Flanked by a large group L.A. port drivers, and opening for L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Sierra Club’s Allison Chin, Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa delivered a thundering keynote last Thursday at the Los Angeles Good Jobs, Green Jobs Regional Conference on the on-going fight to make port trucking a good and green American job. And he got a second by both environmental champions Allison Chin and the L.A. Mayor! “We are going to look for every way we can to make sure that independent truckers who are misclassified, who are really employees in every respect of the word, that they get their justice,’’ Villaraigosa told the audience (port drivers and the greenies went bonkers after he dropped that line!). No doublespeak for the mayor either, he delivered that same message at the shippers’ conference in Long Beach a week before.
Despite the drastic reduction of drayage-based pollution at the L.A. ports, Hoffa also echoed Mayor Villaraigosa’s declaration that the fight is far from over, and the Teamsters remain fervently committed to achieving the “blue” goals of this Blue-Green Alliance—delivering good wages, and a voice on the job for drivers. The mayor reaffirmed his administration’s and the city’s commitment to changing the way the port industry treats their workforce, a.k.a. ending the misclassification swindle.
Port drivers continue being treated as second-class citizens, and enduring the third-world like working conditions, whether they’re employees or drivers disguised as “independent contractors.” Case in point: the ongoing driver battle for union recognition at Australian based Toll Group’s L.A. facilities, which has brought international attention, and solidarity from Australia’s powerful Transport Workers Union (TWU), including a vow in L.A. from TWU’s national secretary Tony Sheldon to hold Toll accountable for their disgusting labor practices
Well Xiomara isn’t holding back something else either—her story, and willingness to continue the fight. With Hoffa and her fellow port drivers on stage, and both TWU national secretary Tony Sheldon and the L.A. mayor in the audience, Xiomara delivered a heartfelt speech on what they’ve endured to arrive at the cusp of achieving the biggest Teamster victory in the port industry with Toll’s upcoming union election. And guess who has her back? L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
As if Xiomara’s story and the treatment by her employer wasn’t shady enough, she was joined by Carla Campos, a worker from a local recycling facility, American Reclamation, who also described the third-word like workplace conditions she stand against. Like Xiomara, Carla Campos was also fired for flagging health and safety obligations. Based on the successes and framework of the Clean and Safe Ports Campaign, cleaning up the L.A. recycling industry has been the basis of the “Don’t Waste LA” campaign, a blue-green effort to increase the rates of recycling, and set safety and workplace standards.
Two valiant women, mirror image campaigns, and one common goal: cleaning up industry’s act. If L.A. waste doesn’t end up in our backyards in urban landfills, it finds its way to the ports ready for export on trucks being driven by workers like Xiomara Perez.
The message out of the conference is crystal clear: jobs can’t be good or green if they’re not union!
It’s Day 10. There are so many things happening at the Port of Seattle – but business-as-usual work ain’t one of them.
Like always, Puget Sound’s port truck drivers are busting their humps ‘round the clock, but instead of hustling cargo under unjust and unsafe conditions, these normally voiceless workers are holding meetings, taking votes, making signs, taking names, calling legislators, staging actions, granting interviews, sending delegations…in other words, they are organizing themselves.
And it is increasingly evident that port operations are running on fumes as a result.
Containers are normally stacked only two or three high. Now every stack climbs to four or five units tall. The chronically congested, seemingly endless terminal lines are gone, replaced by skimpy truck queues maybe 10 or 11 rigs deep. Ships that look as lonely as they are large can be spotted from Highway 99, idling in Puget Sound. Those are the ocean liners that can’t unload cargo or receive exports because there are too few drivers to move the shipments. Several trucking companies have gates closed or chains around their fences to yards that are normally only locked at night.
“It’s beginning to seem like a ghost town because all last week I didn’t see a single truck come through from the major cargo haulers at the port. Seattle Freight, Pacer, Western Ports, none of them! This does mean less work for some of us, but me and the guys here get it. We all work at the same port, handle the same freight containers, and want the same things for our families. It’s not right that we have dignity while they are treated like dirt,” observed BG Lemmon, a railroad yard contractor and single father of five from Tukwila.
The intermodal machine operator with 26 years at the port paused, before adding: “If I were forced to take safety shortcuts, I’d grab my coworkers and walk off the job too. They’re making a huge sacrifice. Maybe their companies don’t respect them, but all of us here at the railroad sure as hell do.”
See for yourself here. More photos will be added to this Flickr gallery soon, and if you’re local send me yours with captions too.
Wait, are you still getting up to speed?
Sorry, these drivers are moving sooooo fast, maybe I am too…here’s the blog that broke the story. But in a nutshell: Roughly 120 of Seattle’s port truck drivers self-organized and sacrificed a day’s wages on Monday, January 30 to make a trek to the state capitol. They passionately support a pair of bills that would make owners of faulty equipment responsible for road hazards that cost lives, and wipe out the Wall Street-like self-employment scheme that transportation businesses use to defraud blue-collar workers, cheat on taxes, and skirt safety and environmental regulations.
Toll Watch provides real-time dispatches, live updates and social media/video updates to assist LA workers achieve democracy in the workplace. We keep tabs on Toll Group by monitoring and reporting the company’s attempts to undermine their worker’s right to a free and fair vote to unionize. [Read our first Toll Watch and sign up here for instant alerts.]
Determined to keep all eyes on a fair process, a group of community watchdogs went out on their first monitoring shift outside Toll’s yard. The units, consisting of community, labor, and public health groups, are serving as roving watchdogs to closely monitor management’s behavior.
Weathering the cold evening breeze near the port, and with clipboards in hand, they talked to a dozen Toll drivers eager to relay Toll’s latest dirty tricks and anti-union election shenanigans. True to form, what they heard and documented is consistent with Toll management’s antagonistic behavior thus far. See what community monitor, Amanda Mendoza, found out…
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 out Toll Watchfor latest updates 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
UPDATE12:00 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.
