FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 27, 2007

CONTACT: Barb Maynard, 213-387-0780

Port Drivers to Mobilize Huge Rush-Hour Convoy of 100 Diesel Trucks; Freeway to Harbor Action a Push for Clean Air, Healthy Communities, Employee Rights

Green Trucks Save Lives’ the rallying cry as drivers, environmentalists and community allies organize statewide response to industry bid to kill the ports’ reforms

To underscore the scope of an environmental and public health crisis – and demonstrate support for its innovative and common-sense solution – a large convoy of port drivers will jam the 110-Harbor freeway with over 100 dirty, diesel-spewing trucks during the morning rush hour on Wednesday June 27, culminating at a scheduled meeting of port stakeholders in Long Beach. It will begin in the low-income South LA neighborhood where many of the drivers live and led by a hearse to symbolize the alarming number of children that are dying as a result of the polluted harbor.

The drivers’ mobilization is a challenge to the trucking industry’s opposition to the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach “Clean Trucks Program,” a widely praised green economic proposal to clean the air, create healthy communities and improve jobs. There will be photo and interview opportunities with the port drivers in their trucks, their families, environmentalists, and other community advocates at staging areas at both the start and end of the convoy route [Details below].

Diesel truck fumes have led to a high incidence of asthma, cancer, and other pollution-related diseases, disproportionately affecting children in communities at risk – including the very same families of port truck drivers. Statewide, drivers are growing more outspoken because the trucking industry lobby is attempting to thwart the LA and Long Beach Ports’ innovative solution that would drastically improve the air quality, a mandate for planned port expansion. Drivers at the Port of Oakland will hold a simultaneous rally.

“My kids’ lives are at risk because of this dirty air, but the truck companies just look the other direction,” said Leonel Orellana, a truck driver for nearly 4 years who lives in Long Beach and has two children with asthma. “I support the Ports’ plan to put an end to this crisis. It will stop these greedy companies from killing our children.”

Responsibility for buying and maintaining the trucks that move goods from the Ports of LA and Long Beach to retailers like Target, Wal Mart, and Home Depot currently rests on the backs of the 16,000 area port truck drivers – instead of the for-profit companies who contract them. The Ports have proposed changing this unworkable, failing system because it is a major source of the pollution in the harbor and surrounding communities: After the drivers pay insurance, taxes, gas, and other basic operating expenses, they in effect become minimum wage workers unable to meet clean air compliance standards. Key to the Ports’ plan is a provision that would transform the underpaid drivers’ status as “independent contractors” into employees in order to hold the trucking contractors accountable to new environmental and labor standards.

The Clean Trucks Program would shift responsibility for halting deadly pollution from the drivers to the trucking companies and their Big-Box shipper clients. It would also establish real standards for business on port property, including a provision that trucking companies must hire the drivers as employees and take on the responsibility for buying, retrofitting, and maintaining environmentally clean trucks.

A group of port stakeholders also gathers Wednesday at the Port of Long Beach headquarters for a closed-door meeting, the third of three such sessions to review the Clean Trucks Program before a vote on the program by the L.A. and Long Beach harbor commissions in July. The California Trucking Association has a representative in the meeting whereas the drivers do not, a growing source of anger among thousands of mobilized port drivers. The trucking industry’s efforts to kill the Clean Trucks Program and preserve the deadly status quo is behind the day of protest on Wednesday, June 27, 2007:

6:30-8:00 a.m.— Over 100 port drivers assemble with their trucks in South LA., where the majority live, at Exposition Parking lot 5 located at 807 W. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. (at Hoover St.), LA

8-10 a.m.— A massive convoy of 100 diesel-spewing trucks drive south, jamming the Harbor-110 freeway during the late morning rush hour. A “P-Trak” monitor will indicate the volume of fumes polluting the air. Helicopter shots are recommended.

10 a.m.—Trucks and drivers, along with environmental, community, and public health activists, rally at a press event outside the Port of Long Beach headquarters, 925 Harbor Plaza, where a stakeholder group is meeting on the 5^th floor to take up the ports’ Clean Trucks Program. Interviews available before and after the meeting.