The first in a series of real-time dispatches, live updates and social media/video updates to assist LA workers achieve democracy in the workplace by monitoring and reporting Toll Group’s attempts to undermine their free and fair vote to unionize. [Check back or sign up here for instant alerts.]
It’s not hard to make some assumptions about who the underdog is here.
In our corner you have roughly 75 underpaid Southern California workers who have endured nearly a year of humiliation and harassment on the job. On the other side, there’s an Australian CFO-turned-CEO of an $8.3 billion global mega corporation and his team of U.S. executive henchmen.
Astonishingly though, it was the truck drivers who challenged their employer to step into the ring. Last week, via an international telephone press briefing, they announced they had filed for a workplace election – a balloting process unlike voting in an American political context that has been compared to “illegitimate charades staged by authoritative regimes outside of democratic nations.”
So why are these workers inviting what is seemingly a fixed fight?
First, these symbols of the 99% are as smart as they are strong when it comes to overcoming their handicap against the 1%. They launched their challenge just as the nation’s top labor agency issued a formal complaint stating that Toll “has been interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees” in violation of the National Labor Relations Act. The move by the National Labor Relations Board is the result of Toll refusing to remedy a series of workplace violations and the company will now be prosecuted in an upcoming federal trial. Second, while a workplace election is advantageous to union hostile employers, the workers have carefully evaluated the risks, assessed their strong majority support for the union, and came up with a real plan to withstand the sucker punches their employer is sure to pull.
UPDATE 8:35 pm PST 2/2/12 -Seattle Times Transportation writer Mike Lindblom breaks the Port’s media blackout attempts! http://bit.ly/xj0pyn
UPDATE 12:00 pm PST 2/2/12 – Port officials are denying to reporters that workers have walked off the job to protest runaway safety hazards; they claim there is zero slowdown! Please help get the truth out…
Monday mornings are the busiest at any port, but this past one in Seattle the trucks were parked. Drivers spanning the major companies that do the most business in the Puget Sound simply turned off the engines, got out of their cabs, and stopped hauling. They had somewhere else they needed to be.
Steely determination led roughly 150 port drivers to sacrifice income and risk retaliation to make the hour-and-a-half trek to swarm the State Capitol in Olympia.
Commerce at the Port of Seattle slowed to a trickle, and hasn’t picked up since.
This week the truck drivers – who toil under the guise of false self-employment – are making it their job to sound the alarm on occupational hazards, overweight containers, shoddy equipment, risks to motorists, and the culprits responsible for these rampant safety violations: their employers and their giant retail shipper clients like Wal-Mart, Sears, and Target.
The trucking bosses at Pacer, Seattle Freight, Western Ports and others were stunned, but the state troopers weren’t. Washington’s top cops testified before lawmakers right alongside the workers, detailing a dizzying array of dangers associated with the drayage industry: Chronic safety violations so serious that an investigative journalist discovered late last year that officers pulled 32% of rigs they inspected outside the terminals off the road — double the rate for trucks throughout the state. When specially trained troopers conducted more thorough inspections in 2011, King 5 TV reported, 58% of Port of Seattle cargo vehicles were yanked. And according to Captain Jason Berry’s testimony, an astonishing 80% have been put out of service during certain recent time periods.
As their trucks remain parked, they’ve asked allies and supporters to help amplify their voices by reposting this and spreading the word about why they flooded the legislative hearing room to standing room-only capacity. One by one, they ferociously spoke in favor of HB 2527, a bill to shift responsibility for fixing the hazards, paying fines, and correcting safety violations off their sweat-ridden backs, and onto the broad shoulders of the mega-rich corporate owners of the tools of the trade like chassis.
Semere Woldu, who has been hauling cargo at the Port of Seattle for 8 years, told the panel:
“Our work is extremely dangerous. So the safety laws are very important. Unfortunately though, we drivers are forced to pay for violations that we are not responsible for. We often get tickets or are cited for faulty equipment that we don’t own. One time, my boss knew I had a heavy load. He told me to go by the scale early in the morning when it was closed to avoid having the load weighed.”
More drivers cited these illegal pressures their employers put them under, and shared their fears for their personal safety and the lives of motorists. “Every day, I haul two or three loads that are overweight, possibly putting myself and others at risk,” said Aynalem Moba, a 14-year port veteran. “The truck could tip over. I’m afraid I might kill myself or someone else. Sometimes we’re carrying hazardous materials, and we don’t know it.”
Some explained the retaliation they face for blowing the whistle. They get banned from the terminals or are denied work by their dispatchers.
“The shipping and rail lines force us to use faulty equipment. One time I got a load that was 4-5,000 pounds overweight, and it was on a chassis that was insufficient for carrying heavy loads. The company told me to take it anyway,” said 13-year driver Calvin Borders. “I was really nervous about it. All that extra weight puts a lot of wear and tear on the truck. It blew my wheel seal…It cost me $450. My truck is my livelihood. If it doesn’t work, I don’t work.”
The downsizing and accompanying new recall eligibility policy, suspiciously implemented after drivers began their union organizing efforts, turns on its head Toll’s most recent track record on legitimate seasonal layoffs by instituting an absolute 90-day eligibility window for rehire.
We are the front-line workers who haul container rigs full of imported and exported goods to and from the docks and warehouses every day.
We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, Tacoma, New York and New Jersey to tell our collective story. We have accepted the honor to speak up for our brothers and sisters about our working conditions despite the risk of retaliation we face. One of us is a mother, the rest of us fathers. Between the five of us we have 11children and one more baby on the way. We have a combined 46 years of experience driving cargo from our shores for America’s stores.
We are inspired that a non-violent democratic movement that insists on basic economic fairness is capturing the hearts and minds of so many working people. Thank you “99 Percenters” for hearing our call for justice. We are humbled and overwhelmed by recent attention. Normally we are invisible.
Today’s demonstrations will impact us. While we cannot officially speak for every worker who shares our occupation, we can use this opportunity to reveal what it’s like to walk a day in our shoes for the 110,000 of us in America whose job it is to be a port truck driver. It may be tempting for media to ask questions about whether we support a shutdown, but there are no easy answers. Instead, we ask you, are you willing to listen and learn why a one-word response is impossible?
On the first business day following a meeting truck drivers had with a lawyer to file a wage theft lawsuit against Proud 2 Haul, Ivana Koprowski, the owner, terminated two of the drivers who attended the meeting. Felix Jay and Gonzalo Chirino claim that they were told their terminations were for “working against the company and not with the company.”
In response, truck drivers filed charges with the labor board and organized a rally at the Tullo Truck Stop in Kearny, NJ in support of the two terminated drivers.
Flanked by community leaders and Teamsters, Felix and Gonzalo marched into Proud 2 Haul’s offices to demand that they be reinstated, with back pay and full employee rights for all drivers at the company.
“I’ve been hauling containers for three decades at these ports and over the years conditions for truck drivers have only worse,” said Felix Jay a married father of five and one of the drivers who was terminated. “Low-road companies like Proud 2 Haul and ruthless owners like Ivana Koprowski have made it impossible for port truck drivers to earn a living. They never miss an opportunity to deduct money from our paychecks or to deny us basic employee rights.”
