Comments
Please wait...
Comments are closed.
Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.
More In News
Editors' Picks
Popular Articles
is a proud member of the
media network
media network
All contents © Index Newspapers LLC
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
The port's idea is to collect taxes from the citizens to ensure that the commission and Big Biz can enjoy a better life.
The worst part of it? You had no say in how you ran your "independent" business. None whatsoever. You could not raise the price of your newspaper, you could not cancel nonpaying customers for 3 months and 1/4 of all new customers never paid a dime.
In a few short years, the job had degenerated into an outright scam. I'm shocked they still got workers, but with so few jobs in the area, many families felt they had no choice--either a scam job or no job.
I'm not sure why these port workers continue to work these "independent" cargo jobs when Seattle does have an abundance of other actual minimum wage jobs,unless they lack some legal documents. Many of these kinds of jobs never look into backgrounds, nor do they care to. Which is good for some, bad for others.
The reason some people I knew did the newspaper jobs was exactly because the newspaper companies refused to look into backgrounds. The local delivery for my living area was a teenager who had already had 2 DUIs. So long as you showed up every day, that was all the business cared about.
Still, it would be great if independent contractors were allowed to unionize. They are one of the few groups of workers that truly need it. To many businesses abuse the concept of independent contractor, by essentially making them employees without benefits and few, if any, rights.
Have you priced a used truck? $10,000 will get you a usable one, albeit with high mileage that needs constant repairs (with the associated downtime) and uses more fuel, and therefore is much more expensive to operate.
Why would someone do this? How many people can clear $400-$500 a week anymore? Especially if you're a recent immigrant or lacking a college degree?
Unfortunately, because unemployment is so high, there aren't other options for these people. Sure, the port is evil and the rules should place these truckers as full-time employees, but normal economic adjustments should get these people a decent wage. As soon as they stop taking this crappy job, it will stop being a crappy job. That's just how economics work.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.a…
Same old Seattle bullshit. Hipersensitivity is not good, real facts are.
Plus I hear it's not so easy to get another job when you've put your family's savings into that old, polluting truck.
The situation is the same at Ports around the country: Here's a link to last week's NPR piece from Southern California.
http://www.scpr.org/news/2009/12/24/truc…
And, as Jake notes, we pay the price. Dirty air, emergency room care for the sick and injured (since Basic Health's no longer an option), clogged roads, trucks parked everywhere.
Meanwhile, the shippers, the Port staff and the commissioners reap all the benefits.
If truckers delivered to regional distribution warehouses and then local retailers instead of retailers like Walmart, motorists would shorten their driving distance and reduce gasoline/diesel combustion overall, even though trucking distances would be further.
trucks are needed to move containers on/off the piers and rails, the longshore see this as their work and want control of it again. the "clean trucks" agenda is a way for them to bring in big trucking firms that can afford to purchase/lease new trucks and hire truck drivers to work these trucks (paying the truckers shit wages in exchange for benefits). the pier to rail work used to have unionized companies to doing this, but that went out the window with deregulation, and opening up the game to competition, giving the brokers the ability to hire who they wanted to move their freight. the teamsters and longshore had a strangle hold on the piers, and they've been grieving about "the good ol'days" ever since.
secondly, the long lines are because the piers are not open enough hours to accommodate the amount to truck traffic that the piers generate throughout the day. the steamship lines are unwilling to pay the longshore for extra hours to keep the piers open, and the longshore are often unwilling to stagger their breaks and lunch hours to keep the trucks moving efficiently through at these times. look at any other grocery store or bank, and you don't see these establishments closing for 20 minutes at 10am and 3pm for coffee breaks, or for and hour and 15 minutes for lunch. during these times trucks are left where they're at till longshoremen choose to return to there jobs. and lord help the truckers if the longshore are staging a "slowdown" to protest some aspect of their contract that they perceive being violated by the shipping companies. of course, the folks squeezed in the middle of these competing interests are the truck drivers everyone sees lining up and blocking traffic. an easy way to alleviate these long lines is to open up the piers early, and stay open later, and not shut down all the operations till the longshore come back from all their breaks. the port refuses to put pressure on the steamship lines to pay for these added costs, and the longshore need to agree to stagger during breaks to keep trucks moving.
as far has truck drivers getting paid crap wages, when the economy is down, we all suffer. as an owner operator, you get paid by the move, not by the hour. the brokers need to get freight moved, and have to hire trucks to do this. during the busy times, they are willing to pay us well for the work required to move these containers, and hire carriers that have efficient turnaround times, clean driving records, and good customer relations. many of these brokerage firms have become greedy, and refuse to pay a fair rate to good carriers because there is always another company that will undercut the rate. there are many unscrupulous carriers that have set up shop doing container work, that hire a lot of trucks, driven by immigrants that are willing to work for less because they think they can run a truck for the money that is being offered. if you moved from a war torn country, making a few bucks a day, getting offered $20 to move a container from the grain elevator across the street to a pier is a lot of money. but when you sit in line for 3 hours to get rid of that can, and pick up an empty can to take back, that $20 doesn't go very far to pay your expenses. so what do you do? you get up early to beat the rush and block the streets so you can get a jump on the other guy who choses to sleep in. and because so many of these trucking companies underbid each other to compete for the work that is brokered through the rail and piers, the brokers get rich on the backs of who? the truckers.
the port could do a lot more to control these issues with the truck traffic, air pollution, longshore and steam ship companies, etc. if they would grow a backbone and start making everyone play nice. first they could start fining the steamship companies when trucks are are backed up on the streets. i can guarantee that there would be no trucks blocking traffic if the steamship lines had to pay these fines. the port should upgrade the piers to have have outlets for the ships to plug into while in port, and fine the ships that don't upgrade to use these services. ships idle their engines at the ports to run basic operations onboard, and one ship pollutes more than all the trucks running in the piers on any given day. the port could offer transit parking for truckers to park containers during heavy traffic hours at the piers, so that trucks wouldn't be forced to sit for hours and hours while waiting for the longshore and steamship companies to get their acts together. then truckers could bring the containers in when the traffic has cleared, and can the work done in a timely fashion. lastly, the port could meet with various carriers and brokerage firms, review the rates that are charged to move containers throughout the system and establish basic rates for the drayage of containers. then enforced these rates to prevent the underbidding by by corrupt brokers, and unscrupulous carriers. truckers could be guaranteed a livable income, could afford to maintain newer equipment, and could still compete with quality service and efficient drivers.
but thats just my view of it, talk amongst yourselves.
Jake: how about something at least a little balanced, or at least openly disclosing your existing opinions?
Your post:
"The author should study economics and understand the way that a real free market system works really good before writting an emotional article about the rich v/s the poor crap. Trucks companies are going down just like any other small truck owner..."
is startlingly revealing of your credibility. Perhaps you should study English grammar, usage and spelling before ripping on someone else's impression of the free market system.
A note: the abbreviation for "versus" is vs. or v., rather than v/s. What a douche.
Posted by Your Name Here on December 26, 2009 at 10:10 AM
AGITATE
EDUCATE
ORGANIZE.
If those guys weren't willing to undercut each other for work, the docks would pile up, and something would give. even if a national conglomerate came in, at least these guys would be employees, which it seems from your article is a goal.
What do the Teamsters' Union have to say about it?
This shit goes on in good times too.
But at least we now know why truckers pull those asinine protests whenever gas goes above $3/gallon. Yeah, protest the government because gas prices are too high, don't protest against your employers for taking advantage of you.
No wonder this country is so fucked.
The country now has about 10% unemployment. There aren't other jobs. In the meantime someone needs to move the product, and the way things are structured, old dirty trucks do the job. Things could be restructured to provide more money to the truckers and lessen the environmental impact of the Port. But y'all would rather spout Reaganomics like it hasn't been proven wrong a hundred times over.
My boyfriend's dad happens to be one of them, and is a first gen immigrant from Russia.
Now, here's the thing about immigrant communities that is far different from non-immigrant communities - they ARE real communities. It's not like people come here, and just magically purchase a truck, and then bitch about the low wages. Rather, they get help from friends and family, and pay them back over time.
A truck job is ideal for an immigrant that knows how to drive one. It has the promise of paying well, you get to, more or less, control your schedule, and your interactions with people who don't speak your native language is minimal. If you know how to work on your vehicle, even better.
The fact remains, however, that these owner-operators get screwed. As was correctly pointed out, they haven't gotten a raise in years, rather have seen a decrease in their income what with the cost of gasoline skyrocketing from where it was just ten years ago. Not dissimilar from airline pilots, this can and will lead to safety problems.
Even if it's not unionization (which would be preferred), some sort of major reform to how these people are paid is necessary. The incentive to drive like an asshole to get more deliveries should be taken away. The fact is that every piece of legislation to make trucking safer has put the onus on the driver (which is not necessarily a bad thing), while ignoring the fact that the pay system is asinine at best.
For people who say these people should just "flip burgers" - not only would that not pay what they take home now (at $9/hr, and assuming 40 hours a week, that would be $360 before taxes), but the mindset is different.
For people who think they should just stop showing up - then how will they get paid?
I only hope that the effect of the new mandate to purchase health insurance doesn't do much more to hurt the livelihoods of these people that you and I take for granted on a daily basis.
The IRS (which is interested in a precise definition in order to collect taxes from the appropriate party) says that a worker is an independent contracter if the employer (the one paying for the work) has "the right to control or direct only the result of the work and not the means and methods of accomplishing the result".
So, if the trucking company mandates that the truckers have to show up at 4am, stay until 4pm, drive specific routes, drive a specific speed, etc., then I'd agree that they are employees (and the IRS would likely be interested in knowing this as well, since they'll get more tax revenue). However, I suspect that the truckers actually are independant contractors, with the associated benefits and costs. The benefit is that no one can tell you when to show up, or for how long. You get your day's work done by noon? Go home to your family. Would these workers really be willing to give up the entreprenurial aspect of their job and the associated freedom to go work for The Man?
The reality is most unions have had to break and stomp repeatedly on laws to win.
Shut down the port and they'll negotiate.
They always do.