USA Today undertook a year-long investigation into southern California truckers, so-called “independent contractors” who form a critical link from America’s busiest port to the rest of the country, and found that drivers are sunk into deep pits of debt due to predatory contracts they signed under duress, debts that are used to force them to work unsafe hours, falsify their work records, and sometimes bring home literal pennies a week after working 80+ hours (some drivers even finish the week in deeper debt, owing money to the companies they “contract” for).
When these workers take their grievances to California’s labor board – with the help of the Teamsters Union – they are generally vindicated and awarded compensation, but the majority of the drivers lack the wherewithal to undertake such a grievance.
The companies whose goods these truckers move include some of America’s biggest brands, like J Crew, Ralph Lauren, LG, Home Depot, and Target, and these companies wash their hands of any responsibility for ensuring that their shipping contractors are not engaged in criminal, exploitative, systematic theft of wages and unsafe working conditions.
The current situation stems from a California rule that banned out-of-date, polluting diesel trucks from its ports. Trucking companies bought all-new trucks with better emissions profiles, then forced their workers to sign contracts through which they assumed all debt for this new fleet, with payments to be taken from their paychecks. The workers were made to sign on pain of immediate termination, without access to a lawyer or advisor, and many didn’t speak or read English well enough to understand the contracts.
The contracts allow the company to terminate the truckers’ employment at will, or to deny them shifts. Workers who miss any work, or a single payment, lose all the payments they’ve put into their trucks, and many report watching years’ worth of wages disappear at the stroke of a pen because they refused to go out on the road for 20 hour shifts, or took a few days off work for a parent’s funeral.
Desperate drivers take out second mortgages on their homes and borrow from relatives to make payments on their trucks, but a driver who falls out of favor with a boss can be “starved” out of his rig if the boss just refuses to give him any shifts – eventually, the driver will simply run out of places to borrow money for payments on the truck (and the drivers are contractually forbidden from driving for other companies, even if the company they work for won’t give them any hours).
The owners of the companies that USA Today investigated denied all this, and when USA Today presented them with documentary evidence, they stopped answering USA Today’s calls.
All else being equal I’m strongly in favor of transitioning away from trucking as a major form of transportation infrastructure, but in the meantime and in the transition it’s extremely important to take care that the workers displaced by those changes are taken care of.
This is corporations using clumsy environmental efforts to increase their stranglehold on the lives of their employees, and we need to fight that. We need to be on the side of the folks who lose their jobs when flawed or destructive infrastructures are phased out. Not in the sense of not ending those destructive practices, but making sure that those workers’ lives and freedoms are protected.
A Middleground 