“This is where trucks come to die”
The above quote is by Port of LA spokesperson Arely Baker, from the LA Weekly article A Heavy Load, which is featured on the cover of this week's issue. The eight page article focuses entirely on the drivers and their struggles as the Port tries to clean itself up, re-organize the way truckers are employed, and replace hundreds of aging trucks.
The article highlights the disparities between the non-union and the union workers at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. While doing similar jobs one group has managed to build a secure workplace for itself and the workers of the other are barely getting by.
This quote is from Chicho, a truck driver, addressing his frustration at the class division between the organized workers of the ILWU and the non-organized t -
“The longshoremen have a lot of ideas, they have power,” Chicho says. “And whoever organizes the truckers — Teamsters, Wobbly, whatever — they choose the driver. If the longshoremen could take over the drivers, that would be powerful. Then they have all the power. But right now, the way things are, the longshoremen is afraid to share with the driver his economy.
“Who controls the drivers controls the pier, and who controls the pier controls the container. And who controls the container,” Chicho concludes, “controls the economy in this country.”
The article highlights the disparities between the non-union and the union workers at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. While doing similar jobs one group has managed to build a secure workplace for itself and the workers of the other are barely getting by.
This quote is from Chicho, a truck driver, addressing his frustration at the class division between the organized workers of the ILWU and the non-organized t -
“The longshoremen have a lot of ideas, they have power,” Chicho says. “And whoever organizes the truckers — Teamsters, Wobbly, whatever — they choose the driver. If the longshoremen could take over the drivers, that would be powerful. Then they have all the power. But right now, the way things are, the longshoremen is afraid to share with the driver his economy.
“Who controls the drivers controls the pier, and who controls the pier controls the container. And who controls the container,” Chicho concludes, “controls the economy in this country.”
Labels: ILWU, pollution, port, Port of Los Angeles, Truckers
4 Comments:
Arley Baker is a Premium Grade A A-Hole. Sorry to be blunt, but he's the reason the Port's communications and public outreach has sucked for the past couple of years. He's a political appointee leftover from the Hahn administration for goodness sake! He pull down $150K a year and he's basically a doofus. It's always interesting to see him quoted as any sort of authority when he's basically clueless.
sincerly,
Harbor Dept. Retiree
Chicho may have a point there. The relationship between the ILWU and the port truckers is a long, complex, and frustrating one, and the story ought to be told. It's unfortunate, then, that the LA Weekly chose Judith Lewis (or she chose herself) to tell it in this article.
In all the time I've been reading her pieces in the Weekly, Lewis has never struck me as the kind of reporter who lets complicated facts get in the way of a good story. I'm not talking so much about the dumb research (lack-of-research?) mistakes that she usually makes, although there are a few of them in the article:
Crane operators, the local 63 “crème de la crème” of the port work force, now make upward of $100,000 a year
That would be Local 13, Longshoremen. Local 63 is Marine Clerks. And to make "upward of $100,000 a year" you would have to be a steady with a guarantee, or a very lucky and very busy hall man.
To Mike Mitre, president of ILWU Local 13, which represents the clerks
Um, no, that would be the longshoremen again.
At the time when I first met Lopez, the union, along with another labor consortium with a name reminiscent of sweepstakes or sports challenges, Change to Win
She writes here as though she had never heard of Change To Win. In fact, CTW is the product of a historic split in the AFL-CIO in 2005, where several of the largest affiliated unions broke their ties with AFL-CIO over issues of organizing strategy, and the Teamsters are part of the coalition.
Like many of the drivers at the port with this problem, Melvin thinks the conflict is a racial issue: Most of the clerks are women, and most of them are black, while nearly all the drivers are Spanish-speaking men.
“Black people like to intimidate us,” he says.
Lewis quotes Melvin here without comment. When an interviewee in a news story makes a factual assertion such as this, a good reporter will at least try to verify it. A really good reporter might even ask a few followup questions, especially when the quote is one that verges on racism (and some may well say that it crosses the line).
Most Local 63 clerks are women, and most are black? That's news to me as a longshoreman of nine years standing who works daily with Local 63 clerks. If Lewis made any attempt to find out from PMA, Local 63, or from any public records whether the racial/gender makeup of the clerks' union is as Melvin described it, she doesn't say so in the story. A paragraph later, she describes a thwarted effort to sneak into a terminal in the cab of a truck to observe trucker/clerk interactions. If she's willing to do this sort of cloak-and-dagger stunt work in pursuit of the story, couldn't she have stood outside the clerk's hall during one of their meetings and made a note of the race and sex of the people who walked in? For that matter, couldn't she have tried to interview a clerk to get his or her take on the issue of the port truckers?
Admittedly, this might be difficult for somebody who doesn't know the difference between Local 13 and Local 63.
OK, I guess I am talking about Lewis's dumb factual mistakes and omissions, after all. She really is a piss-poor journalist. But I think that what she really misses here is the impossible situation that the truckers, the clerks, and the longshoremen are stuck in when it comes to working with one another.
The terminals are too small to handle the amount of cargo that is being squeezed through them; the truckers are being paid by the load in what amounts to a "rolling sweatshop" economy; and the clerks and longshoremen, who are unionized and paid by the hour, nonetheless have to endure the side effects of the economic injustice visited on the truckers: speeding and other dangerous maneuvers, line-cutting, and displays of justified anger at being forced to wait without extra pay in long lines. Working day after day with people who are angry at you, whether or not their anger is justified in the larger scheme of things, does not make for a friendly work environment (on the other hand, a person who had read Lewis's article would be surprised to see just how often clerks/longshoremen and truckers can be observed interacting politely and even joking around with one another). Just as the truckers seem to make a hobby of complaining about those damned lazy ILWU personnel, longshoremen and clerks constantly bitch about those damned "outside truckers" who blow stop signs at full speed and cut one another's figurative throats to get ahead in line.
(Incidentally, those stupid intercoms that make it so difficult for truckers with limited English to communicate with clerks were the bright idea of the terminal operators, who saw them as a way to process more trucks with fewer clerks. Before those things started popping up, the driver and clerk were face to face, where they could see each other's lips move and they could write things out if there was a language barrier.)
Then there's the issue of scabbing. A lot of ILWU people rightly or wrongly blame the truckers for taking what were once decent-paying union jobs, and for perpetuating the dismal conditions under which they work by undercutting one another on the price per load. Personally, I think it's long past time to reevaluate the "scab" issue, since a lot of the guys driving now weren't even born when Carter deregulated the industry. The sad truth is that the labor movement was all but destroyed in the private sector during the eighties and nineties, and millions and millions of people are now working non-union jobs in industries that once were heavily unionized. Should we regard them all as scabs and refuse to try to organize them? On the other hand, I used to get into arguments with one of the guys in my letter at the casual hall: I would be defending the truckers and he, a former port trucker, would insist that they bring it on themselves by their lack of solidarity and willingness to undercut. I don't really know what to think about that.
Further complicating things is the relationship between the ILWU and the Teamsters, whose freight agreements largely disappeared during deregulation. The two unions have lately tried to cooperate and help one another out in their contract struggles and organizing efforts, but historically the relationship has not been such a good one. In the old days, teamsters and longshoremen would literally battle it out over the question of jurisdiction over cargo on the docks. During the much of the twentieth century, there was also a certain tension between the militant leftism of Harry Bridges' ILWU and the Archie Bunkerish reactionary hardhat politics of the IBT. At the same time ILWU volunteers were feeding hungry picketing farm workers in the late sixties and early seventies, the Teamsters, at the behest of the grape growers, were sending goons to beat them up. That was a long time ago and the IBT has cleaned up its act considerably since then, but the two unions are still sort of learning how to work together. And the issue of jurisdiction has hardly gone away.
None of this is to say that there aren't asshole clerks. There are. Unfortunately, some of them are chief truck delivery clerks of yard operations, and they try to instill this us-versus-them bullshit attitude into the new casuals who often work under them (none of the people I'm thinking of are black women, FWIW). What I'm saying is that Judith Lewis doesn't come close to capturing the whole story, and I don't think she's capable of it. What we have here is a system that manifestly does not work. The truckers are the most hurt by the failure of the system to work. A solution has got to be found for this. Reflexively blaming the workers of the ILWU for problems wrought by global capitalism and exploding global trade is not likely to be a part of that solution.
Excellent comment, IMBG. The issue is complex and has a history that's well beyond the scope of Lewis' article.
I really think that it's a huge, union weakening mistake for the ILWU not to work their butts off to unionize the truckers (and other local workers as well). Despite the ILWU's current PR problems, and some serious organizational issues, it's still operating from a position of security and strength, and I really feel like the union has missed the boat on taking the opportunity to help organize other workers, and that has created a real divide between the organized workers at the port and the non-organized workers at the port or in allied industries that may come to bite the ILWU in the ass in years to come.
That's some extraordinary insight, IMBG, and I wish to god I would have had it in advance of writing this particular story. Unfortunately, the ILWU was unhelpful to the point of being impenetrable, and many, many phone calls and attempts to buttonhole union leaders were unsuccessful. Even Mitre, helpful as he was in the moment, would say very little on the record. It makes it pretty hard to tell the other side of the story when the other side remains opaque.
I'm not saying I didn't screw up; I did. I am indeed a "piss-poor journalist" for transposing the local numbers 1 and 6; that sort of thing happens, unfortunately, to the mildly dyslexic writer struggling to carve out a narrative from many points of view. (We used to have fact-checkers at the LA Weekly to help us when we were writing beyond our areas of expertise; unfortunately, our new big corporate bosses axed them.) It's true I took on the story myself, as I often do, with no experience writing about union politics and history. And that was too ambitious. I apologize.
But it's telling that this colossal mistake of mine drew not one letter from anyone like you, nor from anyone at the ILWU. I get the feeling the longshoremen and their allies would prefer to just sit this one out, let the workforce implode and take over and rebuild it when the dust has settled. And that's too bad, because it seems from what you've written here that there are important and historic alliances to be forged. It doesn't seem likely they'll be forged humanely in secret.
This story came about because I had been listening and talking to truckers for a year. I saw a story -- a very small part of which was the trucker's relationship with the longshoremen -- that wasn't getting told. I wrote a story for people who read the LA Weekly in those stolen moments while they wait for their lattes. It wasn't a manifesto on the thorny politics of port labor. I hope to do more on this topic, though, in which case I hope that someone with your background and understanding of the issue will make yourself available to me.
As for Change to Win: I do know about it from Harold Meyerson, who wrote a story for the American Prospect focusing on their efforts to organize at the ports. But as far as I could tell, none of the truckers I talked to had ever heard of it. They did, however, think the name was funny.
Judith
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