The Greening Of America's Busiest Port ( The Progress Report )

[pinto]

Center For American Progress
The Progress Report
March 20, 2008 by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Satyam Khanna, Matt Corley, Ali Frick, Benjamin Armbruster, and Brad Johnson

The Greening Of America's Busiest Port

Today, the commissioners of the busiest shipping port in the United States will vote on the Clean Trucks Program, a plan devised by a unique coalition of national and local environmental, labor, and community organizations. Despite fierce opposition by big-box retailers and the trucking industry, the commissioners of the Port of Los Angeles are expected to approve this plan to reform the Port's trucking policy. The Clean Trucks Program mandates that the Port only deal with trucking companies who employ, rather than contract, their drivers (a major labor and national security reform) and maintain high-efficiency trucks running high-grade diesel fuel (a major environmental reform). If approved, this plan will mark a significant milestone in the ongoing fight for "green growth" of the port and provide a model for the progressive movement.

THE FIGHT: The Clean and Safe Ports Coalition came together when national environmental groups like the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which has led the legal fight, and the national Change to Win labor coalition -- backed by SEIU and the Teamsters -- joined forces with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, a community alliance founded in 1993 that defeated Wal-Mart's proposed Inglewood Supercenter in 2004. The Clean Trucks Program, a linchpin of the coalition's strategy, would allow the ports to deal directly with a small number of trucking companies instead of the thousands of drivers -- and thus enforce environmental, security, and efficiency reforms, and put the drivers under the national worker safety and labor framework that protects employees. After being elected mayor of Los Angeles in 2005 on a platform that included port reform, Antonio Villaraigosa appointed S. David Freedman to chair the Harbor Commission. Freedman embraced the coalition's suggestions, saying, "We're not going to grow unless we grow green." In 2006, the ports jointly drafted the San Pedro Bay Ports Clean Air Action Plan based on the coalition's suggestions and have been gradually implementing elements such as truck standards and ship emissions reductions. The cargo importer trade groups -- including the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, National Industrial Transportation League, National Retail Federation, and the American Trucking Associations -- are fighting every step of the way. Last month, the Port of Long Beach -- "saying the employee model would get bogged down in the courts" -- approved environmental but not labor reforms, sparking cries of protest from the community. However, California's third largest port, the Port of Oakland, approved a similar plan on Tuesday and the Port of Los Angeles is expected to embrace the Clean Trucks Program today. Despite the intense pressure to maintain a broken system, this is a clear demonstration that it is indeed possible to move society toward sustainability, justice, and opportunity.

BIG-BOX HEAVEN: The Port of Los Angeles and the adjoining Port of Long Beach, twenty miles south of downtown Los Angeles in San Pedro Bay, are the first and second busiest ports in the nation, handling a combined 15.9 million containers with $378 billion in cargo in 2007. "Forty-five percent of America's total imports and seventy percent of Asian imports" come through these ports. The containers are then shipped out by train and tens of thousands of trucks to stock the shelves of Wal-Mart, Macy's, Target, and The Gap across the nation. Approximately 500,000 regional jobs are driven by the port economy, including the longshoremen who are some of the highest-paid blue-collar workers in the country, and the predominantly Latino truckers who make $12 an hour after expenses, without benefits. The Port of Long Beach even has its own YouTube channel. The ports are a nexus of the globalized U.S. economy -- the clothes we wear, toys we buy for our children, products we make, even much of the food we eat, likely came through this one 43-mile stretch of waterfront.

THE CHALLENGE: But the "port complex is also a microcosm of the inequality of income, wealth, and public health" that mark today's society. This remarkable concentration of ships, trains, and trucks in one point creates a deadly zone of pollution in the surrounding waters, land, and air. The local community -- poor and predominantly Latino and African-American -- is hardest hit, with double the national rate of childhood asthma. Diesel fuel is a major culprit. Diesel exhaust, with soot, volatile organic compounds, nitrous oxide, and other pollutants, is responsible for 70 percent of cancer caused by air pollution in California. The 16,800 truckers who sit in their trucks all day, often idling in the ports or in congested highways, bear the brunt of diesel's harmful effects. Eighty-eight percent of the drivers are "independent contractors," meaning the trucking companies they work for do not have to pay for health insurance, pensions, or the $46,000 a year in truck-related expenses. Nor is it legal, as non-employees, for them to unionize. In the name of driving down costs, industry has ironically resisted standards that would improve the efficiency, reliability, and safety of the trucking fleet.

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/progressreport

[diane in sf]

1. Good news, may they suceed.