A few months ago, video surfaced of a ‘truck driver’ deciding to execute a U-turn in the middle of a busy highway. If you are familiar with the physics of truck-trailers, you’d know immediately how insane and irresponsible a move that is. It met with the inevitable, tragic result: an SUV, not expecting such imbecilic behavior, plowed into the sudden obstacle. Three people were all killed; the ‘driver’, a recent immigrant with an un-tested CDL, looked annoyed. How the hell does that happen?
End of the Road: Inside the the War Against Truckers is a history of how absolutely antagonistic governments and market forces have grown to be towards that vital percentage of workers who keep the blood of modern economies flowing. While it’s largely about the American labor market, author Gord McGill has worked in Canada and his insights and experience cover Australian trucking as well: he’s a man who has freighted goods in all three countries. McGill mostly writes about the American market, but some of the forces he writes about are in effect across North America in general even if the specific legislation that feeds them varies by country. McGill’s targets are a mix of both deregulation and regulation, but both are tied to labor. The main thrust of this book is that completely opening access to trucking has made the labor pool shallow and treacherous: because US CDL licenses are not graduated the way other Western countries’ are — with multiple levels indicating increasing proficiency in more varied and demanding situations — a kid who graduates from a diploma mill can be thrown in well over his head. Responsible companies, with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, would presumably not want an inexperienced driver driving their equipment on huge contracts, right? You’d think, but jiggle the variables a bit and the law of average wins out. What if the driver isn’t driving your equipment, but has instead been seduced into leasing his own? He wrecks the rig, he’s liable for it, not you, and paying new drivers jack while accepting some levels of accidents (new drivers are 70% more likely to ‘hit something’ and 40% more likely to be in a serious collision) is evidently more cost effective than paying experienced drivers what they’re worth. This is especially true when the new drivers are FOB immigrants who can’t speak English and who have been recruited with a promise that it will help their bid for citizenship. The poor pay and baptisms by fire that many new drivers encounter leads to an incredible amount of turnover, so corpos and the government constantly fret over ‘driver shortages’ and throw CDLs at anyone capable of putting on a pair of boots despite the fact that there are more registered CDLs in the country than could ever find work — if they were active. McGill writes that many young drivers would leave the industry if they could, but they’re debt slaves: they have to pay for their ‘training’ and the rig they had to lease as part of their hiring contract.
Drivers, especially on-the-road drivers who spend most of their time on the open highway shuttling goods from terminal to terminal, are highly mythologized in American culture, hailed as modern cowboys of a sort. There have to be reasons a man would forgo seeing his wife and children more than a few times a month, to being incapable of making regular social plans, to knowing he might end his day peeing in a jug and sleeping on the side of the road. There used to be: a reliable paycheck and the prestige that came from being a king of the road. These days, though, the pay envelope is lighter and lighter, and truckers are reduced by technology to being just one more drone. Their trucks are infested with tech that spies on them, and routes are handed down from on high rather than being left to their experience, local knowledge, and shared information with other drivers. Much of these tech measures have been inflicted against a declining pool of experienced, safe drivers to counteract the gross negligence of new hires, who often have no knowledge of English or local road cultures, committing outrageous errors. It adds insult to injury, and is made even worse by the fact that local knowledge is often superior to those GPS routes — new drivers often find themselves driving in places where a truck has no right to be.
McGill covers a lot of other ground here, like analyzing the role of brokerage firms — who connect drivers and firms with loads, often manipulating both parties — and reviewing the various organizations who claim to speak for truckers. Many of these are certainly not spokesmen for drivers: the huge corporations who drive down wages by having the government subsidize their training of 90-day wonders are antagonists of the ordinary driver, not his friends; and the Teamsters, while previously being titans of (corrupt) labor, now only represent a meager portion of them and are often as dismissive of drivers’ interests as the corporate powers. During the Freedom Convoy, for instance, when drivers and their rigs aimed for Ottawa to protest the COVID regimes, the Teamsters followed the party line. Why? Because the men who run these organizations are not and have never been drivers themselves: they’re the same soft-handed out of touch ‘professional managers’ that can be found in every overwieldly and unproductive corporation and ngo.
As infuriating as this book was, I enjoyed being pissed off — mostly because I’m the son of a driver and the nephew of many others. I grew up in truck yards, watching my dad pore over maps with other drivers and discuss road conditions. I’d watch with fascination as these men hurled straps over their loads and tied them down, and began meticulously looking over their rig before hitting the road. I have heard complaints like McGill’s for decades — the grumbling over electronic systems that are constantly making the entire rig break down, the feeling that you’re not your own anymore. Part of what makes End of the Road work, I think, is that even when he’s pointing out that immigrant drivers are a huge part of the problem, he’s not treating them as the problem — he even argues that they themselves are being exploited, since many have no idea how radically challenging the North American landscape is to driving than to what they’re used to. He keeps his fire on the collusion between profit-hungry corpos and the government, rather than the working man.
Related
Pedal to the Metal: The Work Lives of Truckers. Written in the 1980s, this already showed how technology was starting to degrade the king of the road.
Trucking Country : The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy. I used to have this one but it focused so much on economic and regulatory policy I let it go. Reading End of the Road makes me think I need to hunt down a used copy again..
Quotations
Yet nothing has been done to beef up lax training systems, and efforts to remove the incompetents from the road have only just begun. Instead, veteran seasoned truckers like myself, people with a lifetime of safe operation and clean driving records, are forced to work under ever more punishing scrutiny and surveillance technologies that insult our professionalism. Trucks themselves are now built to accommodate lower-skilled drivers, perpetuating a cycle that further degrades the respect and honor once afforded us. Life on the road continues to deteriorate in numerous ways: there’s not enough parking, truck stops are closing or converting to fast food only, and surveillance technology and the flooding of the industry with recent arrivals have completely upended our culture. How we relate to each other, how we are treated at customer facilities—it’s all part of a pattern of dehumanization.
Truck-driver training is exactly back-asswards in America. Most new truckers, once they have learned the bare minimum to pass a state CDL exam, are sent out on their own to crisscross America without any experience whatsoever. The results are about what you would expect.
If there were an actual shortage of truckers, trucking companies wouldn’t get away with barely paying minimum wage, would they? If the market for drivers were this hot and this desperate, maybe a guy with two decades of experience and a near perfect driving record would get offers more befitting his profile? In a properly functioning market economy, wouldn’t the shortage boost the price of truckers’ labor a little higher than what one might expect at a fast-food restaurant, a job often advertised as a stepping stone for teenagers into adulthood, and one not meant to pay that much? What are we missing here?
Scratch beneath the surface of the ad copy for any truck-driver training school or local- and state-funded retraining program, and the government grants and subsidies become immediately apparent. From funds doled out by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to Pell Grants to $47 million in extra funding from the Biden Administration in a 2023 handout, it is clear that the trucking industry is awash in taxpayer largesse, and unless we recognize this corporate-welfare program for exactly what it is, the money will continue to flow.
Another clothing-related issue might not seem like a big deal but is revealing about the nanny-statism animating certain Australian workplaces. Even when working outside in heat exceeding one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, you must wear a long-sleeved shirt for any job, regardless of the task. The stated concern is that you might get skin cancer at some point in the future, and the assumption is that you, a grown adult, are not to be trusted to apply sunscreen. “It’s for your own good, mate,” was the near universal reply whenever I spoke with Australians about this. Nanny statism runs so deep in their society that it’s like talking to the proverbial fish about water. It is inconceivable that you may have legitimate agency, as an adult, to make your own decisions about the clothes you wear or whether to apply sunscreen.
While sitting there, I noticed he had a flat-screen TV showing a square for every driver camera in the fleet, and nearly all of the cams were on or displaying a cycle of all those twelve-second clips running together. I could watch any guy in the company—and so could the people who claimed they would never do that.
The data is clear: truck-involved collisions on American highways started ticking up in 2016, which is when English language proficiency enforcement was waived. So what is the argument for this waiver? Who benefits? Major corporations, that’s who, for which this simple requirement is a hurdle to incremental increases in shareholder return.
Dhillon recalled telling Biden Administration officials that a “person crossing the border with no experience . . . gets a work permit in two months, and within one month gets their CDL. Well, they never even drove a car in this country, so why are we doing this? This is not even an issue [just] for the trucking industry. This is a national security issue.”.
The modern labor movement has a problem in the divergence of interests between its members and its leadership. Most union leaders today come from what Barbara Ehrenreich referred to as the “Professional Managerial Class.” They are university trained and credentialed and more often than not have never sweated a day in their lives—not to earn their keep, anyway. They also have fixations on those cultural issues which obsess the progressive political class and often offend regular working men and women.
The people who insist that aesthetics don’t matter, that trucking is strictly business, and a truck is just a tool to get work done as cheaply as possible, are missing or ignoring the fact that in virtually any other trade we could all be making more money in fewer hours without spending weeks away from home. Clearly there is something about trucking—incomprehensible to the spreadsheet brain of your average accountant—that draws us to it, but we don’t agree on what exactly that means or what we’re willing to compromise to be here. As for me, I’ve had enough of being a half-assed cyborg in today’s highly surveilled, mostly automated fiberglass and plastic aero trucks. I’m glad that many fuel-saving features are available for those who want them, but I’m an American—I shift gears, I piss standing up, and I resent not having a choice. When I wake up early in the morning I put on steel-toed boots and a pearl-snap shirt and I set out to do my job with dignity, respect, and, when possible, good cheer. I do the right thing even when I’m not being watched by the cops, a safety manager, or the safety manager’s AI assistant. I treat my work with a level of seriousness appropriate for an environment where a lack of skill, or more likely one lapse in judgement or attention, can easily kill half a dozen innocent people—as news reports show with increasing frequency despite our electronic babysitters. Is there still a place for me in the trucking industry? After thirteen years of professional driving all I can say is that I honestly don’t know. I’m about to take a huge step in my career and an enormous financial risk to find out—by buying an older, less automated truck and putting it to work full-time. We’ve all heard the cliché “Trucking isn’t a job, it’s a lifestyle.” That’s true. That’s why the freedom to live in accordance with one’s own values is so critically important. What I’ve come to realize is that if I can’t do this job my way, there’s no point in doing it at all.
Reading Freely 