LA Weekly

An Even Heavier Load   On Thursday, Nov. 1, the LA Harbor Commission unanimously approved a phased ban of the aging truck fleet working LA's ports with goal of replacing the short-haul vehicles with newer, cleaner-burning trucks that could reduce 80 percent of the area's harmful diesel emissions. But what about all of those independent owner-operator drivers who make up the majority of port truckers? In July, JUDITH LEWIS reported on how the proposed ban would affect the truckers in her story "A Heavy Load." For context on today's news, read her story here.

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Before sunrise on a Monday morning, outside a sterile office park in Compton, a convoy of small, beat-up cars, none of them newer than 1995, arrives at the offices of the trucking firm Calko Speedline. One by one, the car’s drivers emerge, ranchera and mariachi and estás escuchando a Piolín por la mañana! competing from their radios. They buy coffee from the taco truck that follows them in, and assemble in small groups, huddled in circles among their big rigs — hulking red, green, blue and white mammoths lined up along the curb, their diesel-burning engines grumbling into action one by one.

The drivers’ day of waiting begins.

“My name’s Chicho. Everybody knows me. You can ask anyone, ‘Do you know Chicho?’ and he’ll say yes.”

Chicho, born Hernan Robleto, is short, round, nearly bald and, when he speaks, energetically animated. His English is nearly indistinguishable from his Spanish; sometimes, while listening to him, it’s possible to lose any conscious sense of which language he’s speaking. At the Calko office, he paces among the various groups while office personnel inside quietly field calls from terminal operators at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach about ship traffic and schedules; later, they’ll give each of the men directions to their first load of the day, a container of goods destined for an intermediate shipping facility somewhere inland or farther down the coast, where it will be transported still farther, to distribution centers all over the country, by truck or train.

“I am from Nicaragua,” Chicho tells me, with a sideways look and suspense in his voice. “I came here 25 years ago. It was a revolution; they were killing everybody. If you could leave, you did.” He said goodbye to his family and began the thousand-mile journey over two borders to the U.S., where he went to the ports and looked for a job.

“I went into one company and said, ‘I want to be a truck driver,’ and they say, ‘Okay, let’s go get you a truck.’” He jumps back and forth as he tells the story, acting out both sides of the conversation, turning one way and then the other as he switches characters. “They take me to the place where you can buy a truck, and we pick one out. I have no credit — no trucker has credit, and the ones that do have bad credit — but they sign for me, and I have a truck.”

It still works this way. Trucking companies act as co-signers on lending agreements so long as the trucker works exclusively for that company and carries its logo on the truck’s driver’s-side door. Truckers cannot enter the port without a specific pickup assignment from the dispatcher at the trucking company that “leases” their truck.

“But still they say we are independent workers. I don’t understand this. How can we be independent if we can only do what one company tells us to do?”

While Chicho talks, his friend Honorio Rivera takes out a sponge mop and goes to work on his 2004 Freightliner as the sun comes over the horizon. He washes the windshield, the hood, the doors, then lifts the hood and wipes down the insides of the engine with a rag. The white metal gleams in the day’s new pinkish light.

“It was an expensive truck,” Rivera says. “I have to take care of it. It cost me $69,000.”

If port truckers like Chicho and Rivera are lucky, they can squeeze in two or three loads a day, at anywhere from $70 to $180 each, depending on the shipper and the route (trucking lines such as Calko pay drivers per load, a sum first determined by the shipper; 70 percent goes to the trucker). At most, a driver earns about $300 a day, including the fee for returning the empty container. Working 50 weeks a year, he can gross close to $80,000. But since drivers work as independent contractors — or “independent owner-operators” according to industry euphemism — they pay their own fees, taxes, insurance and fuel. These expenses, combined with monthly payments on that $69,000 truck, easily whittle a trucker’s salary down to around $30,000.

Which means that Chicho, after 25 years of hard work as an independent contractor without health care or retirement, has never been able to buy a house. He can’t even rent one in Los Angeles. Instead, he lives in a $700-a-month two-bedroom apartment 180 miles away in Morongo Valley with his wife and two children, 5 and 14. He has never taken a vacation, he has never seen a doctor.

“I am tired,” says Chicho, who says he is 50, but looks a decade older. “I am at the point in my life where I want to be taken care of. I am also at a point in my life where I wonder who will take care of my wife if I die.”


Now Chicho and his fellow truckers have a new set of worries. With the nation’s attention fixed on the ports — just last week Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff came to Los Angeles to announce new security procedures for the ports, including screening all containers for nuclear materials — the drivers’ lives will no doubt become more complicated, with longer waits and more bureaucracy than they already claw through today. In the name of security, air quality and global trade, the ports are due for an epic shift: Checkpoints will be put into place, technology upgraded, and new machines put on the roads at considerable expense and effort, all to move huge crates of goods off foreign ships to big-box stores. But no one has bothered to ask the men who do the most to move those goods — the truckers — whether the changes make any sense to them.