Before dawn breaks, Domingo Avalos is already off to work.

The 50-year-old truck driver leaves at 2 a.m. before his family wakes and returns home long after his wife and 4-year-old son are in bed for the night. On his way to the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, he sits in a metal truck cab for hours with a pillow tucked behind his aching back, waiting behind a line of trucks to pick up a cargo container he will haul to make ends meet.

He like other truckers will wait six to eight hours without a bathroom or meal break. With no rest stops near the terminals to leave their trucks, the drivers pack food and use an empty container to urinate.

“Sometimes we don’t get enough to pay the rent,” said the soft-spoken man who came to the United States from Mexico 15 years ago.

Avalos is among the more than 13,000 short-haul truck drivers registered in Southern California who work or contract for 1,000 trucking companies in Southern California, according to the National Employment Law Project. About 80 percent of truckers are independent contractors who own and operate their own trucks and the remainder work as employees.

An estimated $300 billion of goods annually come through the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, according to Art Wong, spokesman for the Port of Long Beach. These goods are carried by haulers like Avalos, who are increasingly being viewed as workers earning too little compensation for the work they perform.

At a March conference at Cal State Long Beach, Federal Maritime Commission Chairman Mario Cordero described short-haulers as “the stepchild of the industry,” meaning they don’t get the same attention as dockworkers, which results in poor working conditions and dwindling compensation. Because the International Longshore and Warehouse Union represents dockworkers all along the West Coast, the union was able to nearly shut down the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach after rancorous contract talks that were finally resolved in late February.

Congestion woes

Lost in the discussion of port operations is reducing the “turn times” of truck drivers — the amount of time they sit idle waiting for cargo outside the port gates, Cordero said in an interview last week.

Without these drivers, 75 percent of the cargo flowing through the twin ports — including clothing, construction materials, furniture, cars and car parts, tools and electronics — would not get to warehouses in the Inland Empire, stores across the region and trains destined for the East Coast.

Observers say truckers were all but invisible in the grand discussion about port congestion. While the attention-grabbing headlines centered around retailers unable to receive goods in time for the holidays or the contract talk slugfest between dockworkers and their employers, truck drivers have in some ways born the biggest brunt of port bottlenecks created by the arrival of bigger ships carrying more cargo and the unreliable availability of chassis, the trailers needed to tow containers to and from the yard, experts say.

Cordero said he once counted 272 trucks waiting in line at a terminal at the twin ports.

“That has not diminished, and you look at the situation and you must ask yourself … how can it be that it takes two to three hours for a truck to get into a terminal?” Cordero said. “How is that an acceptable business operation?”

Fred Johring, chairman of the Harbor Trucking Association, said that as recently as four years ago, 14 percent of truck hauls took more than two hours. Now, 34 percent of Golden State trucks wait more than two hours for a container and that an additional 18 percent wait 90 minutes to two hours, said Johring, also president of Golden State Express/Logistics, a short-haul company in Rancho Dominguez.

Some truckers start lining up three hours before terminal gates open. In some cases, they come up empty-handed after seven to eight hours of waiting in line.

“All the containers are (stacked) five high,” said Steve C., a 58-year-old Bellflower trucker who asked to use only his first name over concerns of retaliation at work. “They have to move way more containers to get to your container, so each truck is waiting longer. … You might be so far away in line, you think, I may never get my load. That’s how far away you are.”

No pickups, no money

When long lines and congested yards turn into only one or no pickups, truckers live Steve and Avalos say there is no way they can support a family and pay off the more than $100,000 cost of the truck.

“As long as we are not moving anything and we are waiting, we are not getting paid,” Avalos said.

At a recent symposium on port trends, David Duncan of Duncan and Son Lines Inc., an Arizona-based trucking company that serves the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, said the driver shortage is “the worst I’ve ever seen it” and added that it’s difficult to obtain and retain drivers. The industry is dealing with an aging trucker force, trying to attract a new generation of younger truck drivers who see the profession as a viable option for raising families.

“We need the terminals to start treating truckers like customers … (and) make truckers a priority,” Duncan said at the Pulse of the Ports event hosted by the Port of Long Beach last month. “Truckers are no longer a commodity and can’t be treated like one.”

Changing trends

It wasn’t always like this, veteran truckers said.

“I used to call it the $5,000 dream,” said Mike Johnson, trucking operations manager for Port Logistics Group in Rancho Dominguez, who started out as a trucker more than 30 years ago. “You could buy an old truck for $5,000, work at the port and make a decent living. A lot of guys did.”

When the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulated the trucking industry, there was a huge shift from union drivers to independent contractors. More drivers, seeing the promise of making $140,000 a year, chose the latter.

That included Latinos, who make up the growing majority of truckers working in the U.S.

“Trucking is a gateway to the middle class for people who are new to this country,” said Joe Rajkovacz, director of government affairs for the California Construction Trucking Association, the oldest nonaffiliated, nonprofit trucking trade association in the U.S. that recently created a conference specifically for Spanish speaking truckers.

The trucking industry would undergo another change when the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach implemented their Clean Trucks Program, which banned trucks older than 2007. The trucks became cleaner, but also more expensive.

“Now the $5,000 dream doesn’t exist,” Johnson said.

Many companies invested in trucks to lease back to drivers who didn’t qualify for a lease to a truck that cost more than $100,000. That was fine for many drivers, until congestion issues began to hit their pocketbooks, forcing some truckers out of the business and others like Avalos to ask for better conditions.

Avalos and his girlfriend have been picketing with other drivers and the Teamsters in front of his workplace, Pacer Cartage’s office in Commerce, not far from where the couple lives. Avalos said he and other drivers have been wrongly classified as independent contractors and should instead be classified as employees, which they argue would entitle him to healthcare, benefits and vacation pay.

Avalos said he can’t afford to be sick. Every day he doesn’t work is a day he can’t buy food or pay the rent on his small one-bedroom apartment, set on a busy street where cargo-toting trucks constantly rumble outside his door.

His apartment, where he lives with his girlfriend, Olivia Flores, a fast-food worker, and 4-year-old son, Anthony, fits only a sofa, a loveseat, a lamp and television. By the end of the week, a paycheck of $3,000 for 70 hours of work dwindles to $600 after his company deducts his truck payment, maintenance, fuel and other costs.

Pacer could not be reached for comment, but representatives from area trucking areas said that most truck drivers want to remain independent for the flexibility and the ability to own their own small businesses. There are also truck drivers who are employees but do not belong to a union.

But the port congestion has ramped up the Teamsters’ efforts to unionize drivers, leading to lawsuits over wage theft allegations and strikes at port terminals, rail yards and trucking companies.

“It was never an issue when people were getting in and out with three or four turns a day,” said Weston LaBar, executive director of the Harbor Trucking Association. “My argument would be if we ever get to a point of three or four a day, the whole thing would go away.”

Julie Gutman Dickinson, an attorney representing the Teamsters, disagreed, saying that the issue of misclassification existed long before the congestion issues arose.

“It’s effectively wage theft,” she said. “It’s taking away money from hard-working drivers and putting it into the pockets of these companies. They are at the mercy of these companies.”

She pointed to companies already transitioning to an employee-based model, adding that the independent contractor model will soon be obsolete.

Avalos said that picketing on hot days is a small sacrifice compared to living day to day on the wages given by his company.

“It’s a big sacrifice to be on strike, but it’s an important sacrifice,” Avalos said. “We deserve dignity.”

Contact Karen Robes Meeks at 562-714-2088.