Overworked and underpaid, striking couriers at a San Francisco messenger service are facing unyielding bosses and violent strikebreakers.
JAN. 12, 9:15 a.m. The city’s fastest workforce is running late. Last night I got word that bike messengers with Dispatch Management Services (DMS) would be serving management with a strike. The 30-plus cyclists were supposed to show up here, at company headquarters, bearing bad news for the bosses, at nine sharp.
Under an ashen San Francisco sky I gaze up Third Street toward the high-rise zone, looking for a rolling picket line.
So far only one courier is on the scene, a rookie named Brian Molina. A couple of heads with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union the folks working to unionize the industry are here too. We’re all wondering if the messengers will pull it together and walk er, ride out.
Same-day delivery workers like day-care providers, burger flippers, and the grunts who build circuit boards are the unwanted stepchildren of this silicon-powered economic boom. They’re the digitally poor, the new underclass, the ones who’ve seen their earnings plummet as rents explode and TV talking heads blather endlessly about the new prosperity.
Employees at DMS have gotten a particularly raw deal. In 1998 the outfit, a 3,600-employee global dominator in the quick-time delivery field, snapped up seven small Bay Area delivery companies. Since then couriers bikers, walkers, and drivers have suffered a precipitous income decline.
“My last paycheck was $320 for two weeks,” Molina tells me, his bike leaned against a post. “That doesn’t even cover rent. I caught forty tags [deliveries] yesterday in the rain, and they’re still on me like I don’t work hard enough.”
While clients are shelling out more to have their packages sped across town, DMS messengers are taking home a diminishing commission per package. According to the company’s own tally of one messenger’s one-day payout, that courier took home $2.20 for a $10 job. In the days before consolidation, couriers at the seven merged companies typically earned a 50 percent commission per delivery. A recent day’s payment slip shows that a sample DMS messenger is now making between 16 and 32 percent per delivery. That’s before paying taxes and upkeep on their vehicles.
9:35 a.m. The bikers have yet to show up, but management is aware that business has been suspended. DMS manager Greg Austin is hitting up ILWU organizer Peter Olney for information.
“You’ll have to talk to the workers,” the union leader replies. “They’re on their way.”
Olney’s not playing coy: DMS workers have yet to vote the union in. If they strike today, they do so on their own without the union’s lawyers and without its strike fund.
I ask Austin, cell phone in hand, if his company has been struck. “We don’t have complete information yet,” he stammers.
A few minutes later we find out. Some 20 cyclists stream down to 1900 Third Street, Critical Mass-style, picket signs (“Hi Mom, I make $4.90 an hour!”) sticking out of their sling bags.
The cyclists pull into the DMS parking lot laughing, whooping, fists clenched. They secure their steeds and huddle before heading inside. “We’re going in there as a collective force, and we’re going to lay the demands on Greg Austin’s table,” vet Aaron Hackett yells from the center of the circle. Hackett reads from a photocopied list of 12 demands: the riders want, among other things, pay raises; compensation for equipment costs; paid sick days, holidays, and vacation time; hazard pay for rainy days; and an end to favoritism and “secret dispatching of jobs.”
An air of exuberant chaos fills the stairwell leading up to DMS’s second-story office as the riders most of them white, almost all of them young men storm the fortress.
The messengers say all DMS’s bicycle and foot deliveries have ceased, as have in-town truck deliveries; a pirate has jammed the radio frequency for suburban drivers. The bikers say work will halt until management concedes.
A nervous office grunt steps out of the dispatch center. “Who am I dealing with?” she asks.
“Aaron,” one courier says.
“All of us,” says Hackett, handing her the demands.
9:45 a.m. Management has alerted DMS executives in New York. An ad-hoc company spokesperson offers this response from the upper echelons: An executive V.P. named Patrick Gallagher is on the next plane out. He is taking the situation very seriously and will discuss the demands with workers tomorrow. Mr. Gallagher would also like the bikers to get back on the road.
They laugh. The idea of these so-called dregs causing migraines for the Armani set is pretty funny. “His plane ticket costs more than my pay for a week,” one biker says.
10:30 a.m. Riders are massed in the DMS parking lot, lined up along Third waving picket signs. Big rigs barreling along the street salute the strikers with blaring air-horns. Smiling cyclists from other companies stop by to cheer on their brethren. They’re handed a half-size flyer by Natasha Dedrick, a principal organizer. Dedrick and the other couriers fear DMS will blunt the strike by temporarily farming out deliveries to competing companies. The flyer encourages couriers at other outfits not to scab.
Jan. 13., 1 p.m. The heavens are pissing, making the city’s already perilous streets all the more treacherous. It’s a sucky day to be pedaling for a living.
Soggy strikers are congregating at the Wall, the messenger hangout at Sansome and Sutter. They’re taking credit for a 90 percent reduction in deliveries yesterday. Management was hoping for an 8 a.m. sit-down; the strikers represented by a team of six strode in at 10:30. DMS is expected to make an offer within the next couple of hours.
“I feel good,” Dedrick tells me, running on adrenaline after three sleepless nights. “I feel powerful. I think we’ll be celebrating.”
Hackett is recounting the half-hour-long negotiations. “They went down the list and for what it’s worth they said the demands are valid,” he tells me. “They didn’t come out playing brinkmanship with us. They weren’t threatening mass firings. They were pleading with us to come back to work.”
Despite the rain, morale is still soaring. Rak Affonso, a veteran courier riding for a recently unionized firm, throws Hackett an emphatic handshake. “Good job! You guys did a good thing. You guys did a very good thing!” he enthuses from under a flame-emblazoned helmet.
Strikers have hacked into the company’s alpha-pager system, sending out guerrilla greetings to DMS workers around the bay. “MANAGEMENT CONCEDED TO MOST DEMANDS BUT ARE HAVING TROUBLE PAYING A REASONABLE HOURLY WAGE THAT MEANS YOU OFFICE WORKERS!” the latest broadcast reads.
Thus far, only one of some 10 desk-bound employees has walked out. But much of the credit or blame for today’s turmoil can be laid at the feet of Greg Rodich, a disgruntled former dispatcher.
Rodich says he quit two weeks ago, after local DMS boss Terry Hird labeled all bike messengers “morons.”
“I started out as bike messenger,” Rodich says. “I just told him, ’I resign.’ ” He promptly passed the moron comment on to the pedalers; they didn’t find it too amusing.
Jan. 17, 9:35 a.m. Four rounds of negotiations Friday resulted in nothing but sneers from the strikers. After hours of dialogue the corporation would only concede to a pair of minor demands: no retaliation against strikers (which is mandated by federal labor law anyway) and an end to favoritism within the company. The couriers walked out.
There was good news over the weekend: the San Francisco Bicycle Messenger Association, an industry-wide posse that is slowly morphing into a full-fledged union, has agreed to donate $2,000 to a strike fund.
Cautious optimism is in effect outside DMS offices. About 30 messengers are picketing, signs in hand, bikes hanging from a chain-link fence. The Cobras, a black motorcycle gang, give the strikers a clenched-fist salute as they rumble up Third. TV, radio, and print journalists are on hand seeking sound bites. Vintage soul blasts from a boom box.
Manager Hird strides out in crisp navy suit, his graying hair trimmed neatly. “Some of the messengers who work for us are engaged in a legal work action, and we are negotiating with them,” Hird tells me. “The majority of our messengers are working. We were taken by surprise by this action, as were our clients, but work goes on.”
I ask him if he really called his employees morons. “That’s not correct,” he responds quickly. “That’s taken completely out of context.”
11:10 a.m. Messenger firebrand Dedrick, who is white, is confronting a van full of four or five scabs, all of whom are African American. Some are regular workers who aren’t striking; others have been brought in to replace the strikers. The van is trying to pull out of the DMS lot to take them downtown to do walking deliveries. Other strikers gather around to back Dedrick up.
Dedrick and a pissed-looking dude in the driver’s seat are barking at each other. A guy leaps from the van, roots around in a pickup truck parked nearby, and returns with a heavy, two-foot-long steel spring. He uses it to hit middle-aged courier Howard Williams in the spine.
Time seems to slow down. The confrontation graduates to full-tilt melee status. By now most of the messengers are in the brawl, either trying to break it up or trying to take a shot. Williams gets clocked in the face with a sucker punch; blood shoots from his mouth like an action-film clichι. Somebody grabs the steel spring and chucks it. The scab who started the whole thing grabs a hefty pipe wrench and starts chasing strikers with it.
The strikebreakers who threaten to come back and kill everyone are eventually pushed back into the building. Patrick Gallagher, the New York vice president, walks out, not a hair out of place, utterly unfazed. “Are you siccing those people on us?” Hackett demands.
“Oh yeah,” Gallagher shoots back sarcastically, before asking if anyone needs medical assistance.
As the squad cars roll up, somebody mentions the fact that today is Martin Luther King Day.
