Rigged: Port truckers trapped in their jobs
LOS ANGELES - Samuel Talavera Jr. did everything his bosses asked.
Most days, the trucker would drive more than 16 hours straight hauling LG dishwashers and Kumho tires to warehouses around Los Angeles, on their way to retail stores nationwide.
He rarely went home to his family. At night, he crawled into the back of his cab and slept in the company parking lot.
For all of that, he took home as little as 67 cents a week.
Then, in October 2013, the truck he leased from his employer, QTS, broke down. When Talavera could not afford repairs, the company fired him and seized the truck — along with $78,000 he had paid toward owning it.
Talavera was a modern-day indentured servant. And there are hundreds, likely thousands, more still on the road, hauling containers for trucking companies that move goods for America’s most beloved retailers, from Costco to Target to Home Depot.
These port truckers — many of them poor immigrants who speak little English — are responsible for moving almost half of the nation’s imports out of Los Angeles’ ports. They don’t deliver goods to stores. Instead they drive them short distances to warehouses and rail yards, one small step on their journey to a store near you.
A yearlong investigation by the USA TODAY Network found that port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford. Companies used that debt as leverage to extract labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.
If a driver quit, the company seized his truck and kept everything he had paid toward owning it.
If drivers missed payments, or if they got sick or became too exhausted to go on, their companies fired them and kept everything. Then they turned around and leased the trucks to someone else.
Drivers who manage to hang on to their jobs sometimes end up owing money to their employers — essentially working for
free. Reporters identified seven companies that have told their employees they owe money at week’s end.
The USA TODAY Network pieced together accounts from more than 300 drivers, listened to hundreds of hours of sworn labor dispute testimony and reviewed contracts that have never been seen by the public.
Using the contracts, submitted as evidence in labor complaints, and shipping manifests provided by trade data consulting firm Panjiva, reporters matched the trucking companies with the most labor violations to dozens of retail brands, including Target, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot, Hasbro, J.Crew, UPS, Costco, Ralph Lauren and more. Among the findings:
Trucking companies force drivers to work against their will — up to 20 hours a day — by threatening to take their trucks and keep the money they paid toward buying them. Bosses create a culture of fear by firing drivers, suspending them without pay or reassigning them the lowest-paying routes.
To keep drivers working, managers at a few companies have physically barred them from going home. More than once, Marvin Figueroa returned from a full day’s work to find the gate to the parking lot locked and a manager ordering drivers back to work. “That was how they forced me to continue working,” he testified in a 2015 labor case. Truckers at two other companies have made similar claims.
Drivers at many companies say they had no choice but to break federal safety laws that limit truckers to 11 hours on the road a day. Drivers at Pacific 9 Transportation testified that their managers dispatched truckers up to 20 hours a day, then wouldn’t pay them until drivers falsified inspection reports that track hours. Hundreds of California port truckers have gotten into accidents, leading to more than 20 fatalities from 2013 to 2015, according to a USA TODAY Network analysis of federal crash and port trade data.
Many drivers thought they were paying into their truck like a mortgage. Instead, when they lost their job, they discovered they also lost their truck, along with everything they’d paid toward it. Eddy Gonzalez took seven days off to care for his dying mother and then bury her. When he came back, his company fired him and kept the truck.
Since 2010, at least 1,150 port truck drivers have filed claims in civil court or with the California Department of Industrial Relations’ enforcement arm, known as the labor commission.
Judges have sided with drivers in more than 97% of the cases heard, ruling time after time that port truckers in California can’t legally be classified as independent contractors. Instead, they are employees who, by law, must be paid minimum wage and can’t be charged for the equipment they use at work. Many companies have appealed the labor commission decisions to civil court and then settled without admitting guilt.
The rulings do not address specific allegations of abuse by drivers, including whether companies physically barred them from leaving work or ordered them to work past federal fatigue limits.
But allegations like those have been made in sworn testimony in hundreds of cases against about 60 trucking companies. Nearly all of them ended with the companies ordered to repay drivers for truck expenses and lost wages.
Prominent civil rights leader Julian Bond once called California port truckers the new black tenant farmers of the post-Civil War South. Sharecroppers from that era rented farmland to make their living and regularly fell into debt to their landlords. Widespread predatory practices made it nearly impossible for the farmers to climb out.
Through lease contracts, California’s port truckers face the same kinds of challenges in ways that experts say rarely happen in the U.S. today.
“I don’t know of anything even remotely like this,” said Stanford Law School Professor William Gould, former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board. “You’re working to get yourself out of the debt. You just don’t see anything like that.”
Reporters tried to contact owners and managers at more than 30 trucking companies. Many did not respond or declined to comment.
Those willing to answer questions said they have never used truck leases to mistreat drivers. Some owners said their lease programs were a favor to truckers who might otherwise have been out of work. And there are drivers who make it through the contract to own their trucks. Drivers who can’t make a living aren’t working hard enough, many company executives say.
“Our owner very generously went out and purchased a fleet of clean trucks,” said Marc Koenig, a vice president at Performance Team, which has lost cases to 21 drivers at the California labor commission. “That’s what really frustrated our owner. He really reached out and helped these guys.”
California’s port truckers make it possible for the WalMarts and Amazons of the world to function. Even so, most of the two dozen retail companies contacted by USA TODAY Network declined to comment, while citing their supply chain ethics guidelines.
Retailers don’t directly hire the truckers who move their goods at the pier. They generally hire large shipping or logistics firms that line up trucking companies through a maze of subcontractors.
When asked about labor violations by trucking companies in Target’s supply chain, spokeswoman Erika Winkels wrote: “Target doesn’t have anything to share here.”
For decades, short-haul truckers at the nation’s ports relied on cheap clunkers to move goods to nearby warehouses and rail yards.
With little up-front investment, drivers — most of them independent contractors who owned their own trucks — could make a decent living squeezing the last miles from dilapidated big rigs that weren’t suited for the open road.
In October 2008, that changed dramatically in southern California, home of the nation’s busiest ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach. State officials, fed up with deadly diesel fumes from 16,000 outdated trucks, ordered the entire fleet replaced.
Instead of digging into their own pockets to buy cleaner trucks, the companies pushed the cost onto individual drivers.
Truckers at dozens of companies say they were handed a lease-to-own contract by their employer and given a choice: Sign immediately or be fired. Many drivers who spoke little English said managers gave them no time to seek legal advice or an interpreter.
It was “take it or leave it,” according to Fidel Vasquez, a driver for Total Transportation who said he couldn’t read the contract because it was in English.
Jose Juan Rodriguez owned his own truck and drove primarily for Morgan Southern. Like many drivers, Rodriguez said he didn’t understand what he was signing, but felt he had no choice.
Executives at Total Transportation and Morgan Southern denied forcing drivers to sign leases and said they offered them as options for truckers to stay in business.
Rodriguez’s wife has Stage 3 breast cancer and his adult son has severe brain damage requiring frequent doctor visits.
“Where do I sign?” Rodriguez recalled asking right away. “The only thing I had to worry about is work, because I have a family.”
Knowing drivers could not qualify for their own leases, trucking companies financed their fleet then arranged subcontracts with drivers, essentially putting them $100,000 or more in debt.
That left drivers at the mercy of their boss, who could fire them for any reason and keep the truck.
Drivers who signed up for leases watched their take-home pay plummet.
“The company didn’t care whether I took a gallon of milk to my home or not,” José Peraza testified in civil court. “The company would take everything.”
For years, Talavera made an honest living at the Los Angeles harbor. But everything changed in late 2010, when his boss at QTS told him he needed to trade in his truck and sign a lease-purchase contract.
For the next four years, he worked mind-numbing hours to pay the bills. He slept in his truck at work to save commuting time and used an empty two-liter to avoid bathroom breaks.
A stack of weekly paychecks he keeps in a drawer at home shows his worst weeks. He grossed $1,970 on June 3, 2011. But after truck expenses, he took home $33.
On February 10, 2012, he took home $112. The next week, he made 67 cents.
Through interviews and court records, reporters cataloged more than 120 drivers who say they regularly worked 12 to 20 hours straight behind the wheel.
Federal law prohibits commercial truckers from driving more than 11 hours at a time, and they can’t work at all after 14 hours, until they have had 10 hours of rest. Government studies show that for every hour past 11 that someone drives, the chances of crashing increase exponentially.
James Kang, former president of the now-defunct QTS, declined to comment.
Through interviews and a review of sworn statements, the USA TODAY Network identified more than 100 drivers who reported threats and retaliation. Some companies have physically barred their workers from going home at night.
Eduardo Garcia, 57, remembers pulling into the Tradelink Transport truck yard exhausted after almost 15 hours behind the wheel one night in October 2010. But as he approached, he said, his boss was standing at the gate, waving drivers back to the docks and refusing to let them into the spaces where they were required to park for the night.
“If you say no, then the next day, don’t come in. No work for you,” Garcia said.
“We are not human. We are machines for making money for these people.”
Rigoberto Cea, president of Tradelink, said he’d go into the parking lot, but only to encourage drivers to keep working. “We would go out there and ask and beg,” he said.
But drivers all over the industry say there’s never really a choice.
“If you don’t drive,” trucker Gustavo Villa said, “you don’t eat.”