[Shadow_Group] Fw: [nwanarchy] Stockton Truckers Join IWW, Win 2-Day Strike

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Forward by Tacoma IWW

 Stockton Truckers Join IWW, Win 2-Day Strike

 By Adam Welch, Motor Transport Workers Organizing
 Committee
 Published in the Industrial Worker, September 2004

 More than 200 Stockton owner-operator truckers working
 out of the rail yards in California's Central Valley
 have joined the IWW since July and won several
 victories. In the past few weeks the union has
 successfully worked to reverse two IWW members'
 life-time banishments from the Burlington
 Northern-Santa Fe rail yard and negotiated a favorable
 settlement of a strike at the 11-driver Patriot
 trucking company.

 The truckers are now preparing to take on the issue of
 the wait times they are forced to endure without pay,
 which can run up to two hours for an increasing number
 of drivers, and also fighting against short paychecks.
 "The truckers are fighting every single day to get
 their money," said one trucker.

 Some 250 truckers in Stockton work for the rail yards
 and are considered independent contractors who lease
 the trucks they own to the companies they work for.
 Nearly 85 percent are Sikh Indians from the Punjab
 region of India. The work force also includes a number
 of Latino and some Filipino, Cambodian, Middle
 Eastern, black and white drivers.

 In early May a strike broke out among West Coast
 truckers over the increasingly high fuel prices that
 drivers are forced to pay out their own pockets. The
 Stockton truckers claim to have been the first group
 to strike. "Fuel was the main problem then. The companies
 were getting a fuel surcharge, but they weren't
 passing this along to the drivers," said trucker Gurp
 Singh, 25, who has been driving for four years and
 came to the U.S. from India when he was 16 years old.

 The strike lasted for two weeks and made significant
 gains, including 20 to 25 percent increases in the
 rates paid per load delivered and a reduction of
 unpaid wait times to a maximum of one hour. "When
 everyone stands together they pretty much have no
 choice. What are they going to do?" says Singh,
 recalling the May strike. However, nearly 30 companies
 in Stockton compete with each other for the business
 of the rail yards, and this competition has slowly
 eroded some of the gains of the May strike.

 Joining the union
 A month after the May strike, Stockton truckers
 contacted the Industrial Workers of the World, and Bay
 Area organizers Bruce Valde, Adam Welch and Harjit
 Gill met with 45 drivers in the library of the
 Stockton Sikh temple. After an intense discussion
 entirely in Punjabi, the drivers voted to go with the
 union. All those attending the meeting immediately
 joined, and the truckers began working to sign up
 their co-workers.

 Deciding factors in the decision were the IWWs
 previous experience organizing with independent
 contractors, that the union would address drivers'
 individual as well as collective grievances, and the
 presence of a native Punjabi speaker, IWW organizer
 Harjit Gill. "It felt good to be helping two
 communities at the same time  the IWW and people who
 are from the same country and ethnicity my family is
 from," said Gill.

 Bay Area organizers were then invited to spend two
 days under a tree near a Highway 5 off ramp to sign
 members up. Local leaders of the truckers got on their
 CB radios, Nextel phones and even created a home-made
 sign with a piece of cardboard and sharpie marker that
 they waved on the side of the road, flagging drivers
 down to stop and take out membership cards. The sign
 read, 'Truck driver stop for fill up application for
 union.' On the first day, nearly 90 truckers were
 signed up off the hood of a car.

 Fighting "banned for life"
 A follow-up meeting was then organized where members
 discussed several issues and heard the story of union
 member Vijay Kashatria, who received a lifetime ban
 from a Burlington Northern-Santa Fe rail yard cop when
 he disputed a ticket for running a stop sign. The
 drivers voted on a plan of action to win their fellow
 worker's job back.

 After being contacted by the IWW, BNSF manager Bob
 Tooke claimed he had no record of the incident and
 that Kashatria was free to resume work.
 African-American member Robert Wooten also suffered a
 lifetime ban shortly after this when he attempted to
 have BNSF document pre-existing damage to a container
 load he was about to haul. Unhappy to see him speaking
 up, a rail cop asked to see his ID and Wooten refused.
 That ban, too, was quickly reversed.

 Singh says after the incident he and other drivers
 made phone calls to spread the news of the victories.
 "Everyone was pretty much excited by it. It was only
 the second time ever," that a lifetime ban had been
 reversed, he said. Rail yards routinely bar truckers
 from working in the rail yards for three, seven or
 even thirty days for minor infractions of the rules.

 Patriot strike wins demands
 Not being able to tolerate rate cuts and unfair
 treatment, a strike erupted at the 11-driver Patriot
 trucking company Sept. 13. Dewey Obtinalla said that
 these conditions, "ignited these people to go with
 it." After two days of striking, Patriot manager Casey
 Stevenson drove his pickup truck out to the field
 where the drivers had gathered during the strike and
 signed an agreement meeting about 70 percent of the
 drivers' 14 demands.  "We feel it's a victory for us.
 It's not that big, but it's better than what we had.
 After they talk nice with the [truckers]. That's the
 real victory for us, that we're treated properly,"
 Obtinalla said.

 Patriot workers also recalled an incident where the
 manager had told the Indian drivers that they could
 not speak their own language in the company office.
 "The drivers didn¹t believe it was devoid of racism
 and neither did I," said Gill.

 Waiting without pay
 Now the drivers are preparing to demand all companies
 return to the one-hour wait time they agreed to during
 the May strike. After delivering a load to a customer,
 drivers are forced to wait between one and two hours
 without pay during the unloading process. After the
 period of unpaid wait time, drivers receive $35 to $45
 for each additional hour that is charged directly to
 the customer.

 "They are being lazy, that's part of it. But they are
 used to having that power over the drivers. They go
 treating you like some kind of animal . They want you
 to do the work for free, and if you refuse they tell
 you to go home," Singh says on the wait times.

 Companies are constantly in competition with each
 other to be awarded work from the brokers, who make
 commission acting as middlemen between the companies
 and the rail yard and their customers. Companies that
 still have the one hour wait time are losing business
 to companies with two-hour waits, putting them under
 pressure to increase their unpaid wait time. "A few
 truckers can stop working and the boss is ready to
 negotiate. Truckers have a lot of power in the
 industry they are in," says organizer Valde, "and the
 IWW is behind these workers using that."

 Support the fight of the Stockton truckers.
 Organizers are asking for donations toward organizing
 expenses and to create a hardship fund. Make checks or
 money orders out to: "Bay Area IWW," PO Box 11412,
 Berkeley CA 94712.

 Contact the IU 530 Motor Transport Workers Organizing
 Committee at: troquero at iww.org<mailto:troquero at iww.org>

 This article originally appeared in the Industrial
 Worker, the newspaper of the IWW. To get regular news
 on radical labor organizing subscribe today!

 Make checks or money orders payable to "IWW." $15 for
 10 issues per year.
 Industrial Worker, PO Box 13476, Philadelphia, PA
 19101, USA

>From the San Jose IWW union
 A rank and file union for all workers
 * ORAGANIZE * EDUCATE * AGITATE *

 Contact us at:
 sjiww at iww.org<mailto:sjiww at iww.org>


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