Did you know that your Ralph Lauren polo shirt was driven to the warehouse by an indentured servant? At USA Today, Brett Murphy reports on how port truckers — required to lease their trucks from their companies — are working for pennies (or less) each week as they struggle to drive enough hours to appease their bosses and the public’s insatiable demand for merchandise from big chains like Target, Ralph Lauren, and The Home Depot. If a driver fails to log enough hours, falls behind, gets sick, or collapses from exhaustion, the company seizes their truck and they forfeit everything they’ve paid toward its purchase.
Samuel Talavera Jr. did everything his bosses asked.
Most days, the trucker would drive more than 16 hours straight hauling LG dishwashers and Kumho tires to warehouses around Los Angeles, on their way to retail stores nationwide.
He rarely went home to his family. At night, he crawled into the back of his cab and slept in the company parking lot.
For all of that, he took home as little as 67 cents a week.
Then, in October 2013, the truck he leased from his employer, QTS, broke down.
When Talavera could not afford repairs, the company fired him and seized the truck — along with $78,000 he had paid towards owning it.
Talavera was a modern-day indentured servant. And there are hundreds, likely thousands more, still on the road, hauling containers for trucking companies that move goods for America’s most beloved retailers, from Costco to Target to Home Depot.
A yearlong investigation by the USA TODAY Network found that port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.
Get the Longreads Weekly Email