Long Beach, Calif. – Not wanting to spend $600 on two new tires, Francisco Murasaya pulled his truck behind the line of drivers waiting to have treads cut into their rigs’ bald tires.
But when a sweaty teenager finished crudely carving new treads on Murasaya’s tires with a hot iron and demanded $12 for each tire, the driver angrily stormed off.
“Twelve bucks!” he shouted. “No way! It used to be 10 bucks. I’m going somewhere else next time.”
Two bucks is no small change for many of the 16,000 drivers who get by on the barest of margins hauling goods from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, among the world’s busiest.
Fanning out from the mammoth ports, the drivers, nearly all of them Latino, crisscross Southern California’s congested highways in their timeworn trucks, carrying freight that ultimately will make its way to every part of the country.
But a number of the drivers are undocumented immigrants, and they may soon find themselves out of work. So, too, freight may begin backing up across the country.
That’s because the federal government, in its drive to boost port security, is on the verge of issuing guidelines for checking identities of the nation’s 750,000 port workers, including 110,000 or so haulers.
“We believe finalization is in the coming weeks. It’s very soon,” said Darrin Kayser, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, describing the government’s plans for the security system.
Like any business pondering how it will get by without undocumented workers, the trucking industry is in deep debate about what could lie ahead.
“There could be a huge impact,” said Curtis Whalen, an official for the American Transportation Association. “If you start getting whacked in the West, you will have an impact in Chicago because of less traffic flow.”
Shippers could transfer their cargoes to ports other than Los Angeles and Long Beach or the New York area, where it is estimated that most of the undocumented drivers work. Trucking companies, already struggling with high turnover rates and a dearth of drivers, could be forced to pump up their pay to find new drivers.
And that would hit consumers who have benefited from a freight system that has grown by leaps and bounds but kept costs down by pinching pennies all the way, especially those that wind up in the truckers’ hands.
The ports in Southern California are a good example.
From afar the ports look like an incredible success: miles of massive cranes and docks jammed with freighters riding low in the water from all the containers they are carrying from Asia. Between 1990 and 2005, the number of containers arriving at the two ports quadrupled, and that number is expected to triple in the next 10 years.
Fierce competition between the workers, and the companies that hire them, has kept wages depressed.
“I’ve been working here for 17 years and I can’t even buy a house,” said David Mendoza, 42, who was taking a break at the spot where treads were being carved in bald tires.
