The workers in the Long Beach yard of Waste Management told me to tell you all that they are proud to work for Waste Management or at least they used to be. Some of them worked for this company for 30 years.
The last labor action at the Long Beach yard was more than 15 years ago.
Today I witnessed serious and even dangerous confrontations that went on and on. This video is an example of the many 3 minutes game of chicken that took place.
It seems 3 minutes is all they can hold up a truck before the sheriffs can arrest demonstrators for impeding traffic.
In another yard in Los Angeles incidents of workers in the picket line being hit by Waste Management pickup trucks have been reported.
So how did things get to this point? Why in 2007 are we back to the 1870s when workers fought for 8 hour days? Why is it that his strike is not just about pay and benefits but also "respect and dignity"?
Today I drove to Long Beach and I got there by noon, the picket lines have been there from dawn to dusk since Friday.
I took some pictures and I asked my contact, Galen Munroe who is Press Secretary for Teamsters HQ, to first meet with some of the workers at the nearby Apollo Burgers (damned good ones by the way).
I introduced myself as one of thousands of DailyKos bloggers and I told them that I just wanted to get their stories out.
The more they told me the more I realized that the bottom line is that Waste Management thinks of its workers as fungible commodities little more than spare parts for their trucks. How on earth can a company in 2007 think like this? Has its management, from the top down, learned nothing about the fact that if you treat human beings with respect they will take care of your bottom line? How is the way they relate to their work force compatible with the responsible eco-friendly image they try to project? FYI Waste Management is incredibly profitable, 35% of revenue and they net $24,000 per employee per year.
As I told you I have loads of stuff to talk about. But I cannot do it all in one diary. If this one gets to Recommended I’ll write another one tomorrow with more detail and I will go to the picket lines at 4AM on Monday to cover the first day of garbage collection with the union busters driving the trucks. The action in the picket line will get much hotter then. And many neighborhoods of Los Angeles will go without garbage collection.
Harassing a shop steward (worker elected to represent others union) by assigning them to a yard that requires a 2 hour commute, poverty wages ($17.80 hour on average is nowhere nearly enough to raise a family in Los Angeles), being asked to work 12 and 13 hours days in and days out regardless of how tired they are, using 600 lbs cans instead of the agreed upon 400 lbs ones that can be lifted safely by the forks without human intervention, ignoring more than 200 filed grievances at the Long Beach yard, punishing another shop steward by assigning him a difficult "swing route" job in spite of established seniority and on and on. I could write several diaries on each one of these issues.
In the picture just below from left to right Galen Munroe of Teamster HQ, Shockwave, Sylvester Anthony who works for Waste Management since 1978 and who is still being treated by management as if he had been hired yesterday, Juan Casales who as punished by being shipped off to the Corona California yard (a 2 hour commute) when he filed 5 grievances, Ramiro Rivas whose seniority was ignored and was given a "swing route" and Marco Antonio Frias who told me that they all felt like the company had a jackboot at their throat and that their biggest grievance is that management could not care less about giving their employees a chance to raise a family. All of them Teamster shop stewards. All of them great people.
80% percent of the 142 workers at the yard are Hispanics, mostly immigrants, 10% African American, 10% everything else. How the company uses race o harass workers is yet another story.
Teamster vs. Waste Management confrontations have been taking place in other cities like Oakland, California where hourly rates are significantly higher than what Los Angeles workers get.
FYI the Teamsters has organized Waste Management workers for over 40 years. But things were not always so adversarial. But for now the company culture is one of management by intimidation.
LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was directly involved in the negotiations between the Teamsters and Waste Management until last Friday for the yards in Los Angeles itself until Friday when the contract extension expired.
In Long Beach, a different city, the Vice Mayor, Bonnie Lowenthal, came to give moral support to the striking workers. You can see her in the photo below with some workers, Ron Herrera the Teamsters Local 396 Secretary and Treasurer 2nd from the left, Jay Phillips the President of Local 396 (he reports to Ron), me and Bonnie Lowenthal who promised me a copy of the contract between Long Beach and Waste Management.
I had a chance to read parts of the old contract between the Teamsters and Waste Management. Specially the "dignity and respect" clause. Ron Herrera is trying to find out if given the circumstances he can give me copies of the old and new contracts so that I can publish them, I’d love to have a Kossack swarm go through them, who knows hat they’ll find.
The one thing that really struck me was the union busting strategy of Waste Management. They have hired some neo-Pinkertons to intimidate workers, Blackwater types if you ask me. I am trying to find out the name of this "security" company. They took videos and pictures of everybody in the picket lines. And they have flown in scabs from out of state to drive the trucks. Wasted Management has a "Green Team" of scabs that they fly into town and lodge in local hotels for the duration of the strike.
Some of these scabs are not good dump truck drivers. As am matter of fact take a look at this picture below (it is a blow up of the upper right corner of the one at Apollo Burgers above). As you can see this scab driven truck on a practice run has its can in the up position. As the real drivers told me, bad news if it goes through a low underpass a tunnel or a traffic light.
If the strike goes on into next weekend, I plan to do a live blogging session from the picket lines.
More to come in future diaries if enough of you show interest.
Telemundo showed up.
A van ferrying scabs to and from their hotels.
The front line
Video taping us.