Undaunted by Setbacks, Truckers Look to Union

Just last spring, a daring surprise strike by thousands of Latino immigrant truckers on the Los Angeles-Long Beach waterfront collapsed in a humiliating defeat, marking another in a series of failed union-organizing efforts by the port drivers.

So what are these truckers doing now? Lining up by the hundreds to attend more monthly union meetings. In fact, as many as 1,200 of these poorly paid drivers already have started chipping in dues of $9.50 a month to the Communications Workers of America, even though the union is not yet legally entitled to negotiate a contract for them and provides little in the way of services.

For now, “they’re paying $9.50 a month for really nothing. That’s how much they support the union,” said Judy Perez, executive vice president of Communications Workers Local 9400 in Paramount and the director of the latest campaign by the truckers.

That never-say-die attitude reflects the passion for unions among many of Southern California’s low-wage immigrant workers that inspired U.S. labor leaders to bring their big annual meeting, which began Sunday afternoon, to Los Angeles for the first time. Labor leaders who only a few years ago considered these immigrant workers too timid to stand up for unions now consider them prime targets for organizing.

But today’s union struggles in Southern California also demonstrate that while passion for a cause is essential for labor organizing, it’s not enough. Several high-profile campaigns have found the going brutally tough since a year ago--when the AFL-CIO chieftains decided to stop holding their winter gathering in luxurious Bal Harbour, Fla., and head instead to hotbeds of organizing such as Southern California.

Take, for example, the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project. Last year, this activist group drew notice with its bold proposal to link a coalition of unions in a campaign to organize the hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers in the area along the Alameda Corridor, a proposed $1.98-billion public works project.

When it came time for the various unions to kick in money, though, most of the support fell apart. Today, the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project is hanging on purely as a local organizing arm of the Teamsters Union, while it continues to pursue other partners.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles’ ballyhooed Justice for Janitors campaign--which relied on militant street tactics to organize the cleaning crews of most of the city’s downtown high-rises--has seen some of its major buildings lately switch back to nonunion status.

And a boycott launched early last year at the New Otani Hotel, where AFL-CIO leaders plan to lead a mass demonstration Wednesday, has failed to break management’s resolve to keep out the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union.

All told, the union picture in Los Angeles is reminiscent of the national labor climate of the 1920s and early ‘30s, said Greg Tarpinian, executive director of the Labor Research Assn., a consultant to unions. “There was a lot of organizing at the same time labor was on its back. But the seeds were laid for future efforts, and I think that’s what is going on here,” he said.

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No local campaign better exemplifies both the allure and elusiveness of unionization than that of the port truckers. Their longshot effort has been hampered by issues common to many labor-recruiting drives: rivalries between unions, fierce business pressures, questionable strategy and legal barriers to organizing.

Those are the same kinds of factors that have cut organized labor’s ranks to where now only 14.5% of the U.S. work force belongs to unions, down from a high of around 35% in the 1950s.

Perez, of the Communication Workers, conceded that the obstacles are so forbidding that “there are days when I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

But, she said, “every time it runs through my head, ‘What are we doing here?’ someone comes in and says, ‘Thank you for letting us join the union.’ ”

The vicious economics of the port trucking business stem from the 1979 deregulation of the U.S. trucking industry and a subsequent influx of an army of immigrant drivers hungry for work. Those developments translate into too many truckers vying for too few jobs, pushing down the rates they can charge to the rock bottom. Many say they work more than 40 hours a week but, after expenses, clear only $10,000 to $15,000 a year.

As a result, a half-dozen times since the mid-1980s port drivers have tried to unionize or form associations to protect their interests.

One of the main stumbling blocks has been that the drivers generally are treated by trucking companies as independent contractors, not employees, and consequently have no rights to unionize under federal labor law.

But in 1994, the Communication Workers decided to take a stab and, by late last April, a surprise strike was launched.

To overcome the independent contractor problem, the union-affiliated truckers hitched their fortunes to a newly created trucking venture called the Transport Maritime Assn.. The businessman behind it, Donald L. Allen, promised to hire thousands of the truckers and quickly turn them into employees so that they could unionize.

Transport Maritime Assn., however, couldn’t pull in customers and quickly folded. That angered thousands of drivers who were forced to go back to their old jobs. And, in the opinion of some observers, it made the union officials who went along with the venture without having a backup plan look foolish.

“After the strike, it was pretty hard,” said Miguel Camacho, one of three Communication Workers organizers on the campaign. But, eventually, skeptical truckers were again won over. “Everyone knows the CWA is the only way because no one else is going to help us,” he said.

Rampant complaints of exploitation by trucking companies and personal horror stories have pulled the drivers together. These days, the talk among the drivers, most of whom are from Mexico and Central America, often is about their companero Luis Alberto Baca.

Two days before Christmas, Baca, 52, was run over by the back of a 16-wheeler while walking to a pay phone at a port terminal. Although he considers himself lucky to have survived, his pelvis was badly fractured, and his doctor expects him to need months of therapy before he can walk normally again.

Meanwhile, Baca gets no workers’ compensation insurance or any other employer-paid medical benefits because of his status as an independent contractor.

“The struggle of the union has been [for trucking companies to] give us benefits, so that they pay us by the hour and so that they look at us like people,” said Baca, sitting up in a wheelchair at his Los Angeles apartment.

Despite the tough odds against the Communications Workers, the union’s national organizing director, Larry Cohen, insists that it’s an important battle to fight. Cohen said the difficulties of independent contractors such as the truckers, along with related issues faced by millions of temporary and part-time workers, are “part of a much more serious problem, which is the collapse of workers rights in the U.S., which is not something you’re going to be able to fix right away.”

In any case, he said: “We’re digging in for the long haul.”

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The Communications Workers truckers, given all of their obstacles, could use an ally in the labor movement. Instead, the drivers and union officials are squabbling with the union in the best position to help them--the powerful International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.

Although the ILWU shut down West Coast ports Jan. 20 in support of striking longshoremen in Liverpool, England, it has been unwilling to do the same for the drivers. One of the reasons is that the ILWU wants to save more waterfront truck-driving jobs for its own members, and regards the Communications Workers as a potential competitor.

For other unions, “we’ve stuck our neck out for the common good. But here, there’s a lack of understanding between the parties,” said Domenick Miretti, a 46-year ILWU member now sitting on the the union’s Southern California District Council.

What’s more, the truckers say the ILWU-represented clerks that handle their paperwork at the terminals subject them to unnecessary delays and ethnic slurs. “They treat our people like dirt,” Perez said.

Miretti countered that the clerks are often provoked by impatient drivers who cut ahead in truck lines and grab their paperwork before it is ready. “Clerks are as human as anyone else,” he said. “It gets very frustrating when you have a line that’s a mile long, and everyone wants to get through at the same time.”

These days, Camacho and the two other Communications Workers port driver organizers regularly head out to the waterfront to chat with truckers, finding out their concerns and spreading word about the union’s efforts to do such things as find insurance at reduced rates.

In addition, mass meetings still are held once every month or two. An estimated 500 truckers crowded into a Lakewood hall for the last session not quite three weeks ago.

All told, the drivers and the union have managed to keep the emotions burning. If the Communications Workers union calls for another walkout, “I’ll go back out again,” said trucker Salvador Gonzalez of Carson.