Vol. 76/No. 17      April 30, 2012

Australia-based Toll Group is a shipping and warehousing company that handles brand-name fashion imports at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports.

When the vote was announced at 9 p.m. April 11, “We didn’t go home. We stayed together,” Xiomara Perez told the Militant. “Drivers from other companies honked and yelled congratulations. Some parked by the road and said ‘Organize us!’ That is what we promise to do with this victory.”

Perez was fired in March leading up to the vote, after she stopped at McDonald’s to use the restroom. Her coworkers say the firing was due to her pro-union activities and demand that she is reinstated.

“The trucking bosses woke up to some bad news today,” said Jimmy Martinez at the plant-gate celebration. Like other Toll Group drivers Martinez is a veteran of earlier union-organizing drives. “Those efforts failed, but they taught us something about unions, gave us experience and confidence in ourselves and in each other.”

The union drive won support from the Transport Workers Union of Australia. In March four members of the TWU, which represents 12,000 Toll Group workers there, visited Los Angeles on a fact-finding and solidarity trip.

A Teamsters delegation also went to Australia in October 2011 to protest together with the TWU at the annual stockholders meeting of Toll Group in Melbourne. “The CEO showed the shareholders photos of a beautiful lunchroom and gardens,” Teamster Alberto Quiteno recalled. “I thought to myself ‘Where is that?’”

The union drive at Wilmington was spurred on by poor working conditions in the yard—portable toilets instead of bathrooms, no separate toilets for women, no place to eat lunch, and no water to wash up.

Toll Group in October fired 26 workers, including Quiteno, other members of the delegation to Australia and many drivers who wore union T-shirts to work. So far 15 have won their jobs back.

Teamsters Local 848 has offered support to other struggles. Martinez went to Seattle in February to bring solidarity to port drivers who walked out to protest abuses and fines. “I was inspired by the combativity I saw there,” he said. “I know they are happy for us today.”

The Seattle port drivers face greater legal obstacles to organizing because the companies claim they are “independent contractors.”

With the deregulation of the trucking industry in the 1980s, more trucking companies classified their employees as contractors or owner-operators as a way to lower their labor costs and get workers to bear the burden of paying for fuel, repairs and wait time. In addition, the bosses say these workers are not entitled to union membership.

Most of the drivers at the port here are also labeled “independent” operators. But at Toll Group drivers are hired by the company directly. The drivers’ union victory there makes them one of a handful of unionized harbor trucking fleets in the U.S.

In a statement, Toll Group said it would “recognise our employees’ decision,” but did not reply to requests from the Militant for further comment.

“We will be meeting together to discuss a contract. And we will win a contract. We won’t go back,” said Remberto Martinez, a Toll Group driver.
 
 
Related articles:
Longshore union hall in Wash. is attacked
16 month lockout ends at NY apartment complex  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home