by the El Reportero’s staff
The mayors of Los Angeles Antonio Villarraigoza and of Oakland Ron Dellums unite in big march to demand that the Port of Oakland be cleaned from environmental pollution.
OAKLAND – Hundreds of truck drivers, community, environment, and trade union leaders, legislators, and the mayors of Oakland Ron Dellums, and of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa, held a march demanding a real solution to the contamination of the port.
It was a about a march that looks to creating consensus in favor of a politics that definitively prevents emission of diesel from loading trucks.
Dellums and Villaraigosa together with the truck drivers leader, Jim Hoffa, said that it is a time to stop the poisoning of the environment through the contamination provoked by the trucks.
The leaders want that the Port of Oakland replaces the old trucks.
“The drivers of the port head the struggle for good jobs and a clean environment,” said Jim Hoffa, president of the loading workers.
“They work very hard to earn wages of poverty and don’t make enough to pay for the maintenance of his old trucks that are throwing poisonous contamination,” Hoffa said.
Thousands march in Oakland against the contamination of the Oakland Port.
Oakland could become the port second in adopting programs of sustainable cleanliness of the trucks, followed by the Port of Los Angeles, which approved a plan, at the beginning of this year, which requires that the drivers serve as employees of the trucking companies, instead of independent contractors.
Democratic Assembly man for Oakland, Sandre Swanson, told the crowd that the current system is broken and is creating a health crisis for the local communities and the workers.
The march, at which approximately 2,000 persons were present, began at the Marriot Hotel Oakland and ended at the Port of Oakland headquarter, at Jack London.
Last year, Swanson organized several public hearings where many truck drivers attested that the current system forces them to operate as independent contractors, instead of employees, working for very low wages and without benefits.
Consequently, they do not have the resources to buy less pollutant trucks, which would help improve the quality of the air that surrounds the port communities.
In 2006, a study revealed that the costs of public health associated with transportation will represent the residents of California $200 billion during the next 15 years.
The serious thing is that these costs will have to be paid by the low-income ethnic communities that reside next to the transportation loading centers. The report can be seen at: http://www.pacinst.org/reports/freight_transport/index.htm.
We need a wide solution that fi ghts both with the contamination and the social injustice,” Swanson said to the protesters. And he ended up by saying that the struggle is in two fronts: For the workers of the ports and for the local residents of, like West Oakland, who pay the effects of the problems derived from the contamination in their health and lives.
PICTURE: The real situation:
- The drivers of the ports work between 11 and 14 hours at $ dollars per hour.
- The drivers do not have health and retirement benefits.
- The long lines to load provoke that the residents and drivers breathe poisonous levels of diesel.
- The exposing to contamination by diesel doubles the risk of cancer of the residents of West of Oakland, compared to other residents of the bay.
- The contamination of the port increases the levels of asthma: One of 5 children of West Oakland suffer from this illness.
