Port truck drivers went on strike at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach this week to protest misclassification as independent contractors, long hours, low pay, and a system in which they pay to lease trucks that can be taken from them for the smallest infraction. At one rally,
Several workers shared their stories of having their wages garnished to pay for the lease of their trucks, gas, insurance and entry fees to access port entries, an equation that some say has led to their checks reflecting earnings at less than the California minimum wage. [Former LA Mayor Antonio] Villaraigosa, who is running for California’s governor seat next year, said that it was hard to believe that things like this were still happening to working people in 2017.
“When you heard that story, that before you clock in you owe the company money, that’s like sharecroppers, that’s what that is,” Villaraigosa said. “That’s what used to happen in the sharecropping business, you owe more money before you start the day and often times at the end of the day you still owe money.”
USA Today recently ran a major investigation into the exploitation of short haul truck drivers, making clear just what Villaraigosa was talking about:
Most days, the trucker would drive more than 16 hours straight hauling LG dishwashers and Kumho tires to warehouses around Los Angeles, on their way to retail stores nationwide.
He rarely went home to his family. At night, he crawled into the back of his cab and slept in the company parking lot.
For all of that, he took home as little as 67 cents a week.
Then, in October 2013, the truck he leased from his employer, QTS, broke down.
When Talavera could not afford repairs, the company fired him and seized the truck -- along with $78,000 he had paid towards owning it.
That kind of abuse is common in this industry, enabled by companies classifying workers as independent contractors who don’t have the right to minimum wage and overtime protections. The workers’ organizing is therefore aimed not just at the companies they work for but at local and state governments, which could crack down on misclassification and wage theft. Workers and allies delivered a petition to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Friday.
● America's massive retail force is tired of being ignored:
Retail workers get little attention in major discussions about employment in America. In part, this is because the jobs are widely seen as low-skill, temporary ones done by young people like Aguilera, on their way to something more prestigious. Why make the jobs better if they're just done by kids, or women who are looking for pocket money, or the unskilled?
Such a tension has only been heightened by the ascension of Donald Trump, who attempted to win over blue-collar manufacturing and mining workers while running on a platform ultimately tailored to the wealthy. It has been correctly noted by the likes of economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that those industrial jobs are assumed to be done by men, mostly white men, though the reality is more complicated. (The Carrier plant in Indianapolis, where Donald Trump made a show of “saving” a few hundred manufacturing jobs from outsourcing, in fact has a workforce that is nearly half women.) It is also true that those jobs are more likely to have the protections of unions, which help drive up wages and benefits and give workers an institutionalized way to push back against the caprices of management.
Indeed, when retail workers have pushed themselves into public consciousness in recent years it has been because they have been organizing.
Read the whole thing. Reporting like this is just one of the reasons Sarah Jaffe is arguably the best labor journalist working in the United States today.
● Related, working people deserve schedules that work.
● Hold my earrings. Philadelphia city councilmember Helen Gym has a few things to say about education fund.
● Campus workers smell a rat.