The town that online shopping built — and women are trying to save
San Bernardino County residents have had a complex relationship with industry for decades. As Teresa Flores Lopez worked to clean up the air surrounding the railyards, her husband Nick went to work at the railway company, his employer for nearly 40 years. Flores Lopez said it’s not a contradiction; it’s just the way things are around here. The railroad, Flores Lopez said of her family, “is in our blood.” Many of the environmental advocates Grist spoke to in San Bernardino County have ties to some aspect of the industry. “We lived comfortably because of the railroad,” Nick told Grist. Still, he remembers regularly cleaning a thick layer of black dust that gathered inside their home across from the railyard. Sometimes, he’d develop unexplained nosebleeds. After he retired four years ago, the couple sold their house next to the railyard and moved a few blocks away. The dust cleared. The nosebleeds stopped. “The greater San Bernardino region was built around transportation centers like Santa Fe Railroad and Norton Air Force Base,” said San Bernardino Mayor John Valdivia, who took office in December. “Logistics has played an important role in supporting economic growth.” Valdivia campaigned on a platform promising to cut “the costly bureaucratic red tape that prevents job growth” and “create a one-stop permitting shop to expedite business growth and encourage employers to locate here.” But Flores Lopez, Sanchez, and other residents say the promise of new logistics jobs is no longer enough to compensate for the hazards they associate with the industry. Many of the new warehouse and railyard jobs are temporary positions. They’re in great supply as the holiday shopping season picks up and dwindle as it passes. Locals say the seasonal jobs offer nothing like the security and benefits that used to come with a job at the railyard. Workers complain about warehouse conditions — telling Veronica Alvarado, a program director at the Warehouse Worker Resource Center in the Inland Empire, that they get dizzy when opening containers and nosebleeds from trucks idling outside the buildings. “It’s pretty gross and disgusting that we can be sold the idea of ‘Shut up, just take these jobs!’” Alvarado said. “We want good jobs, where health and safety are respected.” Concerns about the booming logistics industry have recently led to some unlikely partnerships pushing against business as usual in the Inland Empire. In the past year, labor, immigrant, faith-based, and environmental advocates — all worried about rising risks to health and safety — have formed a coalition to protect communities surrounding the San Bernardino International Airport, where a massive new air cargo logistics center is slated to be built on the footprint of the former Air Force base. The center is expected to bring 3,800 new jobs and $5 million in revenue for the city. The Inland Valley Development Agency, which is responsible for redeveloping the base for public and commercial use, says that the air cargo logistics center will also include a 3.75-megawatt solar system and result in local infrastructure and road improvements. Mike Burrows, executive director of both the Inland Valley Development Agency Board and the San Bernardino International Airport Authority Commission, told Grist that the facility’s sustainability features will make it “a model for other projects in the Inland Empire.” But that’s not necessarily enough for the activists, who are pushing for an agreement that would hold developers accountable for hiring locally, providing stable jobs, and keeping their pollution in check. It’s a conversation Burrows said he’s open to having. Growing online shopping demand continues to drive the construction of more fulfillment centers in the region. The centers are being built to aid the demand for 24-hour delivery, economist Husing explained. He forecasted long-term growth in this area. Between 2009 and 2019, e-commerce sales as a percentage of total quarterly retail sales in the U.S. more than doubled from roughly 4 to 10 percent. On May 1, members of the newly formed coalition hoping to hold developers like Burrows accountable gathered for a demonstration commemorating May Day, a day traditionally set aside by activists to take to the streets in support of workers’ rights. Ericka Flores, the organizing director for the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, led nearly 300 people in a march past San Bernardino’s courthouses, county buildings, and city hall. It was a colorful crowd — purple shirts for the home care workers union, orange vests for the warehouse workers resource center, red for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. “We haven’t been as strong working alone,” explained Celene Perez, political director of the Inland Empire Labor Council, which represents more than 200,000 union members throughout San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
< div class="row"> < div class="lf-content"> Holding a bullhorn and standing in the flatbed of a truck pumping music alongside the protesters, Flores led chants in English and Spanish. Cars driving by honked in support. One driver waved a white handkerchief outside his window; another stuck out a fist in solidarity as the marchers cheered. Flores spotted a fellow environmental organizer in the crowd. “Shout out to Sierra Club — I see you!” she called out. Flores stopped in front of City Hall and called up Ben Reynoso, a young activist running for city council. “As a kid, I woke up in the morning, and I looked at the mountains, and I loved it,” Reynoso told the crowd. “Now I wake up — and I live next to it — and I can’t even see it. That’s an issue.” For environmental health advocates, taking part in a protest that unites disparate communities in the Inland Empire represents a new level of political will. But it still might not be enough. Local organizers say it seems impossible to keep up with all the newly proposed warehouse projects in the county, comparing it to an exhausting game of whack-a-mole. And as Flores put it, “A warehouse is a magnet for diesel emissions.” So rather than rely solely on protests and grassroots campaigns, activists like Anna Sanchez are increasingly turning to legal and policy solutions — rules and regulations that will hold existing facilities and new e-commerce projects accountable. Last year, environmental groups successfully persuaded the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the agency that monitors air pollution across Southern California, to create new rules that would make warehouses, sea and air ports, and railyards responsible for the emissions they bring into communities. Environmental groups across the region are now working with the agency to craft similar rules for mobile sources of pollution like diesel trucks, which contribute to 80 percent of local smog-forming nitrogen oxide emissions. They want stringent regulations on facilities that butt up against homes and schools. The East Gate Air Cargo Logistics Center is one such project. It’s slated to be built just blocks away from residential neighborhoods like the one Sanchez lived in when she became pregnant with Nathan. Her father still owns that home, which is about a mile away from the project, and she’s adamant that another young family not suffer from breathing the air nearby. Sanchez keeps a scrapbook of photos from when Nathan was a newborn so that he will know his story as he grows up. For the first year after he was born, he was in and out of the hospital with patches of his hair shaved so that doctors could run an IV through the veins in his scalp. Looking at the photos together, Sanchez asks her son for his reaction. Nathan pauses for a moment. “It’s scary,” he tells his mom. He’s healthy now, though Sanchez occasionally must explain his abdominal scars and missing belly button to concerned teachers and classmates. His hair now falls below his shoulders. Sanchez had him grow it out to hide the shaved IV patches from his early years, and now she can’t bring herself to cut it. It’s a symbol of his health. “That’s your hair, buddy,” she said. “You did it.” “He’s just full of life,” Sanchez said, swelling with pride. “We went through this journey together.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The town that online shopping built — and women are trying to save on May 29, 2019.