Page 5 of 7
Ritch is obviously a guy who doesn't like to lose. He believes the outcome of his fierce battle with the ILWU may determine his company's survival. After talking with him awhile you notice that his fingernails are chewed to the quick.
"For the union to work, you have to organize everybody," he says. "And you can't unionize this industry. It's unbelievably fragmented. There's no geographical boundaries. There's a transient work force. People don't make this a career."
There's truth in what he says.
"There's a saying among bike messengers," says former SFBMA Executive Director Bernie Corace: "Messenger companies are like underwear. If you don't change them often enough they start to stink."
Many messengers switch companies every year or so. "People get pent up because of the [job] pressures, and they take it out on each other," says Carey Dall. "You get personality clashes between messengers and dispatchers, messengers and messengers .... What they get from moving on is momentary psychological relief."
Thanks to the soured economy, says Ritch, the messenger industry is fighting for its life. Five years ago, when thousands of dot-coms invaded San Francisco, messenger companies were swimming in tags. But when the dot-coms went off the cliff, no other businesses replaced them, and tag volume plunged. Meanwhile, Ritch says, increasing reliance on e-mail lessened the need for messengers. Design and advertising firms that used to hire couriers can now send their specs digitally for free. Since 2000, half of the Bay Area's messenger companies have folded. Ritch says his own business is off 50 percent since 1999.
At the same time tags were dropping off, workers' comp insurance rates were soaring, rising 50 percent in the last three years.
The implications of all this are not good for the ILWU drive.
Speedway, the city's other unionized messenger company, is still operating under its original one-year union contract, finalized in 2000. That means its workers haven't received any pay raises or other improvements in three years.
According to Pecker, Speedway employees are sympathetic to the company's financial problems, and haven't pressed for a new contract. (The ILWU shop steward at Speedway, Howard Williams, refuses to comment on the delay in negotiations. Speedway owner O'Rourke blames the union for not being "gung-ho.")
Ritch insists his firm is not in dire straits despite the alarming decline in tags. "We will survive," he likes to repeat, Gloria Gaynor-style. Indeed, Pro Mess bought out a competitor, Silver Bullet, last May.
While giving a tour of the Pro Mess offices, Ritch pauses in the break room to point out ILWU literature he is required by law to post. A "Labor Notes" announcement, penned by his old employee Nato Green, is pinned to a bulletin board across from the candy machine. It's an update on Pro Mess contract negotiations, and, reading it to himself, Ritch's face is impassive. Then he comes to a line that urges his employees to "Squeeze the Weasel."
"That's bullshit," he bursts out. Then he mutters, "And I'm supposed to go home to my wife and family ...."
Asked later why he was so upset, he answers: "Because I'm obviously supposed to be the weasel. And what you do with a weasel is you put your hands around its neck, and you strangle it, and that's how you kill it."
Natasha Dedrick was a rookie bike messenger at DMS in 1999. A petite brunette with a loud mouth, Dedrick, then 24, was boiling mad at her working conditions.
"You were on 10 to 11 hours a day, and you wouldn't necessarily get a lunch break," she remembers. There was no sick pay. "Oftentimes you were listening to a condescending dispatcher. Like, they'd be nasty, and say things to you like, 'Oh duh,' when you'd ask a question."
At the time, DMS driver Marc Gunther was trying to organize colleagues to join the ILWU. As a way of rallying them, Gunther planned a post-work barbecue in the company parking lot.
"It just didn't seem that appealing," says Dedrick. "Then people went, but nothing really came out of it."
She was similarly unimpressed with the SFBMA, which she saw as being more interested in partying than in the gritty work of unionizing. Despite the efforts of Gunther and other organizers, Dedrick felt the ILWU was going nowhere fast at DMS.
"I found that, far from galvanizing activity ... the union drive was instead used as a reason to be patient," Dedrick wrote in a zine she later published about her DMS experiences. "While many messengers were ready to rock-and-roll, there were always enough whom [sic] argued that we should be reasonable and wait for the company to "go union.'"
With fellow DMS employee Aaron Hackett, Dedrick decided to ignore the union and take a more radical approach to bettering conditions at DMS. They got hold of an employee phone list and began calling drivers at home.
"We didn't get much driver involvement," she admits. "Bikes are largely twentysomething or thirtysomething white men. And a lot of the drivers at DMS were in their late 30s, 40s, even older; Latino, black, from Nicaragua, Brazil ... a lot of automatic things didn't unite us."
Dedrick and Hackett had more success with bike messengers. With their punk rock, intensely individualistic ethic, few had much patience for something as time-consuming and bureaucratic as a union drive. But many liked the balls-out, direct-action approach Dedrick and Hackett proposed.
"We were like, 'OK, screw this,'" says Dedrick. "We as messengers had power."
"Aaron and Natasha represented a portion of the messenger industry," says Joel Metz, a San Francisco messenger who runs the International Federation of Bike Messenger Associations Web site (www.messengers.org). "Most people will say, 'Hey, that person's making some noise! They look like they're gonna get stuff done now! I'll go over and hang out with them.'"
