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Trucking
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TOM POLTIEO /HVTF Trucks have been jamming the Long Beach Freeway (I-710) during peak shipping hours for more than five years (above, the I-710 in 2002). Now, trucks are also beginning to jam the Harbor Freeway (I-110). |
It's the system not the drivers
Port trucks comprise one of the port's worst environmental offenses. Trucks are the largest contributor to toxic and greenhouse gas pollution for land-based sources from the ports. They are a major contributor to noise, sprawl, and public safety concerns. They also contribute to industrial blight.
Most of the trucks that service the ports are owned by contract workers who drive the trucks. However, the problem is not the driver but the system. Contract drivers are paid a fixed price for carrying a load from the port to its destination. The drivers may be stuck many long hours in queues inside the port waiting to pick up their loads. However, they are paid the same fixed price for moving a container, regardless of how long they are forced to wait and how much fuel they burn while inching their trucks forward in line. The drivers are given a take-it-or-leave it rate. If they are to pay the debt on their trucks and put food on their tables, they need to take what is offered. The situation is so bleak, that most of the drivers don't make enough money to buy an environmentally superior truck, even when a substantial subsidy is offered to them to help them do just that.
Since we began working this issue over five years ago, we've made painfully little progress. We've managed to pass a bill that limited truck idling time on municipal streets. The industry's solution was to have the trucks idle inside the ports instead. Though this helped free up city streets, the idling trucks remain a serious source of air pollution, greenhouse gasses and noise. THey are also a monumental waste of human effort which large shipping companies can afford only because they do not have to pay for it. RALLY
Help clean up trucking
Write the Mayor of Long Beach (includes truck rally photo gallery)
You can help clean up trucking by writing to Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster and telling him to support a clean truck concession model which will require drivers to be reclassified as employees instead of contract workers. The reclassification is central to a program to ensure that drivers make livable wages and benefits—both important aspects of improving the blighted and impoverished communities many drivers live in. Without a livable wage, we will not have livable cities
CLEAN TRUCK PROGRAM HAS SWEEPING PUBLIC SUPPORT
A clean truck program that would improve the environment, working conditions for truckers and their wages and benefits has strong public support from Democrats and Republicans alike. Read about the report here (PDF).
more coverage here
For more coverage on the port trucking situation, please take a look at the Southern Sierran for July 2002 here. This issue has special coverage on the port trucking and labor conditions.
Good News starting for Port Trucking
San Pedro Bay - Friday April 13, 2007
We wanted to make sure that you all knew that yesterday the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach released their plan for cleaning up port trucking to an advisory group of stakeholders including business, labor, community and environmental stakeholders. The documents outlining their formal proposal for port trucking are now on their web sites.
Simply put, they propose to adopt the model put forward by the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, to be implemented January 1, 2008. The port describes their approach as a concession model under which only licensed concessionaires who meet contractual standards will be allowed to operate as motor carriers on the two ports. The standards include stringent requirements for phasing in clean trucks and a requirement that all licensed concessionaires have employee drivers. The ports’ attitude is that the stakeholder task force process going forward will be about taking input on how to implement the model successfully, not a deliberative process to consider alternatives.
You can see an L.A. Times article at: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-me-diesel14apr14,0,6339731.story?coll
And the ports' press release at: http://portoflosangeles.org/News/CleanTrucksProgram.pdf