The industry was "a powder keg primed to explode" long before the vaccine mandate.
 | By Laura Reston Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
Most stories about the trucker protests that have radiated out from Canada to the United States focus on their hard-line politics: the crowds raging against vaccine mandates, the rigs decked out with QAnon paraphernalia, their connections to the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. But in a guest essay published this week — just as the convoy of truckers who set out from California almost a month ago first entered Washington D.C. — Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein looks beyond the incendiary politics of the movement to investigate its roots. |
I reached out to Rob, a journalist who covers work and economic policy, not long after the first protesters converged on Ottawa. I knew he'd been interested in the plight of truckers, and in our conversations, he described the industry as a powder keg primed to explode long before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau imposed a vaccine mandate on people crossing into Canada from the United States. Trucking has struggled under decades of corporate consolidation, the erosion of pay and unions, and the growth of a precarious gig economy that has pushed them out of their own industry. |
It's an all-too-familiar story: of blue-collar workers worn down to the nub by white-collar efficiencies; of frustration with a public that can forget how even today, a supply chain is still made up of actual people; of resentment and gratitude for the work at hand in equal measure. |
In his essay, Rob chronicles the daily indignities of a life on the open road. The job can feel like a dystopian nightmare. Some truckers work more than 100 hours a week, spending weeks away from their families, struggling to stay awake through the lonely hours on the road, their every move monitored by sensors installed in the cab of their trucks to ensure that the drivers keep their eyes on the road. Jon Knope, a trucker from Georgia, has spent more than 900 nights on the road, logging 350,000 miles at the wheel of his truck — but as Rob writes in his piece, he was never truly alone. |
As we discussed the piece, I asked Rob why workers who are forced to undergo regular health checks and medical tests, and whose every movement is watched by sensors, would react so violently against a vaccine mandate. Of all the invasions of their privacy, and for all the regulations and mandates they were already forced to obey, a vaccine seemed a small price to pay. But as Rob writes in his piece, the vaccine "happens to have a radioactive political valence." It was the final straw. |
I recently asked Rob where Knope is now. Rob told me he's taking a break from trucking, burned out from spending almost an entire year on the road during the pandemic because he was afraid of infecting his family, but he might one day go back. Trucking is a lot like driving for Uber or Lyft; you can pick it up whenever you like. You can leave the industry, and many truckers do, but there is no escape from the precarity of the modern workplace. |
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