Long Beach, Calif. – In the charcoal gray pre-dawn mist along the waterfront, Demetrio Beltran can just make out the forms of 40, maybe 50 trucks, stretching out in a daunting line in front of his Freightliner.
It will be one, two, maybe even three unpaid hours before he can pick up his first load, and the mammoth lines, he says, not only are a daily indignity but are sabotaging his livelihood. He earned slightly more than $20,000 last year despite his many 60-hour weeks.
Globalization and increased trade may be making manufacturers and shipping lines rich and happy, but Beltran says the story is very different for the truckers who work this city’s giant port, the nation’s largest, a wondrous jumble of bridges, berths, cranes, ships and trucks.
The nation’s 40,000 port truckers are so fed up, especially with high fuel prices and the long lines that cut the number of paid trips they make each day, that thousands of them have joined recent demonstrations or strikes at all the major ports, including Long Beach, Houston, Miami, Seattle and Newark, N. J.
“There are a lot of bad things about this work,” said Beltran,42, a Mexican immigrant who has been a port trucker for 17 years. “Every time we go to the harbor, we are treated like trash. They treat dogs better.”
Seeing all this unhappiness, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters is seeking to unionize all 40,000 port truckers in what is by far the union’s biggest organizing drive in decades.
For the more than 6,000 truckers at Long Beach, most of them immigrants from Mexico or Central America, the list of indignities stretches beyond the long lines to the lack of pensions and health insurance, to all the Saturdays they must work, and to the lack of bathrooms where drivers wait in line. Beltran, a short, soft-spoken man whose dark hair is rippled with gray, is also angry that he can afford only a two-bedroom house, making his four children sleep in one bedroom.
Long-haul truckers often view their lives as glamorous and macho, with their big rigs and cross-country trips, but for port truckers, the work is anything but romantic. Theirs is a life of long lines and short, shuttlelike trips, from port to warehouse and back or from port to railhead and back. Drivers usually earn nothing for each hour on line; rather they are paid a flat fee per trip, depending on the distance.
There is another type of line that Beltran is unhappy to be part of – - the evolutionary line of the nation’s port truckers. Over the last quarter century, they have gone from being unionized drivers with impressive wages and benefits, to being nonunion employees with lower wages and benefits, as the advent of deregulation in the late 1970s opened the door to new, nonunion competitors.
And nowadays most port truckers are independent contractors with low pay and no benefits – - no health insurance, no paid vacation, no paid holidays, no possibility of disability pay or unemployment insurance. These truckers are on the unhappy cutting edge of a trend in which more and more companies are scaling back their responsibilities to their workers by treating them not as employees but as independent contractors.
“For the past 10 years, my pay has remained the same,” Beltran said. “And there’s no way I have enough money to save for retirement. Some weeks it gets so bad I have to choose between fixing my truck and buying clothes for my kids, but of course I have to fix my truck. That’s the only way to support my family.”
On an excellent day, Beltran will gross $300 and on a bad one $100, not at all impressive, since he spends about $50 a day on fuel and $30 on insurance. Last year, he said, he grossed $52,000, but he netted far less because he spent $7,500 on insurance, $12,500 on gasoline, $6,000 on payments for his truck and $5,000 for maintenance, tires and repairs. Beltran reckons his pay, after expenses, comes to a paltry $8 an hour.
In recent months, the spike in fuel prices has aggravated matters, raising some drivers’ diesel bills by $100 a week.
“The fuel right now is killing us,” said Tony Fernandez, president of the drivers’ association at the port in Jacksonville. “Since January, we’ve lost over 40 drivers because they couldn’t make it anymore. Some have lost their trucks and their homes.”
His association and drivers’ associations at several other ports have thrown in their lot with the Teamsters.
“This is one of the most exploited work forces in the nation,” said Ed Burke, director of the Teamsters’ West Coast Port Division.
On the night of the NCAA basketball final,80 drivers met at a Teamsters hall in Long Beach where they applauded a video showing the demonstrations at the nation’s ports. The union is distributing bumper stickers and T-shirts that say “Port Teamster,” and while some drivers are rushing to display them, others are scared, fearing their trucking companies will fire them. One driver, Lorenzo Modesto, said his company stopped assigning him trips after he plastered his truck with Teamster stickers.
Oscar Ruiz, a 32-year-old from Guatemala who has driven for 14 years, said: “Every week is a struggle. I’m able to pay the bills, but I’m not saving anything for my future. With a union, we can probably make a better future for our kids. Maybe we’ll be able to send them to college. At this rate, I can’t.”
The unionization effort faces one huge obstacle. Under federal law, independent contractors are not considered employees and thus cannot form unions. Many drivers and Teamster officials argue that the truckers are employees because the trucking companies have so much control over them, but industry officials point to court decisions finding otherwise.
“They’re definitely independent contractors,” said Joseph Nievez, president of Qwikway Trucking Co. and past president of the California Trucking Association. “The one huge defining factor in my eyes is they have made an investment in a piece of equipment and they’re not punching a clock. Someone who invests 10,15,20 thousand dollars in a piece of equipment, he’s in business for himself.”
The Teamsters union is plotting an unusual strategy to surmount this obstacle. The union is seeking to persuade several unionized trucking companies to set up operations at the ports and hire drivers as employees.
The thinking is that the port truckers would flock from their nonunion companies to the unionized ones.
George Cashman, director of the Teamsters’ Port Division, said, “The union’s strategy will be to develop a national agreement at companies interested in employing these employees and giving them a reasonable quality of life, i. e. good benefits, wages and working conditions.”
But the catch could be that the shipping lines might hesitate to contract with the unionized trucking companies to transport their loads, especially since the unionized companies might charge more because they would pay their drivers more.
Many trucking company officials assert that the drivers do not need a union, saying their problems could be solved by having the ports, the shipping companies and the longshoremen do more to shorten the lines. That way, for instance, drivers might be able to make six $50 trips a day, rather than four.
“I feel for these guys,” said Debbie Nako, president of Yamko Truck Line. “They do face long lines. If the port were able to move the cargo in a reasonable fashion, you wouldn’t have these kinds of beefs coming from these guys.”
