* California - Immigrant truckers squeezed in US ports battle
-- Tommy P looks wearily across the cab of his leased Peterbilt truck and voices the frustration of those struggling to haul containers around the vast, highly congested ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach... Mr P — who does not give his full name and speaks only rudimentary English — is one of the tens of thousands of truckers suffering from a months-long slowdown in ports all along or the US West Coast... A now-resolved stand-off between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association — which represents private terminal operators — has contributed to a slowdown in the movement of containers through terminals... Self-employed trucking contractors like Mr P — known as drayage truckers — have been hit particularly hard. They are paid per trip and, in congested terminals, it can take so long to dig out the appropriate container that according to the LA/Long Beach Harbor Trucking Association, nearly 30 per cent of port visits in February took two hours or more. Few of the truckers — many of them poor immigrants — manage the three round-trips a day they say they need to make a decent living... For now, the hold-ups continue, delaying when drivers can reliably make three round trips daily. While there are ships in nearly all the berths around San Pedro Bay and cranes moving containers on and off them, the continued presence of about 30 ships at anchor shows how slow progress at clearing the backlog has been, at least partly because of a shortage of dockworkers... Roberto Partida stands behind his truck on Terminal Way in the Port of Los Angeles. In his limited English, he explains that some customers refuse to accept containers because their goods have been spoilt or are no longer needed. Some weeks, Mr Partida has only been able to make one trip a day. “It costs money because you don’t make money,” he says. “You have to pay insurance, for your truck — you don’t make money. What do you do?” ...
(Photo by Robert Wright - In this photo there are a number of utility vehicles lining up to move cargo) - Long Beach, CAL, USA -The Financial Times (UK), by Robert Wright -March 10, 2015Labels: truckers' stories
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