Truckers Hit the Brakes
by Barbara Ehrenreich
The Nation.com - editorial | posted April 7, 2008 (web
only)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/ehrenreich
Until the beginning of this month, Americans seemed to
have nothing to say about their ongoing economic ruin
except, "Hit me! Please, hit me again!" You can take my
house, but let me mow the lawn for you one more time
before you repossess. Take my job and I'll just slink
off somewhere out of sight. Oh, and take my health
insurance too; I can always fall back on Advil.
Then, on April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers
began taking the strongest form of action they can
take: inaction. Faced with $4-per-gallon diesel fuel,
they slowed down, shut down and started honking. On the
New Jersey Turnpike, a convoy of trucks stretching "as
far as the eye can see," according to a turnpike
spokesman, drove at a glacial 20 miles per hour.
Outside of Chicago, they slowed and drove three
abreast, blocking traffic and taking arrests. They
jammed into Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; they slowed down
the Port of Tampa, where fifty rigs sat idle in
protest. Near Buffalo, one driver told the press he was
taking the week off "to pray for the economy."
The truckers who organized the protests - by CB radio
and Internet - have a specific goal: reducing the price
of diesel fuel. They are owner-operators, meaning they
are also businesspeople, and they can't break even with
current fuel costs. They want the government to release
its fuel reserves. They want an investigation into oil
company profits and government subsidies of the oil
companies. Of the drivers I talked to, all were acutely
aware that the government had found, in the course of a
weekend, $30 billion to bail out Bear Stearns, while
their own businesses are in a tailspin.
But the truckers' protests have ramifications far
beyond the owner-operators' plight - first, because
trucking is hardly a marginal business. You may
imagine, here in the blogosphere, that everything
important travels at the speed of pixels bouncing off
of satellites, but 70 percent of the nation's goods -
from Cheerios to Chapstick - travel by truck. We were
able to survive a writers' strike, but a trucking
strike would affect a lot more than your viewing
options. As Donald Hayden, a Maine trucker put it to
me: "If all the truckers decide to shut this country
down, there's going to be nothing they can do about
it."
More importantly, the activist truckers understand
their protest to be part of a larger effort to "take
back America," as one put it to me. "We continue to
maintain this is not just about us," JB - which is his
CB handle and stands for the "Jake Brake" on large rigs
- told me from a rest stop in Virginia on his way to
Florida. "It's about everybody - the homeowners, the
construction workers, the elderly people who can't
afford their heating bills... This is not the action of
the truck drivers, but of the people." Hayden mentions
his parents, ages and 81 and 76, who've fought the
Maine winter on a fixed income. Missouri-based driver
Dan Little sees stores shutting down in his little town
of Carrollton. "We're Americans," he tells me, "We
built this country, and I'll be damned if I'm going to
lie down and take this."
At least one of the truckers' tactics may be
translatable to the foreclosure crisis. On March 29,
Hayden surrendered three rigs to be repossessed by
Daimler-Chrysler - only he did it publicly, with flair,
right in front of the statehouse in Augusta.
"Repossession is something people don't usually see,"
he says, and he wanted the state legislature to take
notice. As he took the keys, the representative of
Daimler-Chrysler said, according to Hayden, "I don't
see why you couldn't make the payments." To which
Hayden responded, "See, I have to pay for fuel and
food, and I've eaten too many meals in my life to give
that up."
Suppose homeowners were to start making their
foreclosures into public events - inviting the
neighbors and the press, at least getting someone to
camcord the children sitting disconsolately on the
steps and the furniture spread out on the lawn. Maybe,
for a nice dramatic touch, have the neighbors shower
the bankers, when they arrive, with dollar bills and
loose change, since those bankers never can seem to get
enough.
But the larger message of the truckers' protest is
about pride or, more humbly put, self-respect, which
these men channel from their roots. Dan Little tells
me, "My granddad said, and he was the smartest man I
ever knew, `If you don't stand up for yourself, ain'
nobody gonna stand up for you.'" Go to
TheAmericanDriver.com, run by JB and his brother in
Texas, where you're greeted by a giant American flag,
and you'll find - among the driving tips, weather info,
and drivers' favorite photos - the entire Constitution
and Declaration of Independence. "The last time we
faced something as impacting on us," JB tells me,
"There was a revolution."
The actions of the first week in April were just the
beginning. There's talk of a protest in Indiana on
April 18, another in New York City, and a giant
convergence of trucks on DC on April 28. Who knows what
it will all add up to? Already, according to JB, some
of the big trucking companies are threatening to fire
any of their employees who join the owner-operators'
protests.
But at least we have one shining example of defiance of
the face of economic assault. There comes a point,
sooner or later, when you stop scrambling around on all
fours and, like JB and his fellow drivers all over the
country, you finally stand up.
If you would like to help support the truckers in any
way, go to Truckers and Citizens United.com.
[Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed
(Owl), is the winner of the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize.]
Copyright c 2008 The Nation
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