no way out." |
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