L.A.'s warehouse workers: invisible and exploited

Los Angeles has long been a place where it's easy -- dangerously easy -- to labor in obscurity. Just ask any of the 90,000 workers employed at the immense warehouses of Ontario and Fontana, where more than half the goods unloaded at L.A. and Long Beach harbors are trucked, sorted and sent on their way to Wal-Marts, Targets, Home Depots and the like for a thousand miles around. The warehouses are a key switch-point in our new global supply chain, the place where Asian production meets American consumption.

Globally important though they may be, and even though they employ the largest concentration of private-sector blue-collar workers in Southern California, the warehouses are all but invisible. There are no signs on their exteriors, just gray or white windowless walls on the boxlike behemoths (some of them comprising more than a million square feet) abutting interstates 10 and 15 as they traverse the Inland Empire. The only way to identify the buildings is by the trucks parked at their loading docks: The one with 200 Wal-Mart trucks is a Wal-Mart warehouse.

But so far as its workers are concerned, it isn't. The retailers usually don't own the warehouses (they're owned by commercial property companies) or operate them (they're operated by logistics companies). And neither the retailers nor the property companies nor the logistics companies employ most of the workers. Though many have worked full time in the same job for years, a majority of them are actually employed by one or another of the 270 temp agencies that dot the local terrain.

Fontana and Ontario have become company towns in which the companies whose goods are being handled disavow any responsibility for the conditions in which tens of thousands of largely immigrant warehouse workers toil. At its best, warehouse work is fast-paced, risky and hot (many of the warehouses lack air conditioning, and temperatures inside can rise to over 100 degrees in summer). "If people have to go to the bathroom, they have to wait until the break," a worker named Homero, who loads trucks in an area warehouse, told me in May. "If people get sick, they have to stay on the job."

The temps -- even if their jobs are functionally indistinguishable from those of full-time employees -- get no benefits and make little more than minimum wage. A complaint that the Change to Win labor federation (which has been endeavoring to organize these workers) has filed with the Labor Department documents a wide range of alleged abuses to which workers at dozens of warehouses have been subjected, including being compelled to work extra hours either for no overtime or for no pay at all, and being ordered not to report on-the-job injuries to government agencies.