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Guest Essay

How Life as a Trucker Devolved Into a Dystopian Nightmare

Credit...Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York Times

Mr. Kaiser-Schatzlein is a journalist who has written extensively about work, business and economic policy.

A few years ago, Jon Knope was standing in a rainy parking lot littered with smashed soda bottles in Cartersville, Ga., learning the finer details of how to park a Class 8 combination tractor-trailer. He was in his early 20s, somewhat rootless, and needed a job that would beat hustling on ride share apps in his mother’s station wagon.

He liked driving fine, so he went through trucking school. He could make a lot more money, largely because he was allowed to work much more than Uber or Lyft would let him. In the next few years, he would spend more than 900 nights on the road, drive at least 350,000 miles, and, while he was technically alone in his truck cab watching every sunrise and sunset fly by, he was never really by himself. While many associate trucking with freedom, he was, like every trucker, hemmed in by low wages, long hours and an unbelievable level of automation and surveillance.

Today, long-haul truckers are some of the most closely monitored workers in the world. Cameras and sensors dot their trucks, watching the road, the brakes and even the driver’s eye movements. Once, when his truck’s cabin heater broke, Mr. Knope was forced to sleep in freezing temperatures for several days while traveling across northern Ohio and New York because an automated system made sure his engine was turned off at night. The company told him there was no way to override the system.

Just imagine finishing 10 hours at a desk job, only to return to your apartment to find the heat didn’t work. That’d be quite frustrating. Then imagine your apartment was your office and most nights dinner was a microwaveable burrito or a bag of fast food. And then imagine your desk job required you regularly press a little pedal, you couldn’t stand up, you had essentially no face-to-face contact with co-workers, and if a bathroom didn’t easily present itself you were forced to use a plastic jug — all while a computer or a person at a desk hundreds of miles away monitors your every move.

Trucking is a supremely dangerous job, with large trucks involved in 10 percent of fatal crashes in the United States in 2019. Mr. Knope often described tractor-trailers as “40 tons of death.” One wrong move and your truck could easily kill the family in the minivan next to you. Much of the surveillance truckers experience is in the name of safety, and truckers agree that safety is paramount.

However, experts say the fatigue that leads truckers to be unsafe — to fall asleep at the wheel or lose focus — is a direct result of low wages that encourage drivers to spend too much time on the road. While we often think of automation and A.I. as developments that will eventually replace workers (think of Tesla’s partly automated tractor-trailer), those tools are already in heavy use in the workplace. And they haven’t replaced workers; they’ve simply been brought in to manage declining working conditions.

While journalists tracked the Canadian trucker protest as it radiated out from Ottawa, becoming a worldwide movement adopted and amplified by conservative politics, few asked why it was truckers specifically who started the movement when plenty of other workers in Canada and the United States had already been subject to vaccine mandates. And yet there were warnings that truckers would rebel.

The American Trucking Associations, a major industry trade group, noted last October that truckers were likely to cause supply chain disruptions if subjected to a vaccine mandate. They already experience the extreme end of workplace control, diminishing wages and an intense lack of privacy, and ultimately a vaccine mandate pushed more than a few of them over the edge.

Ask almost anyone what’s wrong with trucking — drivers, transportation economists, advocacy groups — and they’ll all begin with one number: the extraordinarily high turnover rate.

For decades, truckers have quit at alarming rates, leading to a chronic shortage. The turnover rate was at a staggering 91 percent in 2019, which means that for every 100 people who signed up to drive, 91 walked out the door. Plenty of people have the commercial driver’s licenses needed to operate trucks, said Michael Belzer, a Wayne State University economist who has studied the industry for 30 years. “None of them will work for these wages,” he added. Studies even show that their pay, when adjusted for inflation, has declined markedly since the 1970s.

It wasn’t always like this, said Jerry Fritts, a retired long-haul trucker from Memphis who started full-time in the field in 1966. Trucking used to be a good job, with union representation, decent pay and benefits, and normal hours.

“There used to be only three ways that you got a trucking job,” he told me. “Someone retired, was killed on the job, or died.” Few quit. I asked Mr. Fritts how he landed his position at a national trucking firm and he told me that he simply received a call one day in 1969 from someone who told him, “Scotty just got killed.”

Before deregulation during the Carter administration, trucking was an industry with high union representation. But fears of inflation pushed the government to allow less regulated, nonunionized firms to compete with the unionized common carriers. That effectively took the bottom out of the labor market, and as companies raced to offer the lowest rates to customers, wages were squeezed. Working conditions and pay cratered, and truckers fled.

To compensate for low wages, some truckers now work dangerously long hours, the average trucker well over 60 hours a week. Many truckers report working 100 hours or more each week. This is in part because truckers are not actually paid for all the time they spend working. They’re almost always paid by the mile.

So if Mr. Knope were to show up to, say, a pet food warehouse, exhausted from a day of driving, looking to unload quickly, find something to eat and catch some sleep, the warehouse staff might tell him there wasn’t anyone available to unload his truck for six hours, and he would be forced to wait, lonely in his truck, paid for only part of the time he spent waiting. (Other trucking companies might not compensate their drivers at all.)

Working more, and driving more, leads to endemic exhaustion, a problem so well known that companies deploy a bevy of “fatigue management” technologies and automated collision avoidance systems, Karen Levy, a sociologist at Cornell, told me. These tools monitor the drivers with that bevy of cameras and sensors.

Many companies now even have software programs that can review camera footage and detect whether a driver had his eyes on the road. At some companies, you can be fired if you are caught looking at your phone, even if it was just to change your podcast.

Mr. Belzer said that mandating that truckers be paid for their time, not just the miles they log, would be a step toward getting them to work a safer 40-hour week — and it might even help companies retain workers by ensuring that they can make it home to see their families more than a few times a month.

When I asked Mr. Knope and Mr. Fritts whether they were surprised that truckers had started the protest movement in Ottawa, neither was. “Trucking has been a keg of dynamite waiting to explode for 39 years,” Mr. Fritts said. “I’m surprised it took this long.”

In some ways the story of a trucker rebellion in reaction to a government mandate is odd because truckers, particularly the ones who drive the long-distance freight routes between the United States and Canada, are some of the most highly monitored and regulated workers in the world. Just to get a job interview, Mr. Knope told me, he had to submit to a blood pressure test and urinalysis. But of all the tests and monitoring that violate their privacy and diminish their autonomy, the vaccine mandate just so happens to have a radioactive political valence. For many truckers, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“It’s a lightweight straw,” Mr. Knope said, “but it’s also a very encumbered camel.”

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein (@robinsreport) is a journalist who writes about economic life and culture in America.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Truckers Are Rebelling. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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