Thousands march for jobs, clean air in Port of Oakland

More than 2,000 environmental, community and labor advocates marched on July 22 with independent truckers to call for clean air and good jobs at the Port of Oakland.

California recently issued new pollution-emission standards for diesel trucks, meaning that most trucks owned by independent operators will need to be retrofitted with new clean-air filters costing an average of $20,000 per truck. Independent truckers work an average of 11 to 14 hours a day for as little as $8 per hour.

Skyrocketing diesel prices have pushed some of these workers, most of whom are recent immigrants, to live out of their trucks with their families. An estimated 66 percent of port truckers have no health benefits despite spending long hours exposed to the carcinogenic black carbon of diesel fuel exhaust.

The poor, primarily those living in the African American West Oakland area surrounding the port, suffer soaring cancer rates and the highest asthma hospitalization rates in California. One in five children in the area has asthma.

The Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports, the California Labor Federation and the Alameda Labor Council organized the demonstration and are calling for the Port of Oakland to require truck companies to directly hire the truckers rather than employ them as independent contractors.

This would make the truckers eligible to join the Teamsters, which provided union representation for most of the truckers at California’s ports before deregulation of the industry in 1980. It would also mean that the financial responsibility for clean air in the ports would be shifted from the independent truckers to the trucking companies and corporate retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target and Home Depot who reap huge profits from global trade coming through the ports.