Tim's Tales from the Road
Tim's Tales from the Road
I am not a Teamster, nor affiliated with the AFL-CIO, or any other union. Yet driving truck for the last sixteen years, I have seen numerous union/management conflicts. Boeing. Grocery Warehouses. Now Kaiser Aluminum. Most often these skirmishes occurred in other's neighborhoods and none of the shouting voices were recognizable. Although unwelcome, those experiences didn't settle in the gut and eat away at everything I believed in. I can't say the same about the Kaiser strike.
This time the body hardhat is flailing right in my own backyard. It's a complicated struggle, especially when I consider the conflicts between union and non-union concerns, I get uneasy. I am reminded of the scene at a particularly gruesome accident. I want to look away but something compels me forward. This time the morbid curiosity of the traffic accident is absent replaced with a morbid dependence on my own paycheck. Like every other issue in trucking these days, the issue of organized labor butting heads with organized management produces more unsettling emotions than easy, sound bit solutions. I'd do just about anything to look the other way. Its just I can't.
I have to cross the lines again.
I neither work for Kaiser nor do I have union support. I am a sub contractor of a subcontractor. In the corporate airfreight world which puts food on my table, that just about qualifies me as mush: The bottom of the food chain.
Over the years, I have crossed picket lines on numerous occasions. I hate being put in that position. These aren't battles I have any real say in. Dispatched out like an economic mercenary, I carry freight and supplies to far away lands. On many trips, I rolled unaware that a labor conflict existed 2500 miles away. Arriving at my destination on time, everything intact, I rarely receive a reception of any kind. But to be greeted at the company gate with picket signs, screams, rocks and intimidation is more than discouraging. My arrival becomes an assault on my conscience. One of me. Ten, Twenty, sometimes more of them. Directing all the hostility of their economic predicament towards a tired trucker, I am just as locked out of the process as the strikers are. The difference is I have few false hopes as to where the economy is headed.
To the strikers walking the lines, my rig becomes the focus of everything that is going wrong in this blue collar brawl pitting one set of economic have nots against others. All of us are trying to preserve the last hold on our middle class way of life. A way of life that didn't start with an IPO flourish or stock option manna from heaven but which seems hell bent on ending in an never ending exported exodus of our piece of the American pie. As blue collar manufacturing jobs are shipped overseas, exiled south of the border, mechanized or even more troubling, compromised through blackmailed wage concessions and deregulation pressures, the competition for the remaining good jobs becomes fierce. Welcome to third world labor in a first class nation. Survival of the most exploited.
Locked out of the entire process, truckers are the smallest cog in the labor machine. Comprising the link holding the least amount of influence in the calculated dance between the negotiators on all sides, drivers are trapped on the front lines, the messengers of powerlessness. As the workers fight their fight and direct their hostility at our rigs, we are merely a very real symbol that no matter how much they protest, life goes on without them. In the unlimited new order world of global economies without safeguards, the almighty cheapest dollar is God. Someone, somewhere will always work cheaper. If the labor demand outpaces supply, management can and will find a body, any warm body to fill that role. Even if they have to import it.
Eventually one has to wonder, if the downward cycle continues, who is going to have the money to buy these products? Marketed towards an ever increasing population without a healthy midsection? There aren't enough wealthy people in the world to sustain a consumer economy.
While I think striker's anger targeting truckers is unreasonable, I also understand it. I did not order the supplies I carry or know anyone was on strike until my arrival. As I watch their signs bob outside my rig's window, I can not truck the order 2500 miles backward. But I sympathize that the union's efforts seem undermined with the arrival of truck after truck. I would be angry too.
Facing each other under the yard lights, I know the strikers just want me to go away. Hurling the scab word, as they spit it out, I recoil. Nothing is that simple. Just as their jobs are on the line, so is mine. If I were to turn the load around, in the grand scheme of things, my actions would be irrelevant. There is always someone to take my place.
Whatever eventually happens to the strikers walking the line, I know that for the truckers, there will be no contract-signing bonus when the conflict is resolved, wage increases, or profit sharing. With most of the trucking unions broken under the pressures of deregulation, drivers lack union backing and union benefits. For many underrepresented drivers, our 70 hour plus work weeks happen without paid holidays or health insurance and the standard one day off for every week spent on the road seems a luxury.
We represent the brave new-world experiment of an economically efficient labor force. One that seems to be spreading to other sectors: A labor force that is exempt from overtime, lacking sick days, and without personal holidays. In the new global economy, management recaptured much of the power formerly split up through collective bargaining.
It is no secret that union representation seems on the endangered species list. The destabilization of trucking unions was one of those first victories. Now unimpeded, our bosses access daily updated "real time" credit and job histories, our bodily fluids are subject to random scrutiny and we live monitored 24/7/365 under the ever-watchful satellites of the company. Look closer at the status of hard collar labor in a white, soft collar service economy. Watching ever closer as truckers roll across the strike line, be warned and wary. As the trickle-down, new economy conditions demonstrate, what is happening to us today, is often eventually implemented across the labor spectrum.
Crossing the line at Kaiser isn't about taking someone else's job or supporting the other side. It isn't about anything other than facing the reality that larger forces control our destiny. They have for over a decade now. The day of the unions is waning as the strike at Kaiser demonstrates. Life goes on. And this new working stiff reality is most disturbing because very few seemed alarmed. As our lifestyle declines and our earnings are compromised, it seems that we are powerless to affect change.
Meanwhile that the rest of our consumer driven society charges forward content with their lot and the changes that are sweeping across the middle class landscape. Like the accident, it's best not to look at the carnage on every other American industrial way. It's best not to give much thought to our new economy. Just so long as we keep the rig moving. Keep her moving forward.
Asleep at the wheel.
Editor's note: This commentary was written specifically for KPBX in Spokane Washington for Morning Edition. To find out more information about this public radio station you can find them at http://www.KPBX.org. Some of the recorded excerpts from "Tim's Tales of the Road" can also be found at the same web address as audio files on the program "Art A La Carte".
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