Port Shipping Almost Normal, Operators Say

Shippers hampered by the labor slowdown at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports said Monday that the flow of freight is returning to normal even as thousands of union truck drivers stay off the job for the second straight week.

“It’s not up to the point that we would expect if there was no slowdown,” said Robert Kleist, an advisor to the Evergreen America Corp. and a member of the Steamship Assn. of Southern California board. “But it’s high enough to where we’re not getting an accumulation of containers at the terminals. We feel very much that the situation is livable.”

“We’re basically back,” said Long Beach port spokeswoman Yvonne Avila. Operations had been restored to 70% to 85% of their normal level, she said.

The rumble of tractor-trailers through the hills and dips of port roads was as loud as it has been in at least a week, but dozens of union truckers milled outside terminals at both ports, keeping up an effort to woo still-independent drivers.

“We don’t want to break down right now,” said Santos Castro, an independent driver for four years, as he stood with about 18 other recently unionized truckers outside the Hanjin Shipping Agency terminal at the Long Beach port. “There are some people who are going back to work because they say they got bills to pay. We all got bills to pay. We’ve got to go all the way.”

Castro is one of an estimated 4,200 truckers who in recent weeks have signed up with a start-up firm, Transport Maritime Assn., that plans to lease drivers and trucks to other trucking companies. Until the new firm emerged, most of the truckers who served the Los Angeles-Long Beach harbor complex, the busiest in the nation, were independent drivers who owned their big-rigs, were paid per delivery, and leased their services directly to trucking companies. But they contend they were underpaid and that the port terminals were run too inefficiently to allow them to make enough deliveries to earn a living.

Donald L. Allen, a former insurance agent who founded the new company, based in Cerritos, has pledged to pay the drivers $25 an hour, plus benefits, to purchase or lease their trucks, and to provide insurance.

But numerous harbor-area trucking companies objected to Allen’s proposed hauling rate of $69 an hour and refused to lease his trucks or drivers, leaving thousands of formerly independent drivers without work for the past two weeks. Allen accused the trucking companies of stonewalling and has threatened to compete with them directly.

Allen has applied to the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Motor Carriers for an identification number, which symbolizes federal approval to operate as a trucking company.

“What he’s taking on is a very mammoth operation,” said Ron Hoffman, the office’s Southern California director. “I think he’s going to have a real challenge dispatching them. Once this gets underway, I want to look at the operation to make sure they are in compliance [with federal safety rules]. The insurance alone is going to be astronomical.”

Allen claims he is backed by a $125-million investment but has disclosed no financial documents. In the closest his firm has come to a public breakthrough, however, 40 Transport Maritime Assn.-affiliated trucks were dispatched to the Los Angeles port Saturday morning to haul containers from the NYK Line lot to a Carson rail yard. But officials at the terminal gates turned away the convoy. “We were locked out because we were union,” Allen said.

German Marino, president of the Long Beach-based Ocean Land Transportation Co., said the 18 independent drivers he usually called to make hauls had all flocked to the new firm and that he had “no choice” but to lease them.

“I got a job. I don’t have any people to move. Too many customers called me to move. No choice, you know?” he said. “I charge my customers a little more. They pay, they want the containers.”