Life, Work, and Injustice in Southern California's
Retail Fortress
by Nicholas Allen
New Labor Forum
Spring 2010, Volume 19, Issue 2

http://www.newlaborforum.org/Home/Spring2010/Spring2010Abstracts/tabid/1700/Default.aspx

ON A CLEAR DAY, FLYING INTO LOS ANGELES FROM THE EAST,
IF YOU GLANCE down about twenty minutes before landing,
the desert and mountains give way to the beginnings of
the massive sprawl that stretches inland from the L.A.
basin. Under a cloud of smog, curly subdivisions spread
as far as the eye can see, ringed by mountains. Then a
proliferation of large white squares and rectangles,
clus-tered together at the intersections of three major
freeways. The outsized checkerboard you are looking
down upon is the heart of the Inland Empire, the
largest concentration of warehouses and distribution
centers on the planet. In these giant buildings, most
of them one million square feet - seventeen football
fields laid end-to-end - an army of low- wage workers
sort and package a huge portion of the nation's
consumer goods and send them on their way to the
shelves of the big-box retailers where we shop. The
Inland Empire, once an insignificant exurb,1 is now the
pumping heart of the vascular system of the world's
largest retail corporations: Home Depot, Target, and,
most of all, Wal-Mart.

THE GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN

THE WORKERS WHO SORT THE goods in the warehouses of the
Inland Empire - over one hundred thousand people in
roughly three hundred buildings - are part of a vast
supply chain that starts in Southeast Asia and extends
to every town in America. Almost half of the goods we
import - flat-screen TVs, dolls, garden tools,
sneakers, iPods - gets put in forty-foot-long steel
containers, piled on cargo ships, and sent across the
ocean from seaports in China to the giant seaports of
Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. From there,
longshoremen put the steel boxes on trucks and trains
that haul the boxes to the warehouses of the Inland
Empire. It is the logical place for these facilities to
cluster: Los Angeles no longer has the space to
accommodate the giant buildings, and the San Jacinto
Mountains are a natural barrier beyond which trucks
require much more fuel and time, as the mountain passes
get blocked by snow while the containers must be
delivered strictly on time to meet the requirements of
a Just-In-Time supply chain.

The dynamic that created the cluster of giant white
boxes that fill the valley east of Los Angeles - the
steel container, the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing
and the opening of China, the digitization of commerce
- is in many ways a marvel of technology and
organization.2 Yet it is invisible to most Americans
and ignored by people outside the industry of "goods
movement," or logistics. The human beings who make it
work are also largely invisible and ignored; and for
them, the dynamic of the logistics industry has created
conditions that are intolerable.

During the 1990s, as the current megaconglomeration of
warehouses in the Inland Empire was taking shape,
hundreds of thousands of workers came to the region to
look for jobs. They came from poor neighborhoods of
L.A., from depressed areas of the rural Southwest, and
from Mexico and Central America. They are a vital part
of the richest corporations on the planet, yet their
conditions are miserable and their prospects for
achieving the American Dream are slim. Unlike the other
workers who make the supply chain work, the seafarers
and longshoremen, they were not part of the great union
drives of the 1930s. They are not organized into
unions, and their low wages and bad living conditions
reflect that.

Who are these workers and what can they do to fight for
better lives? For the past two years I have been a part
of a team of labor unionists and community organizers
working in the region to answer this question;
following are some observations.

THE TEMP GRIND

LIFE FOR THE AVERAGE WAREHOUSE worker in the Inland
Empire is hard. Most warehouse workers do not have a
regular job: they get work through temporary labor
agencies. In the city of Ontario alone there are 275
registered temporary labor agencies and, according to a
recent report by Edna Bonacich and Juan David de Lara,
temporary employment has shot up by an astounding 575
percent between 1990 and 2007. These agencies operate
in a way that is familiar to California's agricultural
sector, in which labor contractors provide labor to the
landowners. In fact, one could argue that the structure
of employment in the Inland Empire never really changed
when the region's economy changed from agriculture to
goods movement; the only difference is the workers are
now indoors.

When you depend on temp work to make a living, the work
day starts early. Most warehouse workers have wallets
overstuffed with reams of cards from various temp
agencies. They call them one by one each morning,
starting at 5:00 a.m., to find out where work might be
available. If an agency responds in the affirmative,
the worker will go there in person to wait outside,
usually with a crowd of people. Some time later a
number of workers will be selected for an assignment,
which could be as short as a day or last for months.
Sometimes the work disappears when the worker arrives
at the warehouse: the agencies sometimes like to
overbook to avoid the risk of workers not showing up.

The temp agency in the morning is reminiscent of the
docks in the days before longshoremen formed a union:
it is a shapeup, where the labor contractor can pick
and choose who will work and who will not each day. In
such a system, needless to say, the power resides
exclusively with the employer. In times of labor
oversupply, like during the current recession, it is an
environment where workers will swallow almost any
indignity to obtain work - not a fertile field for
talking back or organizing. As a result, predictably,
the workers are subject to wage theft in myriad forms.
Stories of underpayment, not being paid for overtime,
and having to pay kickbacks to temp agencies are
common.3

THE SHELL GAME OF EMPLOYMENT

THE MOST FRIGHTENING THING about the warehouse industry
is that it is a glimpse of what the economy as a whole
could look like if the current trends toward
outsourcing work continue. More and more employers are
attracted by the idea of being able to keep their
workers at arms length by hiring them through the
intermediary of a temp agency. Thus the ultimate
employer is no longer legally liable for many aspects
of the employer- employe e relationship, and can deny
responsibility for the welfare of the worker.

In the logistics industry, the companies who control
the supply chain - the giant retailers, especially Wal-
Mart - have created an industry of servant companies
who perform essential functions for them, and are
subject to exacting levels of command and control, but
are not technically part of the parent company. Giant
corporations (suppliers like Mattel, shipping companies
like Maersk, trucking firms like Schneider, or parcel
companies like Fed Ex and UPS) function as outgrowths
of the giant retailers. In turn, these outgrowths hire
labor contractors to supply them with workers. So a
typical warehouse worker is an employee of Select
Staffing Services, works at a Schneider distribution
center, unloads boxes from Maersk, and handles stuff
destined for and owned by Wal-Mart. Most workers in the
Inland Empire, when asked where they work, are sensibly
vague: "at the warehouse" is the common response, as if
these three hundred facilities were essentially
fungible. And in Wal-Mart's eyes, this assessment is
correct. The containers can move through any number of
channels, but Wal-Mart will exercise close control and,
at the appointed time and price, the cargo will end up
on Wal-Mart shelves.4

Anatomy of the Workforce

The goods arrive at the warehouse at all hours of the
day and night, where they are processed by a highly
sophisticated system which, despite increasing levels
of automation, remains labor intensive. The first
workers to handle the goods are the lumpers. They are
often hired in crews to unload shipping containers, and
are paid by the container. A crew of up to four lumpers
might share S85 per container. Each container takes
about three hours to unload, putting the wage
perilously close to or below the state minimum of S8
per hour. The contents of a container are often boxed,
not palletized, and thus require manual unloading onto
a pallet. The pallet is then transported by a forklift
and its driver - a relative aristocrat in the labor
hierarchy who might make SlO or S 12 per hour - to a
conveyor system where the items are scanned by a laser
gun, have their bar codes registered, and are sent on
their short journey to a shelf or an outbound pallet.
The shelf bound object will be lifted by a high jack
onto shelves that reach thirty feet high. It will later
be retrieved and sent into the conveyor system by a
cherry picker, who is sometimes suspended by a harness,
picking boxes off of high shelves. The regular pickers,
often women paid S8 or S9 per hour, work in assembly-
line-like corridors, picking boxes off of shelves
according to computerized orders, sometimes coming to
them in a language of their choice through a headset.
At the end of the conveyor system that snakes its way
through the distribution center is a team of packers
and loaders, who load the goods onto outbound trailers.

Almost all the workers in a warehouse are paid well
below a living wage, which in the Inland Empire would
be around S17 per hour - enough to feed, clothe, and
house a family of four. In addition, temp agencies do
not offer health benefits, retirement benefits, or any
benefits for that matter. Some direct hires might be
eligible for employer-sponsored health insurance, but
for many the premiums are unaffordable at the wages
they make.

Because they are so vulnerable to employer retaliation,
workers are physically at risk: they are reluctant to
report health and safety problems in the warehouses.
Most warehouses are loud, dirty, and dangerous, with
conveyor belts whirring, boxes zipping along to their
destinations, and forklifts zooming back and forth
loaded with pallets that can weigh tons. Back injuries
and repetitive stress problems are widespread, while
more serious injuries are not uncommon - for instance,
a crushed ankle resulting from the unfortunate meeting
of a worker and a wayward forklift.

Immigration

Roughly half the workers in the warehouses are
immigrants and half are native-born. About 80 percent
are Latino. Of the immigrants, although some portion is
undoubtedly undocumented, many are working in the U.S.
legally. Yet even these legal warehouse workers endure
a huge amount of harassment from the Border Patrol and
ICE, the branch of Homeland Security that deals with
immigration enforcement. It is not uncommon to see
roadblocks (something I have never witnessed on the
East Coast) - law enforcement checkpoints at major
intersections in the warehouse district screen every
passing car. If the driver looks Latin-American, the
officers verify driver's licenses. If the driver does
not have a license, the car gets directed to a field-
processing center, conveniently set up under tents and
klieg lights in an adjoining strip mall parking lot. If
the driver's immigration status does not check out, he
is boarded onto a bus, taken away, and processed for
deportation. Under the watchful eyes of federal and
local agents, and their German Shepherds, cars are
confiscated and families separated. Frantic text
messages rapidly spread throughout the immigrant
community, made up in large part of warehouse workers,
alerting family members and friends to the checkpoint
so they can avoid it.

Pollution

The burden of being a warehouse worker in the Inland
Empire is not limited to the onerous working
conditions, low pay, and lack of respect. Workers and
their families must also cope with the corrosive
effects of the warehouse industry's concentration in
the region, what economists would call "externalities."
The most obvious externality is pollution, evidenced by
the visitor's stinging eyes and prickly throat. The
massive amount of truck and locomotive traffic in the
valley makes it the most diesel-polluted area in the
country, and the fourth most polluted place on the
planet, trailing only Calcutta, Djakarta, and Bangkok
for the distinction.5 Most residents are stoic about
the fact that they are breathing poison for the
privilege of living near and working in minimum wage
jobs, but the consequences are serious: asthma rates
are extremely high, and respiratory illnesses and
premature deaths are directly linked to the diesel
particulate emissions.

Lack of Community Services

Another externality is the endemically poor tax base
that funds the region's schools and services. Since
most warehouses are not involved in the sale of goods -
they merely send them on their way - they do not pay
any sales tax, and they pay little if any commercial
tax. The municipalities and unincorporated areas that
make up the Inland Empire have been actually competing
with each other to attract warehouse jobs, seduced by
the prospect of supposedly good-paying blue-collar
work. The local governments offer tax rebates and other
incentives to entice warehouse developers to their
communities. Thus the local tax base is starved. The
end result is a strange urban geography in which the
warehouses themselves are fairly unobtrusive and well-
kept, despite their size - they are often ringed by
well-tended lawns. But the neighborhoods where the
workers live often do not have sidewalks, light poles,
or sewers. Many live in trailer parks. Since the
economic collapse, many families have lost their
housing, and so have had to move in with relatives.
Residential streets in Fontana and San Bernardino are
deserted, lined with foreclosure signs and boarded-up
houses, while the trailer parks are crowded.

The loss of jobs and the relative stability they
provided has hit the region hard. The statistics -
including a 13 percent unemployment rate - are
impressive. But the personal stories tell of the true
cost of the recession. A worker in a meeting I recently
attended spoke of rooting through the garbage to find
food, then bringing it home to feed his daughter, lying
about where he found it so she would eat it.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

IN ORDER FOR THE LABOR MOVEMENT to be powerful and
effective for working people, the goods movement
industry must be organized. Union power in goods
movement is the fulcrum with which workers in
industries at the bottom and the top of the supply
chain can potentially lift themselves out of poverty.
The relatively large density of unionization in
supermarkets, for example, would probably not exist
were it not for the fact that from World War II through
the 1970s, Teamster-driven trucks were needed to
deliver the groceries.

The Teamsters union is still large and powerful, with
1.4 million members. But despite significant organizing
successes, its core strength in trucking and
warehousing has eroded significantly since Reagan's
deregulation of trucking in 1980. Now, few truckers are
covered by the Master Freight Agreement and, outside of
food distribution, few warehouses or distribution
centers are unionized. At the same time, the United
Food and Commercial Workers, despite its best efforts,
has found it impossible to successfully unionize Wal-
Mart store workers, or any other big-box retailer for
that matter. The lack of union power in the new retail
economy is not the fault of the unions: the toxic
combination of NLRB rules that favor employers, and the
scientific and sophisticated anti-union campaigns that
Wal-Mart has perfected make such organizing nearly
impossible. Even if the union could win an election in
a given store, Wal-Mart would likely shut that site
down, as it did in Quebec when union-friendly labor
laws enabled WalMart workers there to organize.

Given these obstacles, any strategy to unionize Wal-
Mart will have to be companywide, and will have to, at
some level, convince Wal-Mart to lower its level of
opposition to its workers unionizing. It is hard to
imagine this happening without a strategy to build
power for the workers in Wal-Mart's supply chain.
Granted, coming to terms with the vehemently anti-
union behemoth will not be easy, or maybe even
possible. As Harold Meyerson put it in the August 2009
edition of the American Prospect, the campaign underway
to organize warehouse workers in the Inland Empire "may
be one of the more quixotic American organizing
campaigns in decades, but it is surely one of the most
important."

Much has to happen for workers in the new retail
economy to achieve the kind of bargaining power
necessary to live a decent life: the consumer economy
will have to rebound, increasing hiring and reducing
the labor surplus that makes it hard to organize; the
laws governing union organizing have to improve; the
chorus of voices calling for accountability in big-box
retail's business practices must continue to raise the
volume; the Obama administration and its agencies must
make this a strategic priority as part of rebuilding
the economy; and the workers of big-box retail - both
in stores and in the supply chain, global and domestic
- must begin to find ways to unite. As long as consumer
goods are made in China and shipped through the ports
of LA./Long Beach, and as long as the San Jacinto
Mountains stay where they are, the Inland Empire will
be a key strategic terrain where this struggle will
unfold. The groundwork for a movement is being created
(www.warehouseworkersunited.org) as this article goes
to press. Much more will need to be done, and there is
not a moment to lose.

Notes
1. For a history of the region, see Mike Davis, City of
Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York:
Vintage, 1992).
2. See Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson, Getting the
Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).
3. A 2009 study by the Workplace Violations Survey
Project found that, in a given week, 25 percent of
warehouse workers in LA, New York, and Chicago suffer
some form of wage theft. The conditions in the Inland
Empire are likely worse due to the high concentration
of work and cutthroat competition among temp agencies.
See "Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers: Violations of
Employment and Labor Laws in America's Cities,"
available at www.unprotectedworkers.org.
4. Nelson Lichtenstein, Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart
Created a Brave New World of Business (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2009).
5. Center for Community Action and Environmental
Justice, "The View from Our Window: Environmental
Justice and the Goods Movement Industry," 2005.

Nicholas Allen has been a union organizer for the past
thirteen years and is a campaign director at the
Strategic Organizing Center of Change to Win. He can be
reached at [log in to unmask]

PortsideLabor aims to provide material of interest to
people on the left that will help them to interpret the
world and to change it.

Submit material: email [log in to unmask]
Frequently asked questions: portside.org/faq
Subscribe: email [log in to unmask], subject 'portsidelabor subscribe'
Unsubscribe: email [log in to unmask], subject 'portsidelabor unsubscribe'
Account assistance: portside.org/contact
Archives: http://lists.portside.org/cgi-bin/listserv/wa?A0=PORTSIDELABOR