Fighting for Clean Air & Good Jobs at the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma
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Driven by a broken economic system, port truck drivers in Seattle and Tacoma are robbed of basic protections afforded other types of workers in the United States and paid as little as $10 or $11 an hour. Low-wage port truck drivers are forced to carry the entire cost of owning and maintaining their own trucks and are often only able to afford to oldest and dirtiest trucks available. As a result, communities located near ports or along major truck routes are saturated by toxic, deadly diesel pollution.
The Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports is a local and national alliance of environmental activists, truck drivers, faith leaders, labor unions and community advocates fighting for environmental and economic justice at our nation’s ports.
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Running on Fumes: Snippets from the Port of Seattle
February 9, 2012
First of a running reporters’ notebook of front-line dispatches from the field Moved to act? Want to help? Repost and Donate to the Safe Drivers’ Family Support Fund posted by Joy Ride
Photo © David Bacon
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.
Waterfront employers reacted harshly. The local NPR station reported:
As many as 30 or 40 percent of the short-haul truckers who normally move containers from docks to railcar terminals at the Port of Seattle have stopped working.
The work stoppage comes after one of the drivers was retaliated against for attending a hearing in Olympia last week on a proposal to improve their working conditions.
They’re independent contractors, who are predominantly immigrants, and say the conditions they’re forced to contend with make the job unsafe.
One man’s story ignites a movement of workers uniting for safety and fairness
Family, friends and co-workers affectionately call Demeke Meconnen by his nickname derived from the Bible, “Yared.”
When his boss asked him why he had needed the day off, Yared simply told the truth: To go to Olympia to support a bill he feels passionately about that would improve port truck equipment safety.
And then this naturalized U.S. citizen was singled out and punished for exercising his free speech rights. He was sent to pick up a container that was overweight – precisely the safety violation issue he had just talked to state lawmakers about – and it didn’t belong to the famous bulls-eye branded retail store he runs routes for everyday. Since 2008, Yared has hauled for the Minneapolis-based big box as part of his trucking company’s Target Division.
When he refused to hitch the freight to his tractor because heavier loads require a special chassis or they could tip over on the roadway, his superior gave the 29-year-old who was born in Ethiopia a clear directive: Don’t come back until next week.
It’s important to note here that management at Western Ports Transport calls him “independent” as if they permitted Yared and the rest of their driver workforce to act as their own bosses and contract services to multiple clients like true self-employed individuals can. (They don’t. Disguising employees as contractors to game the system is a look-the-other-way widespread waterfront practice that robs workers of wages and their basic workplace and safety protections.)
News of Yared’s suspension spread fast. Twenty of his co-workers cancelled their loads in solidarity that very same day. Facing the realization that our protagonists were all united in protest off the job, the company was forced to change its tune and made him a return offer to un-jam the cargo backlog.
But that wasn’t good enough. Yared declined. By morning, 16 more learned of their brother’s mistreatment, and walked… er, drove off the job. Even more soon joined the multi-company worker safety stoppage, meaning this outfit is lucky to have haulers you can count on one hand, and leaving one of Target’s transportation providers with all but completely shut-down operations.
The ironically soft-spoken young leader continues organizing with his co-workers and is now among the over 400 drivers protesting their unsafe and unfair industry, wearing donated Black History month buttons with the image of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that simply read “Into the Streets – 2012.”
Watch Yared’s video testimonial here. [Full disclosure: Kent Christopher of Western Ports, also a top representative of the Washington Trucking Association, virulently denies Yared’s suspension account. I’ve personally seen his saved text messages… Let’s just say they make for awfully good evidence Demeke Meconnen is living up to his righteous biblical moniker.]
Question: People, or Profit? (Answer: Profit)
By now you are getting a disturbing picture of how the trucking and shipping industry shortcuts safety and shortchanges its workers all in the name of their bottom line. Their unbridled greed puts the public safety and health, working families, and our communities at risk.
For years the Port of Seattle CEO, Tay Yoshitani, has ignored residents, environmentalists, and drivers’ pleas for help to curry favor with – and cover up for – trucking and shipping industry executives.
From a King 5 TV report on the worker walkout, part of an ongoing investigative series that prompted lawmakers to introduce the port safety bill:
There are many complex issues in play, including drivers who claim they are forced to carry overweight loads. If a shipper can put more cargo in a container and move it for the same price, they make more money. Drivers say it happens all the time.
In front of lawmakers this week, the head of one shipping company said it wasn’t a problem.
But truck inspections conducted the day after that testimony tell a different story. The KING 5 Investigators requested port inspection records from the Washington State Patrol and Seattle Police. They show of 15 trucks inspected that day; four drivers were written tickets and three received warnings for being overweight.
“There’s a lot of overweight loads,” said [Yared] Meconnen. “We don’t even know what we’re taking out of the terminal.”
Bellamy Pailthorp of KPLU pressed the Port of Seattle on the stoppage (three cheers for being a reporter, rather than serving as a stenographer for the Port’s slick PR flacks who first tried to impose a media blackout by insisting all operations were fine:
In response, officials at the Port of Seattle say they’re trying to be supportive of the truckers. But spokesman Peter McGraw says their priority is keeping commerce flowing.
Emphasis mine. And no wonder the clever guerilla activists at the Rainforest Action Network recently illuminated the Space Needle with a batsignal-like projection that taunted “Welcome to the Port of Poverty & Pollution” to disrupt what otherwise would have been a business-as-usual back-slapping, port-shipping bureaucrat and hack schmoozefest in September.
Overheard on Facebook and Twitter:
Dude. These truck drivers don’t want to get killed on the job, and they don’t want to crush you or me to death in a preventable accident. Sounds like they’re not moving a thing until their working conditions are safe and humane. Support their work stoppage – spread the word.
Non-union truckers shut down Port of Seattle, storm capitol building in Olympia, WA to protest working conditions #insideagitators
Meet the Port of Seattle drivers who are staging a huge safety work stoppage right now. And telling their trucking bosses and Wal-Mart alike: your tricks are dirty, they are dangerous, and you damn well better treat America’s workers right.
They need our support! Seattle Times reports “They are not allowed to use restrooms at the port gates, and say they are sometimes called the N-word or animals.” #DriverShutDown
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Stay tuned for more at www.cleanandsafeports.org. Feel free to repost. And here’s how you can really help these workers in struggle who are standing up for you, me, safety and their families: Donate to the Safe Drivers’ Family Support FundBreaking: America’s Truck Drivers Shut Down Port of Seattle to Expose Dangers of the Job
February 1, 2012
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…
posted by Joy Ride
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.
If the drivers’ collective action sent shockwaves throughout the shipping and trucking industry, then their demonstration equally uprooted a commonly held societal belief. During the Occupy Wall Street port shutdowns, activists and well-intentioned sympathizers debated whether the blockades would siphon wages from port workers – arguably one of the greatest symbols of the 99% — or if it would suck profits from the 1%, such as the Seattle-based global terminal operator, Goldman Sachs’ SSA Marine, and its West Coast trucking outfit, Shipper’s Transport Express.
What their protest proves is that port drivers, as inside agitators, are very much willing to lose pay as a means to powerfully reveal the crushing economic forces that literally put their lives and livelihoods at risk. Even, and especially amidst a severe economic downturn. Their historical ability to self organize, unite, and seize opportunities to improve their working conditions is unfolding before our eyes. Hundreds more drivers have since joined the safety work stoppage, and some companies remain shut with too few workers to move the cargo.
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.”
Some of the protestors have already been suspended. That has only sparked their co-workers to walk off the job in solidarity – and disgust. On Wednesday, these non-unionized men and women who are desperately seeking the protections that collective bargaining rights would provide were leafleting the terminals and the docks, positively engaging the dockworkers brothers and sisters at the longshoremen’s union, vowing to stay united, keep fighting for their rights, and all of our safety.
We’ll post updates as they come in. Will you stand with them and help spread the word?
An Open Letter from America’s Port Truck Drivers on Occupy the Ports
December 12, 2011
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?
We love being behind the wheel. We are proud of the work we do to keep America’s economy moving. But we feel humiliated when we receive paychecks that suggest we work part time at a fast-food counter. Especially when we work an average of 60 or more hours a week, away from our families.
There is so much at stake in our industry. It is one of the nation’s most dangerous occupations. We don’t think truck driving should be a dead-end road in America. It should be a good job with a middle-class paycheck like it used to be decades ago.
We desperately want to drive clean and safe vehicles. Rigs that do not fill our lungs with deadly toxins, or dirty the air in the communities we haul in.
Poverty and pollution are like a plague at the ports. Our economic conditions are what led to the environmental crisis.
You, the public, have paid a severe price along with us.
Why? Just like Wall Street doesn’t have to abide by rules, our industry isn’t bound to regulation. So the market is run by con artists. The companies we work for call us independent contractors, as if we were our own bosses, but they boss us around. We receive Third World wages and drive sweatshops on wheels. We cannot negotiate our rates. (Usually we are not allowed to even see them.) We are paid by the load, not by the hour. So when we sit in those long lines at the terminals, or if we are stuck in traffic, we become volunteers who basically donate our time to the trucking and shipping companies. That’s the nice way to put it. We have all heard the words “modern-day slaves” at the lunch stops.
There are no restrooms for drivers. We keep empty bottles in our cabs. Plastic bags too. We feel like dogs. An Oakland driver was recently banned from the terminal because he was spied relieving himself behind a container. Neither the port, nor the terminal operators or anyone in the industry thinks it is their responsibility to provide humane and hygienic facilities for us. It is absolutely horrible for drivers who are women, who risk infection when they try to hold it until they can find a place to go.
The companies demand we cut corners to compete. It makes our roads less safe. When we try to blow the whistle about skipped inspections, faulty equipment, or falsified logs, then we are “starved out.” That means we are either fired outright, or more likely, we never get dispatched to haul a load again.
It may be difficult to comprehend the complex issues and nature of our employment. For us too. When businesses disguise workers like us as contractors, the Department of Labor calls it misclassification. We call it illegal. Those who profit from global trade and goods movement are getting away with it because everyone is doing it. One journalist took the time to talk to us this week and she explains it very well to outsiders. We hope you will read the enclosed article “How Goldman Sachs and Other Companies Exploit Port Truck Drivers.”
But the short answer to the question: Why are companies like SSA Marine, the Seattle-based global terminal operator that runs one of the West Coast’s major trucking carriers, Shippers’ Transport Express, doing this? Why would mega-rich Maersk, a huge Danish shipping and trucking conglomerate that wants to drill for more oil with Exxon Mobil in the Gulf Coast conduct business this way too?
To cheat on taxes, drive down business costs, and deny us the right to belong to a union, that’s why.
The typical arrangement works like this: Everything comes out of our pockets or is deducted from our paychecks. The truck or lease, fuel, insurance, registration, you name it. Our employers do not have to pay the costs of meeting emissions-compliant regulations; that is our financial burden to bear. Clean trucks cost about four to five times more than what we take home in a year. A few of us haul our company’s trucks for a tiny fraction of what the shippers pay per load instead of an hourly wage. They still call us independent owner-operators and give us a 1099 rather than a W-2.
We have never recovered from losing our basic rights as employees in America. Every year it literally goes from bad to worse to the unimaginable. We were ground zero for the government’s first major experiment into letting big business call the shots. Since it worked so well for the CEOs in transportation, why not the mortgage and banking industry too?
Even the few of us who are hired as legitimate employees are routinely denied our legal rights under this system. Just ask our co-workers who haul clothing brands like Guess?, Under Armour, and Ralph Lauren’s Polo. The carrier they work for in Los Angeles is called Toll Group and is headquartered in Australia. At the busiest time of the holiday shopping season, 26 drivers were axed after wearing Teamster T-shirts to work. They were protesting the lack of access to clean, indoor restrooms with running water. The company hired an anti-union consultant to intimidate the drivers. Down Under, the same company bargains with 12,000 of our counterparts in good faith.
Despite our great hardships, many of us cannot — or refuse to, as some of the most well-intentioned suggest — “just quit.” First, we want to work and do not have a safety net. Many of us are tied to one-sided leases. But more importantly, why should we have to leave? Truck driving is what we do, and we do it well.
We are the skilled, specially-licensed professionals who guarantee that Target, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart are all stocked with just-in-time delivery for consumers. Take a look at all the stuff in your house. The things you see advertised on TV. Chances are a port truck driver brought that special holiday gift to the store you bought it.
We would rather stick together and transform our industry from within. We deserve to be fairly rewarded and valued. That is why we have united to stage convoys, park our trucks, marched on the boss, and even shut down these ports.
It’s like our hero Dutch Prior, a Shipper’s/SSA Marine driver, told CBS Early Morning this month: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
The more underwater we are, the more our restlessness grows. We are being thoughtful about how best to organize ourselves and do what is needed to win dignity, respect, and justice.
Nowadays greedy corporations are treated as “people” while the politicians they bankroll cast union members who try to improve their workplaces as “thugs.”
But we believe in the power and potential behind a truly united 99%. We admire the strength and perseverance of the longshoremen. We are fighting like mad to overcome our exploitation, so please, stick by us long after December 12. Our friends in the Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports created a pledge you can sign to support us here.
We drivers have a saying, “We may not have a union yet, but no one can stop us from acting like one.”
The brothers and sisters of the Teamsters have our backs. They help us make our voices heard. But we need your help too so we can achieve the day where we raise our fists and together declare: “No one could stop us from forming a union.”
Thank you.
In solidarity,
Leonardo Mejia
SSA Marine/Shippers Transport Express
Port of Long Beach
10-year driver
Yemane Berhane
Ports of Seattle & Tacoma
6-year port driver
Xiomara Perez
Toll Group
Port of Los Angeles
8-year driver
Abdul Khan
Port of Oakland
7-year port driver
Ramiro Gotay
Ports of New York & New Jersey
15-year port driver
Trucking industry exposed for “ripping off” workers and taxpayers; Department of Labor vows crackdown
December 2, 2011
What is the trucking industry response to claims that port drivers are actually employees who have been stripped of their basic rights by trucking companies? Robert Digges, a spokesman for the American Trucking Associations, tripped on his own tongue on a CBS national news segment when he tried protesting the idea that trucking companies are cheating workers – and it’s getting picked up on blogs like the Daily Kos.
“They (trucking companies) believe they get a more productive employee – excuse me a more effective worker – a worker who is efficient, who has some skin in the game.”
So, the industry that dismantled the Los Angeles Clean Truck Program finally lets the truth slip: port truck drivers are actually employees who have had their rights stripped from them by greedy port trucking companies seeking to pad their bottom line.
“As long as we are independent contractors (the company) doesn’t have to cover benefits, they don’t have to cover sick days, bereavement leave time, holiday pay. It just saves the company money,” said Dutch Prior, a port driver for Shippers Transport in Oakland.
While the scheme is a boon for port trucking companies like Shippers Transport, a subsidiary of the giant SSA Marine (half-owned by Goldman Sachs), it’s drawing the attention of the Occupy movement and the Department of Labor.
“These (practices) have astronomical impacts on local governments, state governments and federal government and also hurts good, legitimate businesses that are playing by the rules and for employees that are being ripped off,” said Hilda Solis, the head of the US Department of Labor.
Last year the agency collected more than $5 million for nearly 8,000 misclassified workers, but with 300 new investigators on staff the Department of Labor will be looking more closely at misclassification schemes.
On December 12th the Occupy movement is organizing a shutdown of the West Coast ports while the Occupy protesters in New York take their case directly to Goldman Sachs on the same day (Goldman Sachs – half-owner of SSA Marine – has its own checkered history with paying taxes. It’s easy to understand why the Occupy folks are targeting the company in the coordination with the port shut down.)
The CBS Early Show segment is only the latest in a series of investigative news pieces on the port trucking industry generally and on Shippers Transport in particular.
Salon.com interviewed Leonardo Mejia, a truck driver for Shippers Transport who works out of Long Beach. “Mejia is part of the shadow economy, though not in the sense that that term is commonly understood: as an autonomous netherworld entirely off the books and underground, invisible to the taxman and mainstream society. Mejia’s shadow economy is something a little different; purposefully created from the top down, its growth driven by employers increasingly eager to shed costly, legally mandated commitments to their employees.”
New laws will help port truck drivers and other employees who are purposely misclassified by their employers, but enforcement of new and existing laws is key. Without strict enforcement from government agencies an imbalance of power exists which keeps truck drivers under the thumb of the giant trucking companies like Shippers Transport.
“There’s an imbalance of power in the market which enables the big shippers to control the cost of shipping,” According to Dr. David Bensman, a professor at Rutgers University and author of “The Big Rig”, a report about misclassification in the port trucking industry. “And as long as you have that imbalance of market power you are going to have intense competition and substandard industry practices.”
Exposed: Seattle Port Shipping Industry Endangers Lives
November 1, 2011
So let’s say you work in one of America’s most dangerous industries, like trucking at the ports. You see faulty chassis, overweight containers, unlabeled containers full of hazardous chemicals, et cetera.
But what if industry schemes prevent professional drivers from blowing the whistle on safety violations even when it’s their job to safely command 80,000 pounds of truck and cargo? For starters, you could leak it to the press.
Seattle’s King TV 5 News sent investigative reporter Chris Ingalls to the docks to find out more.
Ingalls’ report, Container trucks near Port of Seattle most dangerous in the state turned up Washington State Patrol records showing chronic safety violations so serious that officers pulled 32% of the container haulers they inspected off the road — a rate twice as high as for trucks throughout the state. When specially trained officers conducted more thorough inspections this year, 58% of Port of Seattle container haulers were put out of service because they were too dangerous.
These problems are not confined to Seattle. Safety violations are rampant all across the country. The Los Angeles Times detailed “a shadowy economy of risk-taking drivers and discount mechanics, body workers, welders and junkyards – legal and otherwise” who keep port trucks on the road. When a llantero, the Spanish name for those who regroove worn tires with a hot knife, pointed out a potentially deadly bulge in a client’s rubber tire, the driver shrugged and told the reporter:
“It’s dangerous and irresponsible … But I don’t have money for new tires. I’m behind on my bills. As long as the California Highway Patrol doesn’t stop me, I’ll keep doing it.”
Why is this happening? The reason is simple. Wealthy shippers and cargo owners rig the port trucking system for their own profit without regard to the safety of others.
Mile after mile and heavy loads take a toll on big rigs. Tires, brakes, brake lights, anything that moves on a truck needs to be repaired and maintained. And when they’re not, truck drivers and the public are put in danger.
Just ask Bob Kentner, whose windshield was shattered by a flying port truck brake part. He was lucky. He wasn’t hurt, but he could have been. ”Had it been three or four more inches to the left or right I could have had my head decapitated,” said Kentner.
In a follow up segment, Behind the Scenes: Who has to fix the dangerous truck?, King 5’s Ingalls explains that cargo trucks typically have three different owners: the driver owns the cab; a terminal operator owns the chassis; and a shipping company owns the container. But guess who pays when a part breaks or a shipper packs a container over the legal weight? You got it. Not the terminal operator. Not the shipping company. It’s the port driver who typically makes about $29,000 and cannot afford the repairs and fines.
Shippers and trucking companies force these costs onto drivers through a scheme known as illegal misclassification. They pretend that the drivers are ‘consultants’ or ‘independent contractors’ responsible for all their own business costs while maintaining tight control over how they do their work. With the costs of doing business put on the backs of port drivers earning poverty-level wages, it’s no wonder necessary repairs don’t happen. And it’s the drivers and the public whose safety is put at risk.