A Clean Trucks Victory

It’s been about 12 years since a couple of us started working to bring clean, non-polluting trucks to the Port of Los Angeles. On a Wednesday night in April in a small trailer in a truck yard in Wilmington, a coalition that includes the Angeles Chapter’s Harbor Vision Task Force scored a victory when nearly 50 employee truck drivers voted to join the Teamsters.

The task force started working with Teamsters and the Longshoreman’s union on trucking issues in 2002. Four years later, the Sierra Club began participating in a national campaign based on local coalitions to fight for clean trucks and employee status for drivers. Early in 2006, an organizer from Change to Win contacted Sierra Club National offices in San Francisco to seek the Club’s participation.

They outlined a campaign for clean trucks and employee status for drivers based on a concession model. This was the same sort of campaign the task force had sought from the port back in 2002. Finally, with this vote, the task force scored a victory.

This coalition has been very instructive in terms of the big number of players involved, the Natural Resources Defense Council (which represented the Club pro bono), the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (which coordinated the campaign locally), the Teamsters (who worked to organize the drivers), CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic justice) that worked onthe social issue components of this campaign, lots of local environmental groups, health and economy researchers – all worked in a pitched battle against the National Trucking Association and the National Retail Federation (Wal-Mart dominantly).

Though, this victory is a milestone, the work isn’t yet done. There might be adverse decisions from a case that is winding its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And, there are some 15,000 port truck drivers.

It remains important to the successful longterm operations of the clean trucks program that trucks are owned by and maintained by trucking companies, and that drivers are scheduled to pick up and drop off loads as employees -- so port terminal operators can see the cost of inefficient operations and benefit from running things smoothly, instead of exploiting drivers, wasting fuel and polluting.

And it is humanly important to uplift the working poor because it’s very hard to advance environmental issues in impoverished and environmentally-blighted neighborhoods when residents don’t have the time or resources to stand up and fight off polluters.

Three big cheers to all our partners in this campaign.

Tom Politeo is chair of the Harbor Vision Task Force.