“Then it suddenly occurred to me that, in all the world, there neither was nor would ever be another place like this City of the Angels. Here the American people were erupting, like lava from a volcano; here, indeed, was the place for me – a ringside seat at the circus.” — Carey McWilliams
September 13, 2009
Jerry Moyes flew out from Phoenix to quell an uprising.
The owner of Swift Transportation, one of the country's largest trucking companies, Moyes had made a big bet on the Port of Los Angeles. He invested heavily in the new, clean trucks that had just been mandated by the port. But by February, that bet was not paying off.
Demand for freight hauling had collapsed along with the national economy. Moyes was losing $500,000 a month, and had lost $4 million since the Clean Trucks Program began the previous fall.
Worse yet, his drivers were agitating on behalf of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
Over the previous week, tensions between employees and management had boiled over. The terminal manager had been threatened and a tire on his vehicle been slashed. Two drivers leading the union campaign had been fired. There was also talk of a walkout - the last thing the company needed as it was trying to build up a customer base.
When Moyes arrived at the Wilmington yard, he was upset. Addressing a crowd of drivers, he said he wanted to put an end to it.
"I am disgusted," he said. In 40 years in the trucking business, he had never had a manager's tire slashed. "Congratulations. It's a first."
According to the drivers, he also made it clear he would not allow a union drive.
"The union has never been here, and it will never be here," he allegedly said. "That stops now, or I'm moving this facility to Phoenix."
The unrest at Swift coincided with an intensifying national debate about the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to form unions. Labor groups argue that current law is too weak to prevent retaliation, while business groups counter that the act would subject employees to intimidation from union supporters.
That debate has played out in microcosm over the past year at the Swift facility in Wilmington. Workers who opposed the Teamsters have said they were harassed and threatened by pro-union drivers. Some were followed home, and there were allegations that an anti-union driver had his car smeared with human excrement.
On the other hand, Swift has been accused of firing four drivers for union activity - a violation of federal law. Organizers say those firings have had a chilling effect on the union campaign, underscoring the need for the Employee Free Choice Act.
"These gentlemen put their jobs on the line," said Fred Potter, the Teamsters' port director. "The companies feel that the current law has no teeth, and they can do pretty much what they want. Quite honestly, workers are afraid. The law's not going to back them."
Swift counters that the union campaign failed not because of the firings, but because of a federal appeals court ruling. The ruling, in March, blocked a provision of the Clean Trucks Program requiring companies to use employee drivers.
Ronald Holland, an attorney for Swift, has described the program as a "mini-Employee Free Choice Act" - a legislative effort to restore the Teamsters to dominance at the port.
Holland argues that the pro-union drivers believed it was inevitable that the port and Swift would be unionized, and therefore that they were bulletproof.
"They swaggered with confidence and walked around believing they could not be terminated for company policy," Holland said.
The Teamsters acknowledge they have suffered a setback, but say the campaign is not over. The union's top priority for now is seeing that the employee requirement is upheld at a federal trial in December.
If it is, organizers believe they have a chance to transform the local trucking industry, improve the lot of drivers and create a model for other ports around the country. The first step will be bringing Jerry Moyes to the negotiating table.
"He has the opportunity to dominate this port," said Ricardo Hidalgo, the lead organizer for the Teamsters' port campaign. "If we were able to negotiate a contract with him for the workers, the majority of the trucking companies would have to raise their standards as well."
Port truckers can trace their current state of affairs to the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which deregulated the trucking industry. The goal was to increase competition and drive down costs for the consumer, and in both respects the law was successful.
But it also changed the lives of port truckers. Before the law was signed, they were generally native-born and well-paid. Most worked for big companies and belonged to the Teamsters.
Afterward, small trucking firms sprouted up and started hiring independent drivers. The bigger firms - burdened by union contracts - either sought deep wage concessions or went out of business.
Instead of paying by the hour, the smaller companies paid their drivers by the load. The drivers tended to be immigrants, willing to work longer hours for less money than their native-born counterparts. Because they were independent "owner-operators," they could not unionize.
Through the 1980s, the Teamsters' share of the work force eroded precipitously. Though the union has made attempts to regain a foothold, it is now virtually shut out of the port.
Today, most port truckers are Latinos. They net roughly $27,000 a year - less, as one driver put it, than a cook at McDonald's.
The Port of Los Angeles designed the Clean Trucks Program, in part, to reverse that trend. The program's primary goal was to improve air quality by subsidizing the purchase of clean trucks. But another aim was to improve "wages, benefits and working conditions" for port truckers.
To do that, the program intended to change the relationship between trucking companies and their drivers. The owner-operators would be phased out. By 2013, all drivers would once again be employees.
"It really is more of a drive for employee drivers, which are ultimately far easier for unions to organize," said Julie Sauls, spokeswoman for the California Trucking Association. "It's done under the guise of clean air."
The American Trucking Association sued Los Angeles to block implementation of the Clean Trucks Program, arguing that the city's attempt to re-regulate the local trucking industry was pre-empted by federal law.
The association's initial bid for an injunction was denied, and the program went into effect in October 2008. (The association also sued the Port of Long Beach, which implemented a similar program, though without an employee requirement.)
At the same time, Swift Transportation announced it would purchase 600 clean trucks and hire employees to drive them. Swift would get a rebate from the port for each truck - so far it has collected $8.2 million - and a jump on the competition.
Among the newly hired drivers were Bismark Sanchez, Marco Diaz, Anthony Herron and Salvador Gonzalez. Unlike most port drivers, they were promised an hourly wage of $18 - higher than most owner-operators make. Some were also given benefits.
At the outset, things went smoothly. But soon drivers complained that they were being made to work longer than 40 hours, but were only paid for 40 hours of work. There were other complaints about being forced to take overweight loads or take overnight trips without extra compensation.
By November, the four drivers were meeting multiple times a week with Teamsters organizers. As word spread around the yard, those meetings came to include dozens of drivers - by one estimate, as much as 85 percent of the work force.
"The only way we could change was by getting a union in there," Sanchez said. "I was an outspoken one."
Hiring so many employee drivers - more than a year before any employee requirement kicked in - was seen as a risky play. Market analysts openly worried that Swift would not turn a profit and would attract the attention of the Teamsters. But Moyes was a known risk-taker.
A friend of Sen. John McCain, Moyes is best known in Arizona as the owner of the Phoenix Coyotes, a hapless professional hockey team. Moyes took a gamble when he bought the team in 2001, and it has cost him hundreds of millions of dollars. The team recently filed for bankruptcy.
But Moyes' high tolerance for risk also helped him build Swift Transportation from a one-truck operation into a multibillion-dollar company.
Moyes came of age in the trucking business at a time when a few large carriers dominated the market. Due to strict and often sclerotic regulations, Moyes found it impossible to win approval for new routes.
That changed with the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which allowed him to compete aggressively against larger firms by undercutting them on price. From a base of 150 trucks in 1980, Swift grew to 1,000 in 1990. It now has more than 17,000 trucks, all driven by nonunion drivers.
Brennan Obray, Swift's terminal manager in Wilmington, was growing concerned about sabotage. In the last month there had been a suspicious number of costly mistakes on the yard. He had also heard rumors of union activity.
According to affidavits from former employees, Obray warned drivers that Moyes would never allow a union. Obray allegedly listed drivers who supported the union - including Sanchez, Diaz and Herron - and said "we need to get rid of the bad apples."
At times, Obray felt personally threatened. He said he had also been followed home by Teamsters organizers. A driver, Hugo Molina, also reported that he had been taunted because he refused to support the Teamsters campaign. His tire had been slashed and his car was broken into.
Among drivers who opposed the union, there was the feeling that Swift was offering a good deal and there was no reason to stir the pot. Among older drivers, there is also lingering resentment at the Teamsters over failed past campaigns.
"What the Teamsters want is for us to be a member and to pay $40 a month," said Julio Henriquez, an independent driver. "They just want to get our money."
Mark Donahue, a former California Highway Patrol officer who now works as an investigator for Swift's corporate security office, got a call from Obray on Feb. 5. Obray said his tire had just been slashed and he had a pretty good idea who had done it: Bismark Sanchez.
Obray had just had a confrontation with Sanchez over two trucks with damaged chassis. He had ordered Sanchez to have the trucks repaired and haul them to the rail yard. Sanchez was furious because that would put him over his scheduled hours, and he had stormed out.
Obray had then been confronted by a group of drivers. Speaking for the group, Herron said Sanchez was being treated unfairly and threatened a walkout. Obray had felt ambushed.
The next day he fired Herron, allegedly for making a mistake with a container that cost the company $20,000 to fix. But Herron believed he was targeted because he spoke out.
When Donahue looked at the security footage, he couldn't tell who had slashed Obray's tire. So he sat down to interview Sanchez.
Sanchez said that Donahue tried to trick him into confessing, but Sanchez swore that he didn't slash the tire. Sanchez said that when he refused to provide a written confession, he was fired.
Donahue said he merely asked for a written statement - not a confession - and fired Sanchez for refusing to cooperate with the investigation.
While at the Wilmington yard, Donahue followed up on the threats to Hugo Molina. That led to an interview with Marco Diaz - a big, soft-spoken driver who had become a leader in the union campaign.
According to Diaz, Donahue asked about the tire and the threats, and quickly homed in a single question that he asked again and again: "Who wants to start the union?"
(Donahue later denied that he had asked about union activity.)
Within a couple of days, Moyes flew out to address the drivers. Moyes threatened to shut down the facility if the violence continued - but denies the threat was connected to the Teamsters campaign.
When he opened up the floor to questions, Gonzalez asked if he would pay union wages. Moyes reminded him that he had already lost $4 million on the terminal, and didn't have any more money to burn on the operation. He also listed other trucking firms that were struggling to meet union pension obligations.
Gonzalez scoffed: "Yeah, right." A note ended up in his personnel file: "Rude to Jerry Moyes."
Watching Moyes speak, Diaz said he thought to himself that the man had no feeling and no soul. After the meeting, Diaz heard a dispatcher say, "Anybody involved in the union is going to get their heads cut off."
A few days later, Moyes again spoke to the drivers in a conference call, hoping to quell threats of a walkout. In the call, Gonzalez again asked if he would pay union wages.
A couple of weeks later, Diaz and Gonzalez were fired. A background check had turned up misdemeanor convictions that each had failed to mention when they applied. But the drivers thought that was a pretext.
"They wanted the loudest voices out," Diaz said.
Soon it seemed that the company was rethinking its decision to hire so many employee drivers. According to a driver's affidavit, Moyes returned to the yard in March and told the drivers they could make more money - perhaps even twice as much - if they leased their trucks from Swift and became owner-operators.
A week later, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted the ATA's request for an injunction against the employee requirement of the Clean Trucks Program. Whatever pressure there had been to hire employee drivers evaporated.
The Teamsters filed a complaint against Swift with the National Labor Relations Board, demanding that the four drivers be reinstated and given back pay. A hearing was held in August, and both sides are awaiting a ruling from an administrative law judge.
Meanwhile, attendance at union meetings has dropped. Some pro-union drivers said they are trying to avoid giving the company an excuse to fire them.
With the injunction in place, Teamsters organizers fear that any move to unionize Swift's employee drivers will be met with a wholesale shift to owner-operators. So all eyes are on the civil trial, scheduled to start in December in federal court.
"Everybody's watching the lawsuit," Potter said. "It's probably more watched than the O.J. trial in port areas."
Staff Writer Max Zimbert contributed to this article.